As I write these words, Naftali Bennett is
sitting with Yair Lapid and closing all the details to create a government
consisting of all the left-wing parties in Israel, plus Bennett’s Yemina, plus
Gideon Saar’s New Hope, plus the Arab Ra’am party of Mansour Abbas. And they’re
all in a giddy mood. They’re “bringing new hope to the nation.” They’re “creating
unity and ridding the nation of hatred.” They’re “restoring mature,
statesmanlike leadership.” They’re “saving the nation from the calamitous
specter of fifth elections.” Orwell would be thrilled.
It is unpleasant
for me to even think about these things, let alone write about them. In the
past, when I was asked to write Where
What When articles, and everything looked black to me, I have declined.
Call me “the canary in the mine.” Usually, when I agree to write an article,
things can’t be so bad. At this moment I am worried.
I agreed to write
this article at a very specific moment in time. Following Israel’s March 23
elections, its fourth elections in two years, Binyamin Netanyahu was given a
three-week mandate to form a government of 61 Knesset members, and he failed.
First he tried to bring in Gideon Saar’s right-wing anti-Netanyahu New Hope
party. This would have given the Right 65 seats. Unfortunately, he failed.
There was too much bad blood. Saar, the excellent former education minister,
who started universal tours of Hebron for all Jewish Israeli school children,
would not budge in Netanyahu’s direction.
Then Netanyahu
tried to bring in Mansour Abbas of the Israeli-Arab Ra’am party, associated
with the Israeli Islamic Movement, an Israeli version of the Egyptian Muslim
Brotherhood. With its four seats, Netanyahu would have had a government of 63
seats, perfectly sufficient.
Ostensibly there
were certain good points about this alliance. The Ra’am Arabs are conservative
and very religious. They don’t like the far left-wing Jewish Meretz party or
the other Arab parties, which are much less religious and support things like
homosexual marriage rights. Ra’am works on some issues with the Jewish
religious parties. Many Bedouin in the Negev do the Israeli army. And didn’t
Netanyahu have a practice, going back to at least 2009, of bringing in small
parties from the Left to pad his government coalition and gain a left-wing
stamp of approval? How different was that from what he was doing now?
The main objection
came from Betzalel Smotritch, the very capable head of the Religious Zionist party
(six seats). He argued, “At what price? Are you going to give away half of the
Negev to have Arab Knesset members vote with you? Is Israel, with its own hands,
going to bring an Arab party associated with terrorists into the Cabinet? Is
Israel going to turn itself from a Jewish state to a ‘state of all its citizens’?”
Regarding that
first question, there are many unrecognized Arab-Bedouin shantytowns in the southern
part of Israel, and it was predictable that Abbas would ask for their
recognition as legitimate. We Jews call this “the Arabs taking over the Negev.”
The Arabs call it “providing the Arabs with their basic human rights as
citizens.”
Ayelet Shaked, the
very able and sincere number two of Naftali Bennett’s liberal-religious Yemina
party, frantically shouted at Smotritch, “Why are you burning the granaries?!”
an intentional reference to the well-known (in Israel) gemara associated with
Tisha BeAv, Gittin 56a, in which the ruffians of Jerusalem, to force the Jews
to fight the Romans, burned food that would have supported Jerusalem under
siege for 21 years. Her point was clear: Either you have a right-wing
government that leans on Ra’am, or you’ll get a much worse government that
leans on Ra’am.
But in the middle
of all of this, the most recent war broke out, the twelve-day-long “Guardians
of the City” operation, with thousands of bombs falling on Israel from Gaza,
and that very quickly ended negotiations with an Arab party, seemingly
demonstrating for all to see the dangers of such “deals.” The timing was so
perfect that it looked like classic divine providence – Jews trying to make
alliances with foreigners in the Land of Israel, and G-d pushing back – and I
am sure that that aspect was there. Yet it also turned out that the Hamas Arabs
in Gaza had been watching the whole thing and did not approve. In
flesh-and-blood terms, they started the war to stop the Jews and Arabs
from fraternizing. Because if Jews and Arabs fraternize, Hamas has no raison
d’etre.
