T. Belman I disagree with the sub-title. I think Netanyahu will cave at the last second, not the Rabbis. I wonder if it is possible to separate out Area C from the Defence portfolio. If so it may be a workable compromise. But I don’t think that will happen because the US is not worried about who will defend the country but is worried who will be in charge of Area C.
What most distinguishes the Right from the centre or Left is their plans for area C. The Right wants to keep it all and the others want to give it to the Palestinians for their state.. That’s why Smotrich will not settle for anything less than Min of Defense.
The rabbis will make sure a disappointed Smotrich doesn’t trigger another election
The heads of the parties with the president, this week.Credit: Ohad Zwigenberg
Likud chief Benjamin Netanyahu is regretting two mistakes he made after the election – unforced errors uncharacteristic of a skilled politician who has already formed five governments.
First, he didn’t reserve four strategic ministries for Likud well in advance: defense, finance, foreign affairs and justice. With 32 Knesset seats, half his governing coalition, he had every right to do so.
Second, he sent his associates, drunken with victory, to declare that within two weeks of Election Day, on the Knesset’s inauguration day, he would present a government.
The first error signaled to the megalomaniac Bezalel Smotrich, the messiah of our times, that the spoils were there for the dividing. The second error reflected scorn for Netanyahu’s partners.
Usually when you set such a flashy target date you score an own goal. After all, the deadline is set by law: 28 days after the president awards a mandate to form a government, with an option for a 14-day extension.
I looked for precedents for a lightning formation of a government in recent decades. Two party heads formed governments within three weeks of Election Day: Yitzhak Rabin in 1992 and Netanyahu in 1996.
Today, Netanyahu’s performance regarding the defense portfolio is his worst blunder. The only reasonable candidates for the position are in Likud: Yoav Gallant and Avi Dichter.
After all, Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party isn’t headed by a major general in the reserves, a former security chief or a moderate politician who has spent decades in the security cabinet and the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee (like, in the past, Likud’s Benny Begin and Dan Meridor).
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Smotrich is a walking disaster, a lawbreaker, a racist, a shirker of full military service and a former detainee of the Shin Bet security service on suspicion of offenses bordering on terrorism.
When Ariel Sharon became prime minister in a direct election in 2001, he said: “Not everybody can be defense minister.” He wanted an experienced, security-minded person there, someone who knew the limits of power and the price of wars, someone with a broad vision of the region.
Sharon preferred Ehud Barak, the defeated prime minister. After thinking it over, Barak agreed, but his many rivals in the Labor Party vetoed the move. Sharon’s second choice was his friend Shimon Peres, who refused to hear about the portfolio in the middle of the second intifada. Finally, Sharon appointed Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, a brigadier general in the reserves and a responsible person when it came to both defense and diplomacy.
When Labor withdrew from the coalition, Sharon called in the previous chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Shaul Mofaz, who was studying abroad. As Sharon explained it at the time, “The defense minister has to be somebody who, when he enters the conference room at General Staff headquarters, the major generals smarten up their uniforms. Our Shaul is like that.”
And here we are today, face to face with Smotrich. After every meeting with him, Netanyahu tears his hair out, and his right-hand man Yariv Levin just wants to die. They’ve never encountered such brashness and arrogance. Bill Clinton once said about Netanyahu that the Israeli had forgotten which leader headed the greatest power in the world. Well, Netanyahu must be wondering if Smotrich has forgotten who won 32 Knesset seats and who won seven (most of which he owes to his partner in the Religious Zionist alliance, Itamar Ben-Gvir).
Ben-Gvir, incidentally, is behaving completely differently. Netanyahu likes and appreciates him; he isn’t worried about him. He knows that the trouble lurks elsewhere. He hasn’t forgotten the recording where Smotrich called Netanyahu “a liar and the son of a liar,” while predicting and/or wishing that Bibi will be convicted in his corruption trial and disappear from our lives.
Netanyahu doesn’t forget statements like that. He has a score to settle. Likudniks call Smotrich a “jobnik,” a desk jockey as opposed to a combat soldier. This has a double meaning: Smotrich’s abbreviated service as a clerk at defense headquarters in Tel Aviv, and his insistence on the position that’s holding up the formation of a government.
