Ready to reap the rewards of revenge?
The final strategies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his protégé-turned-despised rival and prospective successor, Naftali Bennett
Since Time magazine crowned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “King Bibi” in 2012, many attempts have been made to compare him to monarchs throughout history and the Bible.
But as he approaches what is looking more and more like the end of his political career, the biblical leader that Netanyahu appears to be emulating is not a king but a judge.
Samson, like Netanyahu, was a mighty and revered leader of the Jewish people who looked undefeatable during his 20 years of leadership, five more than Netanyahu’s 15. But he had his weaknesses, including with women.
When Samson was captured by his enemies, he decided to bring them down with him and used the remainder of his strength to collapse their temple on top of all of them, killing more of his enemies as he died than he had throughout his life.
AT HIS press conference on Wednesday night, Netanyahu looked like a shadow of his former self. He rambled on, unfocused and unlike the communicator he has been throughout his career. He looked tired, dejected and defeated.
And most of all, he appeared vengeful against his former protégé turned despised rival and potential successor, Yamina leader Naftali Bennett, whom he attacked, mocked and besmirched over and over again.
It was already clear from Netanyahu’s previous press conference the day before that he had given up on forming a government with his mandate from President Reuven Rivlin.
But other than revenge, what point can there be in repeatedly disparaging his potential partner for a coalition that could still be formed until his mandate ends on May 4? And why is Netanyahu wasting time and energy pursuing the obviously farfetched political maneuver of initiating direct elections for prime minister?
Sources close to Netanyahu revealed exclusively on Thursday that there remains a method to the prime minister’s madness. Taking Bennett down with him is not only vengeful for Netanyahu. It’s his only chance of political survival.
First of all, there genuinely is no way for Netanyahu to form a government now. Neither Religious Zionist Party leader Bezalel Smotrich, nor New Hope chairman Gideon Sa’ar will budge and compromise on his behalf.
He met with Bennett five times since he received the four-week mandate and did not make serious progress with him, despite a charm offensive that included inviting him to the Prime Minister’s Residence for the first time in Bennett’s nine years in politics. The last meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office on Monday, which both sides described as particularly bad, was the final nail in the coffin of any potential partnership between them.
The only way for Netanyahu to remain prime minister is to successfully sabotage the coalition talks between Bennett and Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid that will begin in earnest after Netanyahu’s mandate is over.
It is already very hard for Bennett to make the compromises necessary to form a unity government in which he would rotate as prime minister with Lapid. It requires breaking four campaign promises: He said he would not sit in a Lapid-led government, he ruled out a coalition with Meretz, he vetoed controversial Labor MK Ibtisam Mara’ana-Menuhin, and he vowed to join only a government with a right-wing majority.
Netanyahu is out to make it even harder by discrediting Bennett among the political base they share on the Right. As he has done successfully to rivals throughout his career, Netanyahu is trying to taint Bennett as left-wing.
The ally of Netanyahu in that effort is Smotrich, who is purposely remaining silent now to maximize his attacks on Bennett later on. Smotrich’s only statement about
Bennett since Netanyahu’s and Bennett’s speeches on Wednesday was to tweet a picture of an etrog.
For right-wing voters, the etrog has come to symbolize their wrath for politicians who after moving leftward were coddled by the media the way the expensive fruit is protected during the Sukkot holiday. Left-wing commentator Amnon Abramowitz made the etrog comparison about Ariel Sharon, as he prepared to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.
It is Smotrich, not Bennett, who is preventing Netanyahu from forming a government by ruling out a coalition with the Ra’am (United Arab List) Party of MK Mansour Abbas. His veto is not only due to ideology but because Bennett, sitting in a coalition supported by Abbas, would enable Smotrich to claim the leadership of religious Zionists and the Right.
Nevertheless, Netanyahu did not attack Smotrich in his press conference, because that would not currently help him. He needs Smotrich to help him stop Bennett from forming a government.
