At the ex-PM’s urging, Israel’s extreme-right factions united into an electoral juggernaut that feeds off right-wing discontent with Netanyahu himself
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The anti-Netanyahu Netanyahu voter
All of this brings us back to October 2022 and Smotrich’s assessment in the leaked recording that Netanyahu is a “desperate…lying son of a liar.” There was more here than meets the eye.
In the immediate aftermath of Smotrich’s leak, it was generally assumed, including among Netanyahu advisers, that Smotrich himself was the source.
A devoutly religious man, Smotrich makes a point of never telling a direct lie. In the recording itself, he confides: “I don’t lie when they interview me [about Netanyahu’s claims that he never wooed Ra’am]. I say that I don’t deal with what has been, it’s not important.”
On October 24, the day after the recording became public, Channel 13 anchor Udi Segal asked Smotrich point-blank if he’d leaked it. “It positions you as someone who stood up to Netanyahu, prevented him from forming a coalition with Mansour Abbas, here’s the ‘real right,’” Segal suggested.
Smotrich’s response was short, dismissive, and clarifying in its evasiveness: “Come, come, leave it alone.”
Whether or not Smotrich was the source of the leaked recording, he basked in the attention it drew, which included television and radio interviews and endless social media chatter. It gave him the chance to reiterate again and again his criticism of Netanyahu — that Netanyahu sought out Ra’am, that Smotrich stopped him, and that Netanyahu has since lied about it to his supporters — while pretending to apologize for it.
And in so mistreating his political patron and ally, he shone a spotlight on a startling shift in the current campaign.
In this fifth race, a profound change has come over the Netanyahu camp. More and more, the campaigns of right-wing parties have focused not on Netanyahu’s strengths but on his weaknesses. For growing portions of the Israeli right, Netanyahu is seen as a failure — not just electorally, but on policy issues too
Over the last four races, right-wing parties ran at Netanyahu’s side with the insistence that Netanyahu was the right man to lead Israel. But in this fifth race, after four failures at the ballot box and growing frustration with his inability to deliver a victory, a profound change has come over the Netanyahu camp. More and more, the campaigns of right-wing parties have focused not on Netanyahu’s strengths but on his weaknesses.
For growing portions of the Israeli right, Netanyahu is seen as a failure — not just electorally, but on policy issues too.
It was under Netanyahu, not Bennett, that May 2021’s internecine fighting between Arabs and Jews tore apart mixed towns like Lod and drew bitter excoriation from right-wing constituencies, especially in those poorer regions of the country where Mizrahi Jewish and Arab communities live in an uneasy coexistence.
A great deal of anger is bubbling beneath the surface over the endemic violence and runaway crime waves that torment impoverished communities in the north and south. It was under Netanyahu that Arab crime organizations, including among the Bedouin communities of the Negev that are Ra’am’s voter base, have been allowed to grow to the point that they now inflict almost daily terror on their own communities and on neighboring Jewish ones.
On the Palestinian front, continuing waves of persistent low-level terror attacks, including occasional bursts of Gazan rocket fire, raised new complaints in working-class towns near the Strip about Netanyahu’s longtime policy of ensuring stability in Gaza by allowing Qatar to fund Hamas.
Bedouin women walk past campaign billboards for the Likud party bearing a picture of its leader Benjamin Netanyahu in the Bedouin town of Rahat on March 10, 2021. (Hazem Bader/AFP)<
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And on and on it goes. Whether this criticism is fair is irrelevant; it is present, and, say campaign strategists, it is driving right-wing voters away from Netanyahu.
The address for frustrated rightists
But where does a frustrated rightist go if they are unwilling to join forces with the center-left, as Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope or Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu have done?
Over the past three months of campaigning, Smotrich and Ben Gvir have worked hard to be that address, the natural home of the anti-Netanyahu protest vote that nevertheless wants to see Netanyahu as prime minister. And they’ve enjoyed astonishing success in the process, swelling the far-right to 14 seats in the last polls before Election Day.
Smotrich and Ben Gvir see Netanyahu as weak and they intend to be unrelenting in their pressure to force Netanyahu rightward once he’s returned to the prime minister’s chair
Smotrich and Ben Gvir see Netanyahu as weak and they intend — they are not shy on the point; it’s their central campaign message — to be unrelenting in their pressure to force Netanyahu rightward once he’s returned to the prime minister’s chair.
Smotrich makes the point constantly, such as on October 20, when he shared a tweet by Defense Minister Gantz in which Gantz vows not to join a Netanyahu coalition. The tweet references Gantz, but it’s talking about Netanyahu. “A failed defense minister,” Smotrich charges. “Gantz, who already broke campaign promises in the past, set out on a path today that will end with an attempt to crawl into a government with Netanyahu. Only if we’re larger than [Gantz] can we be certain of a wholly right-wing government.”
Smotrich’s point is not that Gantz might ask to join a Netanyahu coalition, but that Netanyahu will be eager to have him.
MK Itamar Ben Gvir, head of the Otzma Yehudit political party, visits Beit Orot, in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of At-Tur, October 13, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)<
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Netanyahu, they believe, is badly weakened by four failed races. It’s the far-right’s time to shine, to be the steady hand on the tiller of a government held together by the fading old leader.