Actually, everybody involved in the process who’s talking with the prime minister-designate believes that Smotrich won’t be appointed defense minister. He’ll have to settle for the Finance Ministry, at the expense of Arye Dery. But will Dery, the head of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party and backed by the Torah sages, insist on the treasury, or is this playacting in the service of the boss? In the twilight, it’s hard to know here Netanyahu begins and Dery ends.
If Dery concedes, he’ll receive suitable recompense: the Interior Ministry plus the Religious Services Ministry plus some other goodies. It has even been hypothesized that he’ll be appointed deputy prime minister.
This would be going pretty far. By law, the deputy prime minister must be a member of the ruling party, so if the prime minister is unable to perform his duties, the deputy steps in. Will Netanyahu change this law (too) for Dery’s sake? How many laws can you make for one guy?
Settlement czar
A veteran politician who served in the Defense Ministry asked me if I knew why Smotrich is so keen on that portfolio. His answer:
A defense minister wears two hats. He wears the larger one, of course, for defending the country, preparing the army for war; Iran, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Gaza and the West Bank. He wears the smaller hat when dealing with the settlement project.
In practice, the defense minister is the settlement minister. He’s the sovereign in the West Bank via the Central Command chief and the military’s Civil Administration there. So far, all defense ministers have coveted the position because of the big hat, the existential strategic one.
For Smotrich and his party colleague Orit Strock, it’s the other way around. Don’t bother them with Iran and Gaza, the settlements are the core. Their world is as narrow as the world of the nearest outpost.<
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It’s possible, my interlocutor mused, to create all kinds of circuitous mechanisms like a ministerial committee for settlement, with Smotrich at the head. But if the defense minister isn’t 200 percent committed, nothing will move forward. If Bezalel isn’t appointed, he’ll wake up every morning frustrated and angry, even if he ends up at the Finance Ministry. It’s a sure recipe for fights and fireworks. Netanyahu will suffer.
At the Finance Ministry, too, Smotrich will encounter the boulders of the security-diplomatic reality. For example. Netanyahu won’t let him withhold more money from the Palestinian Authority than is already being withheld – because of payments to terrorists’ families. He isn’t looking to incite a third intifada.
As the veteran politician put it, Smotrich’s obsession is to show that he can obtain no less than Naftali Bennett did. In 2019, Netanyahu appointed Bennett defense minister so that his Yamina party, which had won seven seats, wouldn’t defect. (Netanyahu presented this to stunned Likud activists as a ”joke” and was surprised that nobody else was laughing.)
At the moment, the rabbis have Smotrich’s back, my interlocutor told me, but they won’t be there to the very end. On the 28th day of the mandate, at 11 P.M. at the latest, the game will be over. The golden carriage won’t turn into a pumpkin again. Rabbi Haim Druckman and the rest of them won’t let Israel be dragged into another election.
Looking back in anger
The day before the leaders of the incoming opposition parties met, Yair Lapid and his finance chief, Avigdor Lieberman, had a talk at the Prime Minister’s Office to coordinate. Their alliance hit a snag during the teachers’ wage demands and the election campaign, when Lapid’s party appealed to Russian-speaking voters. But it’s gradually getting back on track.
Lapid and Lieberman both believe that Netanyahu’s coalition won’t last more than two years. They’re worried about what they think looks like a forbidden flirtation between Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Netanyahu.
The meeting of the defeated party leaders the next day was businesslike, a better mood than the bad blood during the election campaign. Lapid is dying to lead an aggressive and united opposition as Netanyahu did, but he knows that his clients are different. Some of them believe that one day they’ll become prime minister, and Lapid is an obstacle in their path.
Indeed, on the day after the Knesset was sworn in, it turned out that Gantz’s people were holding direct talks with the new coalition on divvying up the parliamentary spoils.
Yesh Atid people were boiling mad, so Lapid got them on a conference call. “Cool it,” he said. “They’ve never been in the opposition, and they’re not the enemy. Give them time.” (But people in Gantz’s party told me not to let Yesh Atid fool me. Lapid wants to be the one to hand out Knesset positions among his partners, and Gantz’s people say they’ve now preempted him.)
