Shaked: PM is cannibalizing Right
Yamina struck back at what it called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “cannibalization” of the Right, accusing him on Sunday of being in cahoots with US President Donald Trump to bring about a Palestinian state, and of putting his and his family’s personal animosity before the good of the country.
The combative claims from Yamina Party chairwoman Ayelet Shaked are part of a strategy to fight back against what has become a tradition, in which Netanyahu tries in the last few days of the last few election cycles to convince Yamina’s and its previous incarnations’ voters to switch to Likud, in what has been named the “gevalt” campaign after the Yiddish expression of alarm.
Netanyahu’s argument has generally been that Likud must be the biggest party in order for him to form a coalition and for there to be a right-wing government, whereas Yamina and Bayit Yehudi argue
that all the votes are in the right-wing bloc anyway, and that they must become a large coalition partner in order to ensure the government’s policies are truly right wing.
Shaked’s pugilistic day began with her and Yamina candidate Naftali Bennett publicizing a map of the West Bank that they said reflected Trump’s “Deal of the Century,” which involves settlement enclaves becoming part of Israel, but not the whole of Area C.
The map, labeled “Deal of the Century,” shows the West Bank in black, with spots in white representing Israeli settlements, and white lines representing the road network connecting them.
“Without Yamina in the government, a Palestinian state will be established,” Shaked warned. “The prime minister didn’t show this map in his news conference” in which he promised to annex the Jordan Valley. “This is what he means.”
The map shows “most of the territory of Judea and Samaria being transferred to the Palestinian Authority to establish a Palestinian state,” Shaked warned in an interview with Ynet.
Yamina candidate Naftali Bennett tweeted the map.
“Why does the prime minister make sure to say he will apply sovereignty to towns and not Area C that surrounds them?” Bennett wrote. “Why did we hear about the carrot in the plan and not the stick? Why did Trump agree to delay making his plan public until right after the election?”
Transportation Minister Bezalel Smotrich, also of Yamina, confronted Netanyahu at the start of Sunday’s cabinet meeting. “Are you able to stand up to Trump?” he asked.
The Trump administration has “never before seen” the map, a senior US official told The Jerusalem Post soon afterward.
“The map posted by Naftali Bennett today on Twitter – and his claim that this represents the vision for peace of the Trump administration – [are] highly inaccurate,” the official said.
In a news conference later that day, Shaked argued that voters deserve to see the real map before Election Day on Tuesday.
“Mr. Prime Minister, where is the real map?” Shaked asked. “Could it be more destructive than the map we publicized? If this is not the real map, we want to see the real map today, before we go to the polls. The people of Israel deserve to know what we’re voting on.”
Netanyahu’s spokesman Yonatan Urich called the map “fake news,” saying it “is incorrect and not part of Trump’s ‘Deal of the Century’… It is unclear why Bennett, Smotrich and Shaked are willing to harm our sensitive relations with the Trump administration just to get a few headlines in the media.
“The citizens of Israel need to decide on Tuesday who they want to send to negotiate with President Trump – his close friend Prime Minister Netanyahu, who protected the Land of Israel for eight years… or [Blue and White co-chairman] Yair Lapid, who wants to evacuate 90,000 settlers and who no one serious in the US knows.”
However, Urich continued to say that Israeli sovereignty would apply to “all the settlements,” and did not mention Area C.
A Yamina source said the map was a conjecture based on party leaders’ talks with American officials and Netanyahu’s and Trump’s public statements.
In the same news conference in Airport City in which she called on Netanyahu to show the real map, Shaked hinted that Sara Netanyahu was keeping the prime minister from promoting the Right’s stances.
“I was never dragged into this personal dispute,” she said at a news conference. “The ideological Right deserves much more. I won’t let the grudge Netanyahu and those who surround him have against me hurt the country.
“I ask right-wing voters and religious-Zionists: Why does Netanyahu always try to run over our party?” Shaked said. “Why doesn’t he attack Shas... UTJ... [Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor] Liberman, who moved to the Left? Netanyahu and those around him do not want us. They want to act against the will of the nationalist camp. They are motivated by a personal hatred that I do not understand to this day. I know the country is important to Netanyahu, but there is something beyond that.”
Shaked did not go into specifics, saying that gossip is not her way. However, when Netanyahu was opposition leader and she and Yamina candidate Naftali Bennett were his top aides, they left their posts on bad terms.
Channel 13 reported that
Shaked recently told Yamina activists: “I was the only one who didn’t flatter [Sara Netanyahu], which is why she doesn’t like me, and some even say she hates me.”
Shaked would not confirm or deny making the statement.
The Yamina leader said in her news conference that she ignored the apparent grudge against her to try to work for the people of Israel, but “they always tried to prevent me from succeeding, even though my success is the success of the whole nationalist camp.”
Shaked brought up a recently leaked recording of a phone conversation between Netanyahu and then-communications minister Ayoub Kara, in which the prime minister verbally abused the latter for working with Shaked on a reform that saved the right-wing and pro-Netanyahu Channel 20 from being shut down. Shaked called her cooperation with Kara “important” and “healthy.”
As for Netanyahu’s claim – which he repeated in the many media interviews he gave over the weekend – that Likud has to be the biggest party in order for there to be a right-wing government, Shaked said Yamina has to be big enough to ensure Netanyahu needs it in his coalition, in order to represent the positions of the ideological Right.
“The Land of Israel is in danger,” she warned. “The only reason Netanyahu is attacking us is that he wants to see the most ideological Right-wing list, religious Zionists, being small, pathetic and not influential. We said again and again that we will only recommend the nationalist camp candidate for prime minister, and that is Netanyahu. So stop the cannibalization within the [Right-wing] bloc.” •