Netanyahu is aware of all this. He hopes fervently that this newly energized far-right will galvanize at least a seat or two of voters who’d previously been disillusioned enough to stay home. That might be enough.
Yet if the polls are right, the vast majority of Smotrich and Ben Gvir’s new support doesn’t come from new voters. Religious Zionism’s growth hasn’t changed the Netanyahu bloc’s 60-seat total. The far-right’s success seems to be due mostly to a shift within the bloc. Only on Tuesday night will it be possible to gauge if it brought out new voters.
Humiliations
In the meantime, as the Smotrich recording showed, the two far-right leaders are mounting what is effectively an uprising wrapped in a bear hug.
Consider the unasked-for support they have suddenly decided to offer Netanyahu over his corruption trial.
Religious Zionism Party leader MK Bezalel Smotrich waves an Israeli flag at Damascus Gate outside Jerusalem’s Old City, during Jerusalem Day celebrations, May 29, 2022. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)<
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Unsolicited, Smotrich proposed a bill in mid-October that would cancel the crime of “breach of trust,” which makes up three of the seven charges in Netanyahu’s trial. Two weeks later, once again without Netanyahu’s asking, Ben Gvir proposed to grant Netanyahu blanket immunity from prosecution through a so-called French law.
Netanyahu’s critics assumed he’d engineered these proposals. But the reality — that they came at Religious Zionism’s initiative in the delicate two weeks leading up to Election Day — is far more damaging.
The proposals didn’t come from Likud. They caught the party off-guard. Reached by reporters about Smotrich’s breach-of-trust proposal, Likud spokespeople assured journalists that the change would not affect Netanyahu’s trial since it would not apply retroactively. It was a strange mistake that revealed that Likud had not read the text released by Religious Zionism but simply assumed the party would not be so brazen. But journalists read the proposal and discovered that it would, in fact, apply retroactively to Netanyahu’s trial. To Likud’s horror, Smotrich had crafted a bill tailored with embarrassing precision to Netanyahu’s legal troubles.
It was a moment that began to reveal a pattern. Religious Zionism was not supporting Netanyahu; it was weakening him. It was dragging his trial into the last leg of an election campaign when no one else was talking about it, and humiliatingly dangling a release from the trial over Netanyahu’s head. On October 23, when Smotrich was heard saying in the leaked recording that “at some point he’ll be convicted by the court or whatever,” some in Likud began to connect the dots.
And even as they offered Netanyahu liberation from his trial, they made their demands. Smotrich publicly demanded the defense, finance, and justice ministries last week, the central levers of power in the government. Ben Gvir demanded the Public Security Ministry, presenting a 10-point plan that targeted the latest wave of terror attacks and crime in southern towns.
A bus with a campaign poster for opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party passes by the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem on October 30, 2022. The poster says: “The 61st seat depends only on you!” (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90)<
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To those paying attention, Religious Zionism seemed to be doing its utmost in the final days of the campaign to remind right-wing voters, even as it embraced Netanyahu, of his many deficiencies.
The danger for Netanyahu goes beyond mere embarrassment at the challenge to his character and leadership. In their attempt to ride a wave of right-wing frustration with Netanyahu to positions of influence at his side, Smotrich and Ben Gvir risk undermining the very camp they are meant to save. The demands for top ministries drew groans of frustration in Likud, which has worked hard to hold on to centrist voters turned off by the far-right’s growing influence. In the March 2021 race, nearly one in five of Likud’s 2020 voters didn’t vote for the party. Netanyahu doesn’t want that to happen again.
That’s why Netanyahu has refused — sometimes pointedly — to be photographed with the far-right leaders.
An embarrassed Netanyahu was forced over the past two weeks to publicly decline the offers to legislate away his legal troubles; muttered in an interview that Likud, not Religious Zionism, would hold on to key ministries like defense and finance; and released a statement from unnamed Likud officials complaining that Ben Gvir “is losing control” and “is drunk on power.”
As he headed into Tuesday’s fateful election, Netanyahu was caught in a vise. Across the aisle are parties stubbornly determined to unseat him and rendered too distrustful by past experience to be swayable. Meanwhile, his own camp is increasingly under the spell of young upstarts determined to control him. It’s too late to reconsider his decision to unify and grow the extremist right, and no clear alternative waits in the wings to jump in and replace them.
Netanyahu entered Election Day pretending everything is okay. All now depends on delivering 61 seats for his camp. If he fails, none of this matters; he will find himself in a battle simply to justify his continued leadership of the right.
If, however, he is successfully swept back into power by the far-right surge he’s worked so hard to produce, he will quickly turn his attention to reining in Smotrich and Ben Gvir’s ambitions. The new coalition will be a narrow one, and thus an unstable and likely unhappy one. Its weakest, most resentful link may well be Netanyahu himself.
If they overplay their hand, if they render themselves political threats in their own right by weakening and humiliating Netanyahu, and if the Likud leader sees a path to a sixth election that frees him of his rightist minders, he may well take it. Smotrich and Ben Gvir may find themselves once more in the throes of an election — this time with their great ally and patron determined to clip their wings.
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