Is former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett seeking a comeback?
When Naftali Bennett concluded his term as Israel’s prime minister in 2022, he and his wife decided that due to the stress on their family, he would leave politics for a decade. But after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attack spurred Israel’s war in Gaza, Bennett is rethinking that commitment.
Israel, Bennett told me, is not moving in the right direction. “We’re facing the biggest challenges in our history, and it’s going to require leadership that unites Israel together and inspires Israelis to work together to fix Israel and get out of this deep hole,” he said.
While Bennett says he hasn’t decided if he will run for prime minister, during a wideranging, hour-long interview Wednesday at the Ritz Carlton in Boston, where he was fund-raising for the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, he sounded like he was gearing up for a campaign.
Bennett, describing himself as a “radical moderate,” laid out his vision for Israel’s future, implicitly criticizing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, although the two share similar ideologies.
Bennett is a high-tech CEO, former military commander, and former leader of Israel’s settler council. During his decade in politics, he served as a member of parliament representing right-wing parties and as a Cabinet member in Netanyahu’s government, then he broke with Netanyahu and joined the opposition. He became prime minister in 2021 through an agreement with center-left politician Yair Lapid, a decision that angered many of Bennett’s political allies. The government dissolved after a year due to internal divisions.
Netanyahu is deeply unpopular in Israel and facing pressure to call early elections. Polling suggests centrist Benny Gantz would be the front-runner. But Bennett could seek support from religious Zionist and rightleaning communities seeking someone ideologically conservative but willing to work with moderates. Israel has a parliamentary democracy, in which parties win seats then work with other parties to form a governing coalition. Bennett believes the next government needs to be a bipartisan unity government including left, right, religious, and secular parties.
Today, Israel is riled internally by protests demanding a deal to return the Israeli hostages held in Gaza. President Biden is raising concerns about Netanyahu’s plans to invade Rafah — an area Israel says remains a Hamas stronghold where roughly 1.4 million Palestinians are sheltering. Protests are proliferating over the humanitarian plight of Gaza’s Palestinians, where aid deliveries have been insufficient to supply food, water, and medicine.
Bennett is a strong proponent of a military solution. “I think Israel should have taken Rafah three months ago,” he said.
He believes Israel can get the hostages back by threatening Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s survival. If Hamas leaders believe Israel will kill them, Bennett says Israel can offer Sinwar, Hamas leaders, and fighters deportation to another country, like Qatar, in exchange for the hostages. “Either they don’t go for a deal and then we destroy Hamas and kill them,” Bennett said. “Or at the last moment they raise a white flag. They get on a ship. They get out of here after they release all the hostages.”
Bennett blames the Biden administration for scuttling a deal by pressuring Netanyahu not to enter Rafah. “Whenever we’re on the cusp of a [Israel-Hamas] deal, I heard the [Biden] administration tell Israel don’t go into Rafah, and then Sinwar says to himself ‘well, whoa, I’m getting … my side of the deal for free, so why would I pay for it?’” Bennett said.
He also said he would flood Gaza with humanitarian aid and let civilians leave Rafah. He bristles at the suggestion that Israel hasn’t done enough to avoid civilian casualties, calling it “a double standard only against the Jewish state.” Gaza’s Health Ministry says more than 33,000 Palestinians have been killed, figures that don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants. Bennett cited an Israeli estimate that 14,000 combatants have been killed. “If we were cavalier about killing civilians, this war would have been done in a week. We just bomb the heck out of everyone,” Bennett said. He acknowledged Israel’s mistake in striking a convoy of World Central Kitchen aid workers but said it is no different from America mistakenly striking an Afghan trauma hospital in 2015.
While the United States, European
Union, and others have called for a two-state solution to resolve the decades-old IsraeliPalestinian conflict, Bennett, like Netanyahu, has long opposed a Palestinian state. He says Israel essentially agreed to two states in the Oslo Accords, an interim agreement that failed to lead to a final resolution, and when Israel unilaterally left Gaza in 2005. He suggests the Oct. 7 attack made Israelis less willing to give Palestinians sovereignty. “We can all envision that if we let go of security in the [Palestinian Authority], then we’ll have hordes of radical Islamic terrorists with machetes killing our families,” Bennett said. “No one’s going to do that experiment. The very expectation of Israel to do it is insane.”
Instead, Bennett envisions a Gaza reconstruction plan he compares to post-World War II Germany. It involves eradicating Hamas, then convening Arab nations like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates to support a government of Palestinian technocrats who oversee daily life in Gaza while Israel retains security authority. He also argues for the need to “deradicalize” Palestinian media, education, and mosques. “If they continue teaching children that Jews are pigs and Satan, we’ll find ourselves in the same place 20 years from now,” Bennett said.
Bennett hopes Israel can maintain and expand regional alliances, including normalizing relations with Saudi Arabia. He says he would push Israel and Western governments to be more aggressive in combating terrorism from Iran and its proxies using economic and technological tools so that Israel can “restore our strength and our deterrence.”
There are several potential candidates for prime minister across Israel’s political spectrum. But Bennett, who speaks fluent English, is emerging as a spokesperson for Israel’s rights internationally. He admits Israel is losing the public relations war and hopes speaking out can strengthen American Jews who feel under attack. “Don’t be cowed by the aggression of our detractors,” Bennett said he would tell them. “Fight back.”
Bennett envisions a Gaza reconstruction plan he compares to post-World War II Germany.