TIME magazine cover honors PM Netanyahu: ‘Only the strong survive.’
America’s TIME magazine for the fourth time featured Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on its cover, with the quote: “‘Only the strong survive.’ How Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu is testing the limits of power.”
In its article, the magazine notes that Netanyahu is facing indictment, but still believes that the good of the country is to leave him in charge.
“I don’t look at my survival,” he told TIME. “I look at the survival of the country, its durability, its future.”
He explained that while Israel’s cyber tools are what allowed Australia to prevent ISIS from blowing up a plane in midair, the would-be terror attack is only the tip of the iceberg: “We used our cyber-tools to discover that ISIS was going to do this. So we alerted Australian police, and they stopped this before it happened. Multiply that 50 times, that will give you an idea of the contribution that Israel has made to prevent major terrorist operations.”
“This affects every country in the world, it affects every person in the world.”
But Netanyahu’s enemies see him in a different light.
“Netanyahu has opened the door for fascist elements within the Israeli society and undermined democratic principles,” said Avner Gvaryahu, who heads the leftist, anti-IDF “Breaking the Silence” NGO.
Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who is now running at the head of his own newly-formed party, criticized Netanyahu’s “repeated attempts to disrupt democratic processes,” and claimed his allies want to curb freedom of the press and undermine the judicial system. “These are dark days the likes of which we have not known before. The Netanyahu regime must be toppled.”
Netanyahu, meanwhile, emphasized one of his major achievements: “For so many years, people first of all believed that the cause of all the conflicts in the Middle East was the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.”
“Well, that’s gone.”