Yamina leader Naftali Bennett would be wise to remember that he cannot accomplish his political goals by joining the Center-Left bloc.
Caroline B. Glick, ISRAEL HAYOM
Dear Naftali,
Maybe you remember the conversation we had back in November 2018 when we were waiting for our flight home from New York. I was coming back from a lecture tour. You were coming back from a trip to Pittsburgh. In the aftermath of the massacre of American Jews as the Tree of Life Synagogue, as Minister of Education and Diaspora Affairs you rushed to the scene as the representative of the State of Israel to console and support the community.
I was bursting with pride at your conduct there. When American Jewish leaders tried to use the atrocity to harm then-president Donald Trump, falsely accusing him of responsibility for the slaughter, you refused to play along. You were pilloried in the American Jewish media for sticking to the truth. Dan Shapiro raced out an oped telling you to shut up. But you were a hero to me.
So when you raised the possibility of me joining you to run in the next election, even though I was already a voice in my own right as a writer, I agreed immediately. I believed that together, not only would we successfully advance the issues most important to us – including sovereignty in Judea and Samaria and reform of the legal system – we would have fun doing it.
You and I never spoke about the source of your sour relations with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I didn’t attribute much importance to your feud. I figured that if leaders focus on advancing the national interest in light of their values and beliefs, they can find a way to work together for the good of the country and the nation.
In your case, I assumed your commitment to our common course on the ideological Right would enable you to work with Netanyahu despite the fact that he once tried to tar the good names of your late father and your wife in the press. It’s not as though your hands were completely clean. And more to the point, like me, you left a successful career to enter politics. You didn’t leave high-tech because you needed the glory. You did it because you were an idealist and a patriot who wanted to make a real difference.
During the race two years ago, I never doubted your commitment to our common ideological course. But over the past year, I’ve started to wonder if I pegged you wrong. In the public debate about the sovereignty plan, you were notably silent. So too, in the face of the concocted indictments against Netanyahu by the legal fraternity, you are AWOL.
You know Netanyahu is being tried for actions that aren’t criminal. You know that every day this travesty continues the threat to Israel’s democratic system increases. And yet, you stand by in silence as if this has nothing to do with you.
After your speech at the Knesset last night, my fears about your character have only increased. While paying lip service to the goal of forming a right-wing government under Netanyahu, you made no effort to hide that what you really seek is to serve as prime minister at what you coyly referred to as a “unity government.”
I know you know that the government you are referring to won’t be a “unity” government. It will be a leftist government and you will serve as its right-wing figurehead. As heads of coalition factions, by law, post-Zionist Labor Leader Meirav Michaeli and Meretz leader Nitzan Horowitz will be voting members of your security cabinet. Do you really believe you can deal with Iran’s nuclear program with them at your side?
Do you really believe you can protect the communities in Judea and Samaria and competently fight Palestinian terrorists with Yair Golan at your side? This is the guy who compared Israel to 1930s Germany. Who are you kidding?
You said last night that Netanyahu is to blame for the absence of a 61-seat majority because he hasn’t compromised with Gideon Sa’ar. But you know that it’s Sa’ar who is boycotting Netanyahu, not the other way around. You have significant leverage against Sa’ar. Why don’t you use it to try to form a right-wing government? Why are you instead coordinating your moves with him?
This brings us back to the “unity” government you intend to form and preside over if as you stipulated last night, it doesn’t compromise your values. You don’t need six weeks to figure out that you won’t be able to both stay true to your beliefs and sit with the radicals in Meretz and the Labor party. You know that already.
Indeed, it is far from clear you’ll be able to stay true to your beliefs and sit with Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz. They think that Iran’s nuclear program is America’s problem to deal with, not ours. Lapid supports the nuclear deal and thinks it was a mistake to seize Iran’s nuclear archive and kill the head of its nuclear program. What common ground can you build with him that doesn’t compromise your values?
Furthermore, you will have no power to defend Israel’s interests to the hostile Biden administration when you preside over a coalition of parties, which like Biden and his advisors, wish to restore the PLO’s veto power over our rights and interests in Judea and Samaria.