Anyway, with the
war going on, Netanyahu’s three weeks ended, with his Ra’am gambit foiled, and
President Rivlin handed the task of forming a government to Yair Lapid, head of
the opposition, whose Yesh Atid Party had won 17 seats in the March 23
elections. I was asked to write this article on May 27, when Lapid was two
weeks through his three-week mandate, and he didn’t seem to be going anywhere.
With everyone’s fingers burnt by the Gaza war, I did not imagine what would
happen next.
On Sunday morning,
May 30, with four days to go until the end of Lapid’s mandate, I was sitting in
a Daf Yomi shiur in Hebron. Our teacher,
Rabbi Uziel Nagar, often begins his shiur
with a humorous aside, which I sometimes catch and sometimes miss, but I
distinctly heard him say, “Yesterday Rav Sheshet was asked, ‘Can you carry
forward with the Left?’” He grimaced for a moment. The Mishna’s question [Yoma
48b] was about whether a kohen could
carry sacrificial blood from a freshly slaughtered sacrifice in his left hand,
and I did not understand what he was alluding to. Before I left Hebron that
day, I understood.
It turned out that
Naftali Bennett was moving forward very quickly towards a left-wing coalition
with Yair Lapid, after weeks and months of promising that he would not do that.
In exchange for his agreement to lend a hand to this, he will be prime minister
for the first two years, followed by Lapid. Bennett so much wants to be the prime
minister – even though he is the head of a party with only seven seats – that
he has sold the right wing for the sake of his personal ambitions. Usually, a
candidate builds up a following of 20 or 30 seats before trying to become prime
minister. Bennett, here, has found a shortcut: Sell the Right down the river,
become prime minister, and you’ll be so successful that, retroactively,
everyone will love you. Will that plan work? Highly doubtful. I guess we’ll
see.
I should be happy,
I guess. Israel’s first daily tefilin-wearer
as prime minister. Why am I concerned?
Within his cabinet
with him will be Tamar Zandberg, from the extreme-left Meretz faction, who
still talks about “giving peace a chance,” as though it were 1992, before the
Oslo Accords. Indeed, the last time her party was in the government was then,
and it has taken the ego and ambitions of Bennett to put her back there. Mansour
Abbas of the Islamic Movement will be in the cabinet as well. I hate to think,
G-d forbid, about a war against the Arabs, in which those two people are in the
room. Whenever Israel has a war in Gaza, Zandberg sides with the European
International Court, invariably calling Israel’s defense actions a “war crime.”
In fact they’ll
all be there in the war room, the whole “anyone but Bibi crowd.” Avigdor
Liberman, the secular right-wing Russian from a small settlement in eastern
Gush Etzion, considered a fascist by the entire Left, who tried to force the chareidim to do the army, Zandberg,
Abbas, and Merav Michaeli of the almost defunct Labor party, who only uses the
female gender in speech, even when she is addressing a man or referring to G-d.
And, of course, Bennett and Saar will be there as well. The thought that such a
thing could happen – the
creation of such an “Oslo government,” when the Israel voter is more right wing
and religious than he has ever been – is astonishing!
And then there are
Bennett and Lapid themselves. Lapid and Bennett have an unpleasant history,
going back to 2013, when they joined together as a faction and the
anti-religious Lapid used Bennett to make it easier for him to persecute the chareidim. Later on, Bennett understood
his error, and improved, and his improvement vis-à-vis the chareidim was appreciated. So has he now taken a step backwards?
Like Ariel Sharon who “repented” for the Wye Accords and then brought us the
Disengagement?
I’ve been learning
hilchot Kilayim for a year and a
half, dealing with forbidden mixtures – in agriculture, in animals, and in
clothing. Now we shall see kilayim in
political parties. Heaven help us! Our only comfort is the knowledge that G-d
is running the show. I guess we’ll sooner or later find out where He’s leading us.
