The Israeli roots of the new wave of global populism
Before Trump, Salvini, Brexit, Bolsonaro, there was Benjamin Netanyahu. That’s the message I got from the documentary “King Bibi”, which I saw a few days ago here in Berlin, presented by the director Dan Shadur. More than a study of Netanyahu, it’s a study of populism.
The parallels to Trump, of course, are striking, and the film suggests that Trump and modern populists owe a kind of debt to Netanyahu, who became Israel’s youngest-ever Prime Minister in 1996. He’s the one who first did all their greatest hits: Rabid denunciations of the press at rallies, the cultivation of a media persona as a pathway to politics, a campaign built transparently on xenophobic fear-mongering, and, of course, the drama of a clash between liberal elites and the authentic masses.
What was striking about the documentary, as a study in populism, is that it was mostly all about television. It narrated Netanyahu’s rise to power without interviewing experts or filming new footage, relying entirely on archival material. It made for an eerie but effective portrait of politics as television spectacle. I asked Shadur why he made that choice.
“I was really intrigued by this form...because he's such a performer...I really wanted to play with this, and to try to say something about his abilities and his innovation,” Shadur told me, “but also about something more general about the relationship between media and politics.”