Only if Bennett fails can a fifth election be initiated that Netanyahu will get yet another chance to win. It could be an election for Knesset or a direct election for prime minister.
Raising the direct election for prime minister idea helps Netanyahu discredit Bennett, because while it is hard to make the case that Bennett is at fault for not enabling the formation of a right-wing coalition now, Yamina’s seven votes could have enabled Netanyahu to pass the direct election for prime minister bill.
The bill would have made Netanyahu prime minister automatically at first, assuming he would win the election. It would have given him three more months after the election to form a government.
BENNETT MOCKED direct elections for prime minister as a waste of time and billions of shekels in his speech on Wednesday night. But he purposely did not rule them out, because he can use the threat of initiating direct elections to help him negotiate with Lapid.
Once the possibility of joining a Netanyahu-led government is off the table when the mandate runs out, Bennett will go into negotiations with Lapid with less leverage. The direct election threat can help him obtain a more right-wing
coalition, with key ideological portfolios like Defense, Justice and Education going to figures on the Right and not to Labor or Meretz.
Bennett has been successfully building an alibi for joining a coalition with the Center and Left for his supporters on the Right. He has been repeating that he did everything possible to enable Netanyahu to form a right-wing government.
His next step will be to show them that he will make a serious effort to bring right-wing and religious parties into the coalition after Netanyahu fails to form a government. Only if all those efforts do not succeed will he form the coalition that has been the most likely since the election, with Labor and Meretz and the outside support of Ra’am.
Bennett watched Netanyahu attack on TV on Wednesday night. Those who were with him said he did not flinch as he watched the prime minister deliver blow after blow after blow. When the press conference ended, Bennett merely smiled and said the word “next” – in English, of course.
He is used to being attacked by Netanyahu. It has been happening since Bennett entered politics, though the attacks have become increasingly fierce.
Soon, it will apparently be time for Bennett to get his revenge on Netanyahu. The Prime Minister’s Residence on Jerusalem’s Smolenskin and Balfour streets, where Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, made Bennett persona non grata, will become his home for the first two years of his rotation with Lapid.
Even if he would consider
it, the intense security around the compound would not allow Netanyahu to take the building down before Bennett moves in. •
ARMENIA
Indeed, Adolf Hitler infamously recalled the massacres of the Armenians and the global failure to stop them or punish the perpetrators as a reason that the Nazis themselves should not shy away from similar actions.
Charny is one such person who has argued for decades that Israel, as the nation-state of a people that was a victim to genocide, and as part of Jewish values and tradition itself, has a moral obligation to recognize the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians.
From the early 1970s when he first learned of the atrocities, into the 1980s when a conference he organized in Israel on genocide – including discussion about the mass murder of Armenians – generated opposition from the Israeli government, and until today, Charny has worked passionately to bring public awareness to this dark historical chapter and for Israel to recognize it as genocide.
Just this month, Charny, who made aliyah in 1973, published a book detailing Israel’s history of refusing to recognize the genocide, including the fierce opposition to the 1982 conference he organized which dealt with the Armenian Genocide.
Originally an academic psychotherapist by trade, Charny has also lectured on genocide studies at Tel Aviv University
and other universities around the world, and is a former president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
At the end of the 1970s, Charny began organizing what he would call the First International Conference on Holocaust and Genocide which would eventually take three years for him to bring to fruition.
It was the first international conference to connect the Holocaust to other genocides, and also the first to include Armenian scholars.
The renowned writer and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel was invited to chair the conference, an invitation he accepted, while numerous other scholars and organizations also participated.
But when the Israeli government got wind of the conference, according to Charny following publication about the event in The Jerusalem Post, intense pressure began to be exerted against Charny and his initiative.
Wiesel pulled out, and Charny came under heavy pressure from the Foreign Ministry to cancel the lectures on the Armenian Genocide and to cancel the participation of the Armenian scholars.