Shas leader Aryeh Deri proposed a way to get out of the impasse: direct elections for Prime Minister. You said last night that you would support the plan only if your plan to form a leftist government fails.
If you change your mind and support Deri’s proposal, we will have the requisite majority to move ahead with snap elections and enable the formation of a Netanyahu-led right-wing government. If you support the move, you will make a decisive contribution to ending the now two-year-old political crisis, and then you will serve as a senior member of a right-wing government with a mandate to advance every single one of your goals for the country. Just by keeping true to your beliefs, you will secure your future as a national leader.
If instead, you join the left, to be sure, you will receive the title of prime minister but at the cost of abandoning everything you stand for, and ending your political career the next time we go to the polls.
Naftali, don’t abandon the course. Keep faith with it. Advance it, and it will push you forward.
Yours,
Caroline
@ peloni1986:
Kan News is reporting that Bennett may have been facing a rift in his party due to his negotiation with the Leftist parties. If this is true, Caroline may have hit her mark with this article – I didn’t think it would resonate…Of course, Yamina is declaring it to be fake news and it is based on the ever present “senior officials”, so perhaps my first conclusion was correct.
Here is the link.https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/305155
@ Edgar G.:
Yes, Caroline never disappoints, but in this moment she did more. As a writer can only wield influence by their words, a politician may wield influence thru both their actions and their words. In this “open letter” Caroline was not really writing to Bennet. As an accomplished writer that she is, however, she was also not writing to her public at large, or not specifically so. Her words conveyed an intimacy of relationship that only a comrade can transmit – recall her words of admiration and camaraderie with Bennet in the first of these nonsense elections. But given the fact of this relationship, it is also clear from her words that such a public forum was not needed for her to convey her thought or concerns to her old party leader – such a scolding as she placed in these passages would have had its effect among friends in a more personal context, if Dear Naftali was, indeed, her intended choice of audience to this derision. So, though it was addressed to Dear Naftali, Naftali was not her intended audience, and he quite knows this. No, but Caroline’s great world wide following of readers was also not her choice of target for this great vehemence, though we were all intended to read it and soak in the enormity of the great missteps that took place in Naftali’s judgement in that momentous speech. Naftali is a man of deep conviction and resolve, or so I have and still judge him to be. I believe some large slabs of granite are more easily quarried than Naftali can be moved once his resolve is set as it surely was by this past speech. But with this article, Caroline was not writing to Naftali. She was, in fact, not writing at all. This was a political act. With these words she has thrown herself, for the moment, back into the fray of the political arena to make her most impressive political stratagem. This was, I am sure, not a happy move for her to undertake, but I suspect that the simple need for this action was the most difficult part for her to accept. But being the champion of Israel that she has come to be, she acted as she saw was in the best interest of the state. And the steps she made in this diatribe were movements that only she could take as both a former associate, colleague, friend and stateswoman that she is. But the receiving audience she wrote this chastising treatise to was not Bennett and not we, her reading public. This letter was, in fact, a shot directed across the bow of the ship that Bennett currently commands – the Yamina Party and its current Knessett members. Her warnings of empowering the Left were as clearly targeted at them as were her threats of future electoral consequences should they continue on this path. I don’t know the members of this party, beyond Shaked who will not stray from Bennett, but I suspect they will not be swayed by Caroline’s treatise. In this I hope I am wrong.
@ Bear Klein:
Thanks for your comments, Bear.
For myself, I am firmly supportive of Netanyahu as leader at this time. But as far as the idea his long premiership provides an unhealthy context, I am not sure that I would agree. I do believe the only detraction that such a long career might afford is the impossibility to find a qualified replacement for him and the obvious potential of corruption which is inherent with long political careers (for more on this just look to any Democrat leader in US congress over the past 100yrs). I believe, prior to the covid debacle, that his greatest mistake was his inability, or perhaps his resistance to, groom a proper successor. He is older and a replacement will be needed at some point. But, I think of Churchill and ask how could a political genius such as that begin to sculpt a worthy replacement from the chaff about him. Regardless, though, your criticism here is well noted and this failing may ultimately cause a great folly for the state in the future, or perhaps, even now should he fail to maintain his position. With regards the issue of corruption, little needs to be said. The need of newly developed legal protocols to achieve what political challenges could not speaks quite loudly of the dearth of charges of corruption that could be brought against Netanyahu. But more specifically the charges of ice cream scandals, and cigar bribes screams of the silence of any more substantive charges that could be brought. Their fictions of corruption might have been more useful if they had consulted Stephen King for a convincing plot thread.