Incidentally, Lapid planned to launch his “anger campaign” against the government that’s taking shape on the day the Knesset was sworn in. He wrote a speech starting “Netanyahu and his gang of racists,” but the stabbing and car-ramming attack in Ariel has delayed the address until next week.
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Lapid hopes that the opposition will coalesce for the war he’s planning “for the fate of Israeli democracy.” He promises to take his people into the streets and cooperate with all the civil society groups. We’ll see how that goes.
How much time will elapse until we feel the secular-liberal-enlightened reaction to the new coalition? Its most palpable image has been the photo of the wives of its leaders: all of them with one head covering or another, with Sara Netanyahu, God help us, the only secular woman.
In the meantime, Lapid is busy with diplomacy and defense; those issues aren’t on hold. In his office, which is slowly packing up, no tears were shed over the U.S. midterm elections, of course. But as the dust settled on the Senate, which remains under the Democrats’ control, and on the House of Representatives, which was spared a massive Republican takeover, concerns remained that are still Lapid’s concerns.
For example, was it just by chance that the Americans haven’t thrown all their weight against the Palestinians’ appeal to the International Court of Justice? After all, the Prime Minister’s Office interpreted the FBI investigation into the killing of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh as a poke in Israel’s eye.
This time Israel knew in advance and loudly protested. The national security adviser, Eyal Hulata, was sent by Lapid to express Jerusalem’s chagrin. According to a senior diplomatic source, Hulata had “an angry conversation” with his American counterpart, Jake Sullivan.
Lapid, too, gave the White House an earful. “I know that you don’t like the results of the Israeli election,” he told someone. “I also don’t like them. But this isn’t the way.”
Dreaming of Dermer
Well, the Americans don’t agree with Lapid. From the information that has reached Israel over the past two weeks, it seems the Democratic administration has reservations about our impending government: racism, nationalism, messianism.
It won’t boycott Israel or halt the economic aid, but it will exact a price for every step it disapproves of: a wholesale koshering of illegal outposts, a glut of construction in the West Bank, a heavier hand on the Palestinians there. America’s satellites see everything.
Not only the appointments of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir are exasperating, but also Netanyahu’s intention to tap Ron Dermer as foreign minister. “They don’t have enough eyes for all the fingers poking at them,” a veteran diplomat told me.
As our ambassador to the United States, Dermer was persona non grata at the White House and in Democratic lawmakers’ offices during the years of Barack Obama, whose vice president was some guy named Joe Biden. They see him as a plant for Donald Trump in Israel and remember him for sins that to them are unforgivable.
The list is pretty long: Dermer’s crude involvement in the 2012 presidential election, when he persuaded Netanyahu to half-openly support Mitt Romney; his clamorous lobbying against the Iranian nuclear agreement in 2015 (even Republicans thought he exaggerated, my diplomat source told me); and his active role in organizing Netanyahu’s speech in Congress in March that year, behind the president’s back.
That incident cut off the dialogue between the United States and Israel on the nuclear issue. We could have expected a responsible ambassador to prevent his prime minister from behaving in such a damaging way.
As one Israeli politician told me about a visit to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, “She pointed to the door and said to the guest: ‘Do you know what’s special about it? Ron Dermer will never walk through this door.’”
If Netanyahu is called “the Republican senator from Jerusalem,” Dermer is his identical twin. Granted, the idea of appointing a guy like Dermer is right in principle. He’s talented, intelligent and experienced. But with his record, and considering the United States of 2022, this could be one mistake too many by Netanyahu, who’s using up his mistakes vis-à-vis his ally.
Sending a Republican to blue America is inviting upon Netanyahu the same revulsion that has been felt toward him from the outset: a suspicion of obsessive and polarizing meddling into American politics. Suddenly even Likud stalwart Yisrael Katz, whose face expressed gloom on the Knesset’s inauguration day, looks like a sane alternative.
It’s not yet clear who’ll be foreign minister, but Dermer is the only one who has been mentioned. In the past his name came up as a possible head of the National Security Council, a no less sensitive position that also requires free access and trust with the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department.
Netanyahu can make a promise to three people, choose a fourth person, and moments before the swearing-in appoint a fifth. We’ve seen that more than once.
Likud offers Smotrich to become Foreign Minister
Smotrich has wisely refused.