The ministry even claimed at one point that should the conference go ahead, Turkey might close its borders to Jews seeking to leave Iran and Syria at the time, a step that would trap them in those countries.
Of late, a student of Charny’s dug up Foreign Ministry cables from Ankara to Jerusalem which had recently been declassified indicating the lengths to which the government was prepared to go to
stop the conference and avoid offending Turkey.
In one cable, sent two days before the conference from Israel’s chief consul in Turkey to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem, the consul congratulates the ministry on its efforts to shut the conference down but says he was mystified by the claims about Turkey shutting down its borders to Jewish refugees.
In the cable, the consul is quoted as saying that he had not heard of such threats.
“I realized that Israel had concocted the threats to justify its behavior to try and close the conference down to please Turkey,” Charny told the Post.
He said that, at the time, he contacted the US State Department to ask if there was any threat to Jewish lives, which it said there was not, and therefore proceeded with the conference.
Charny is forthright in his diagnosis of the reasons behind Israel’s refusal to recognize the Armenian Genocide, asserting that it is Israel’s diplomatic, military and economic concerns that have trumped what he sees as its moral imperative.
“We are out for our own self-interest, which is the first value we should be concerned about, but it is coming at the expense of doing what is central to Jewish tradition, ‘Justice, justice, you shall pursue,’” he asserts, quoting from Bible.
DR. HAY Eytan Cohen Yanarocak, an expert on Turkey at the Moshe Dayan Center of Tel Aviv University and the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security (JISS), takes a much more practical approach.
He notes that he himself
believes the massacres of the Armenians to indeed constitute genocide, but argues that it would not serve Israel to unilaterally recognize it as such, given the importance of relations with Turkey, even after more than a decade of rancor between the two countries.
“Recognizing the Armenian Genocide may be something very moral, but it will not contribute to Israel’s national interests,” says Yanarocak.
He says that the utility of having Turkey as an ally from 1949 and the diplomatic and military benefits that stemmed from it, were indeed the primary reason that Israel for so long declined to recognize the Armenian Genocide.
“Realpolitik is my bible. From my perspective, Israel should be very cautious and should not lead the way for recognition of the Armenian Genocide,” he says.
He says that despite the poor relations between Turkey and Israel, there are several reasons to believe that interests between the two countries may be converging once again.
Specifically, a rift has opened up between Turkey and Iran, Israel’s arch foe, over its penetration and influence in Iraq and Syria.
Tehran has long supported the Assad regime in Syria and opposes Turkish intervention there, and has therefore provided support to Kurdish groups in both countries which Turkey fiercely opposes.
Yanarocak says that Israel and Turkey have a joint agenda to minimize the Iranian presence in Syria, and that this rift could be extremely beneficial for Israel.
He also says that repairing
relations with Ankara could help Israel advance its efforts to exploit gas reserves in the Eastern Mediterranean.
He also asserts that unilaterally recognizing the Armenian Genocide would also upset Azerbaijan, a close diplomatic and cultural ally of Turkey with a land border with Iran, and with which Israel also has very good diplomatic and military ties.
Yanarocak argues that Turkey’s limited response to the French recognition of the Armenian Genocide in 2019 and informal recognition by Russia in 2016 was due to the imbalance of power between Turkey and those two countries.
Turkey has more scope and ability to make trouble for Israel and less reason to restrain itself, says Yanarocak, necessitating Israeli caution.
Nevertheless, Charny insists that there are considerations that supersede what he sees as narrow national interests, considerations that he believes could withstand Turkish ire.
“Is there not a point when ethical considerations are no less important than realpolitik? Would we have accepted this kind of reasoning by a country supporting Germany during World War II but at the same time disassociating itself from what Germany was doing to civilians in general and the Jewish people in particular?” he demands.
“It is our human and Jewish responsibility to strengthen peace, and caring for humanity. I love Israel’s contribution to national disasters around the world. That’s the kind of Israel I want to see and be part of,” he