The disturbing phenomenon of Likudniks vs. settlers will continue to keep the Right out of power.
Netanyahu is gone, and the cries of social rift remain. They are always from the Left, but the deeper rift has been opened on the Right itself, and is becoming a concerning social phenomenon. It’s called Likudniks vs. settlers, and it came into being during the days of fear that the previous government would lose power. It will keep the Right out of power longer and longer, like it has thus far.
In an offensive scene near the end of the movie “Pretty Woman,” Stuckey, Edward’s friend, arrives in the beautiful Vivian’s room and tries to exploit her, and when she refuses, he tells her that she’s just a whore from Hollywood Blvd. That is my context for the war between the Likud and the settlers. I’d put an arrow on Roberts and position her as a symbol of what is known as “the settlers.” She understands that there are always those who will remind her of her original sin and use her, but as far as she is concerned, it’s just a reason for her to develop and spread her wings beyond the sponsors who might pay her when they feel like it but insult her before and after.
“Likudniks vs. settlers” is a strange definition, almost a fiction. There really isn’t any such thing as “settlers.” The term, originally a compliment, that was invented in the Park Hotel in Hebron in 1968, no longer has anything to do with the half million people without any notable characteristics who have in common only that they live in a part of the country that was liberated after the 1967 Six-Day War. There are poor towns outside the Green Line, and there are local councils with high socio-economic ratings, and there is everything in between. Politically, 19% of these people voted Likud, 21% for religious Zionist parties that joined the Likud and are supposedly identified with settlers, and only 13% for Yamina (in its previous iteration). The rest voted for United Torah Judaism, Shas, Blue and White, and a few for Labor and Meretz.
But “Bibi-ist” thinkers are declaring that there is a break between the traditional public and the right-wing settlers, and the Haredim and the “settlers.” Of course, they are blaming the settlers for it, in a direct continuance of an article published in Haaretz after the Bennett government was formed. In that piece, a senior member of the Likud Central Committee mourned about the Likudniks being sick of the settlers and said “they shouldn’t come looking for us when they need help in Gush Etzion.” A true right-winger wouldn’t think that Judea and Samaria are a whim. A true public official will fight for values and for the citizens, not for blind loyalty.
MK Galit Distel Etebaryan wrote disappointedly this week about the public that had caused her to leave the Left and join the Right, and is now, she says, trying to appeal to the Left. Oh, come on. Netanyahu might have been a poster boy for the settlements, and rightly so, but the destruction of homes in Amona and Netiv Haavot is down to the Likud, and before that, Gush Katif and the Hebron agreement. And if we go back as far as Begin, whom they miss so badly, there is the destruction of the Sinai settlements. When it comes to the balance between loyalty and ideology, if it were me, I wouldn’t condescend to the “settlers.” Twelve years on, the young settlements have yet to be regulated. Half a million settlers look out their windows to see criminal seizures of Area C that the “right-wing” government never thought to stop. And that’s before we say a word about sovereignty.
When the Likud identifies with the settlement enterprise as if it’s a favor it’s doing for a certain sector, it pulls the rug out from under settlement as an ideological movement. There is a sense that the Likud loves settlers one day and doesn’t the next, but loving the settlers isn’t the issue, or the Likud. The issue is anchoring settlement, increasing security, and unity. In the political arena, the Likud is focusing on delegitimizing Ayelet Shaked, the last right-wing member of the government, and in the field, activists are dismissing the Evyatar outpost affair (which they had eight years to regulate) rather than repeating to themselves that the Right lost power because things got too personal and there was too little ideology involved. It’s easy to throw insults at anyone who sees where he lives a mission of Zionism, or even anyone who happens to live in the settlements. It’s much harder to unite the ranks of the Right.
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