The last 13 months, encompassing Corona
and a third and fourth Israeli election, have been just plain creepy. Even the
weather has been weird, with the coldest post-Pesach week I can remember in 35
years.
Well, thanks to the
efforts of our excellent prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, we seem to have
tackled Corona. Through his efforts at badgering the CEO of Pfizer, who
received phone calls from Netanyahu 30 times, most Israelis have been
vaccinated already, and our numbers have fallen from 70,000 actively sick
Corona patients on February 10, to 3,300 as of yesterday (April 12). Most of
the actively ill are people who refused the vaccination.
* * *
That leaves Israel’s
elections (and the weather) to contend with. To try to understand the electoral
situation, a riddle comes to mind:
“In the explorers-and-cannibals
problem, three explorers and three cannibals must cross a river using a boat
which can carry at most two people, under the constraint that, for both banks,
if there are explorers present on the bank, they cannot be outnumbered by
cannibals…”
The Israel that I inhabit is living this
riddle right now – just that, instead of cannibals, we’ve got insulted right-wingers
(Bennett and Sa’ar), leftists, anti-chareidim
(Liberman), and anyone-but-Bibi Centrists (Lapid). The Israeli ship of state is
trying to reach safe harbor with incompatible travelers, some of whom wish to
eat the others alive.
As a religious, right-wing resident of
Kiryat Arba in Judea and Samaria, I have four times hoped that Binyamin
Netanyahu would be able to form a right-wing, religiously traditional
government of at least 61 seats, the required minimum. Indeed, we went into the
present election thinking that there was a good chance of breaking the
stalemate. All the polls predicted 70 or more right-wing seats – and we have
that, but that doesn’t help us as long as 61 Knesset members won’t sit
together.
*
* *
This election was difficult for me. Three
hours after the polls closed, it looked like Netanyahu had his 61, but when the
morning arrived, he was down to 59.
Here is how the vote turned out:
The Pro-Netanyahu Group:
Likud: 30 seats
Aryeh Deri, Shas: 9
Moshe Gafni, United Torah Judaism: 7
Betzalel Smotrich, Religious Zionists: 6
That’s 52 seats for the pro-Netanyahu,
pro-right, pro-religion group.
Then
there are 20 more right-wing seats:
Naftali Bennett, Yemina: 7
Gidon Sa’ar, New Hope: 6
Avigdor Liberman, Yisrael Beteinu: 7
There are still another 48 seats, making up the left
wing, the anti-Bibi rule-of-law center, and the Arabs:
Yair Lapid, Yesh Atid: 17
Meretz and Labor: 13
Benny Gantz, Blue and White: 8
Secular Arab Joint List: 6
Arab Islamic Ra’am party: 4
*
* *
So why can’t the 20 additional right-wing
seats of Bennett, Sa’ar, and Liberman join the coalition, creating a government
of 72? The answer is that there is a lot of bad blood here. Many politicians
feel that they were insulted by Netanyahu over the years, promised jobs they
never received, or snubbed to begin with. Sa’ar, Bennett, and Liberman from the
right all are in this category, but Gantz and Lapid from the Left were in this
situation as well. What do personal jobs have to do with the welfare of the
country? I don’t know. I haven’t been a politician since high school.
Is there validity to the anti-Bibi
argument that a man on trial shouldn’t be prime minister even if he is the best
candidate? I don’t think so, and a lot of the country doesn’t think so, but it’s
a raging debate.
I have written about Avigdor Liberman
before. In the past, Liberman, a secular resident of the Judean settlement of
El David, has been the head of the right-wing camp, working very well with the chareidim. Over the past two years, he
has become anti-chareidi. He is also
anti-Netanyahu and will not sit in a government run by him as long as Netanyahu
is on trial. He happens to have a son who became a chareidi kollelnik.
Of the three from the Right, only
Bennett, so far, is willing to put aside his personal feelings, and join a Netanyahu
government, creating a possible right-wing coalition of 59 – still two short of
the required 61.
Here are three possible scenarios for
creating a government:
1)
Gidon
Sa’ar buries the hatchet and says, “For the good of the country, I will come
back to the Likud one more time, under Netanyahu.” This would create a very
strong and cohesive right-wing, religious, chareidi
government of 65 seats, which could rule for four years. It would consist of
Netanyahu, Bennett, Smotrich, Sa’ar and the chareidi
parties. Obviously, this is what Netanyahu wants to happen, but Sa’ar is
still rabidly opposed.
2)
Another
possibility is that, instead of Sa’ar, Netanyahu could bribe the small Islamist
Ra’am party of Mansour Abbas to support Netanyahu from outside the government.
In return, they would receive enormous sums of money to be invested in Arab
infrastructure. This would yield a government of 63. Netanyahu has been working
on this for a year. Problem: Smotrich and Ben-Gvir of the Religious Zionist
party would reject that happening as a dangerous precedent. Ra’am, based in the
Israeli south, is connected to some terrorist groups that have killed Jews.
3)
Netanyahu
could step down and allow himself to be elected Israel’s next president in May.
This would allow the entire Knesset to sing, “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead,” and
a large right-wing coalition could be formed, even with some left-wing support.
Someone else from the Likud, perhaps former Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, would
be chosen as the next prime minister.
* * *
Israel has been in political hot water
for two years, but life has gone on. We dealt successfully with Corona. We “didn’t
pass a budget” for two years, but all government workers continue to get paid.
The shekel continues to do better than the dollar.
A few days ago, the Mossad carried out a
cyber-attack on an Iranian nuclear facility, the Natanz complex south of
Tehran, the day after it unveiled new uranium enrichment equipment, causing
enough damage to push back their program by many months or even years.
Also a few days ago, Israel moved 15 more
Jewish families into the City of David in East Jerusalem, the area called the
Yemenite Village. A woman from the far-Left Meretz political movement tried to
visit the local Arabs to commiserate with them, and on her way out of the area,
her car was attacked by Arabs unaware of who she was.
Within the last few weeks, construction
has finally begun on a new housing complex in the Beit Romano neighborhood in
Hebron. Thirty-one Jewish families will move into Beit Chizkiya when it is
completed. This is good news that we have been waiting years to hear. By the
way, Rabbi Chizkiya Medini sat in the Beit Romano complex from 1900 to 1907,
writing his Sdei Chemed encyclopedic commentary on Shas, hence the name.
So our politics are at a standstill, but
life goes on.
