He has mapped out his route to the premiership and will do everything to get there. He is young and he is not in a hurry.
Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu has described himself as a successful amateur chess player. He has boasted that he managed to force a draw against Natan Sharansky, who is considered an outstanding chess player. But now he is playing against Religious Zionist Party Bezalel Smotrich, who doesn’t play by the rules, and, the way things are looking now, may yet checkmate King Bibi.Smotrich, unlike Otzma Yehudit leader Itamar Ben-Gvir and ministers-designate from the Likud and other parties, is not looking for immediate influence, status, and budgets. He is looking to the future. He has mapped out his route to the premiership and will do everything to get there. He is young and he is not in a hurry. The country is changing and he will be there to reap the rewards.
At the moment, Smotrich is playing chicken with Netanyahu to see who blinks first. He knows Netanyahu’s strong points and weaknesses. He didn’t hesitate to accuse Netanyahu of “lying through his teeth” and he didn’t hesitate after the 2021 elections to prevent him from forming a government with the support of the Ra’am Arab faction leader Mansour Abbas.
At the end of the day, Smotrich will take a portfolio where he feels he will be able, believe it or not, to appear stately. At the present moment, he doesn’t want to be just a representative of the settlers, he wants to represent the people. That’s what he did when he was minister of transportation and road safety for a year. He didn’t take advantage of the role to advance new roads in Judea and Samaria, even if he did build a few. He insisted on going ahead with the construction of fast carpool lanes, something that other transport ministers before him didn’t do. He kept an eye personally on the project and when things needed taking care of, he took care of them. The public may have been up in arms at first but now everybody welcomes these fast lanes that force drivers not to travel alone but with at least another person in the car.
People who were with him in the Diplomatic-Security Cabinet relate that he learned the requisite material thoroughly, wasn’t confrontational and didn’t express radical positions. He was above the fray. Over the past few years, Smotrich has become far more cautious. In the past, he led the “March of Beasts” and called himself a “proud homophobe” before then saying he wasn’t aware of the significance of the expression. But he will no longer be caught coming out against the LGBT community.
In the short term, he will use sanitized language and won’t try to force his opinions; he is looking far ahead into the future. And he knows that his views have become popular. One thing we should pay attention to is that Smotrich’s influence is broad and has spread to the Likud party itself. Smotrich and his positions have become a model for imitation and have led the Likud to become more extreme.
Smotrich may be stately, but at the same time, he is winking to the extreme right. His strength is growing from one round of election to the next, as we saw when together with Ben-Gvir, he won 14 Knesset seats. In the past, when he was the representative of the Tekuma faction within the Habayit Hayehudi party, I wrote:
“Don’t be fooled by the blue eyes, well-kept beard, and measured words, and not even by his law degree. MK Smotrich uses all of these to blind us and divert the focus from his radical discourse and the callous deeds he wishes to carry out across Judea and Samaria, and in Israel. In his quiet but vitriolic fashion, he is spreading his extreme views far beyond the one vote he holds in the Knesset.”
I haven’t changed my opinion. Even though he has nurtured a stately image, at the end of the day, if he reaches a decisive position of influence, Smotrich won’t hesitate to pursue his vision – the establishment of a halachic state.
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