Regarding your third point, I totally agree. After 73yrs, just write something down to use as a guide and manage or amend as you go…This make it up as you go and then let the Council of Ephors hand down directives according to their own personal wee-gee boards is unconscionable as well as terribly chaotic.
But your second point, I don’t have any opinion. I have heard of Barkat but I don’t really know anything about him. I hope his talent is up to the task before him, but it is a high bar that he must meet should he succeed in this matter. But, and I think most people would agree, he must not replace Netanyahu, like potatoes instead of steak for dinner. Netanyahu has a great aura of authority in the US, Europe, the Mid-East…His absence at the helm will certainly create a void. For whoever should replace Netanyahu, it is significant that they take the task and act with an equal sense of fluency in the role of premiership that Netanyahu does.
I am somewhat confounded by the Israeli lack of support for an accomplished leader such as Netanyahu. I have largely seen it as the masses being mesmerized by Leftist propagandist measure. I knew that this was not your motivation, which is why I inquired of your thoughts. So again, thank you for sharing.
@ peloni1986:
I will answer you like this:
1. Bibi’s time should be up. He has done gone things for Israel but he has failed to allow a successor to him as the leader of Israel. It is not healthy that he has been PM so long as this is compounded by his court cases and the many enemies he has made in the right wing of Israel.
2. Barkat has the makings of a good leader of Israel and a large right wing stable coalition would form around him.
3. Israel needs a constitution with electoral reform. Included should be direct elections of the PM (who should pick his own professional cabinet for 4 years as in the US). At least half the MKs of the Knesset should be elected by district directly. The second half at large from the whole country by party list, as now.
I just read Caroline’s letter to Bennett for the first time. It is absolutely sparkling, and if it does not bring Bennet to realise the shame and oboloquy of his stupid -cunning behaviour, then…nothing will. He should have already destroyed the people’s faith in him.
@ peloni1986:
You are right to be “curious”…As can be seen in today’s Arutz 7, 2 countries trust Netanyahu enough to ask him to mediate between them. He is reapected all around the word, Highly regarded, personal friend of many world leaders, .Everywhere…except in his own tiny tin-pot country which he dragged, in 20 years, from a fringe 3rd world status,to global pre eminence . His own people’s jealousy and complete misunderstanding of what has had to do to keep Israel safe, are causing them to drag him down to their low levels.
Jews everywhere, can’t bear to see their fellows succeed where they can’t.
It eventually drives them to madness reminiscent of Josephus’ account of Jerusalem before Titus broke down the walls forcing them to stop murdering one another, to turn to fight the Romans, but…too late. They destroyed one another’s food stores , 3 years food went up in smoke in factional fighting, whilst Titus ignored, was forcing entry into the city. (As the Sages said over and over…”Baseless hatred”)..
And we all know what happened THEN…. and for the next 1900 years….don’t we… .
@ Bear Klein:
Serious question for you, Bear. Why do you think this would be better than direct elections by the people? Do you just oppose Netanyahu entirely or do you believe Barkat would really be a better leader for Israel at this time? Just curiosity.
Direct election of the Prime Minister and establishing a right wing government is the way to go. Only thing better would be for Bibi to resign and let the new Likud head become the head of the right wing government. Very possibly could be Nir Barkat who is a fresh clean leader.
Bibi is the problem and not Bennett. Caroline has a hole in her letter to Bennett. Yes she is correct a government full of leftists is a problem but Bibi should step down and stop playing games. He was willing to have RAAM control the government, that is worse than Lapid by far!!