In his apparent final days in office, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has fallen back on his tactic of fear mongering in a last-minute bid to retain power.
Just before the start of Shabbat, Netanyahu took a swipe at attempts by right-wing party heads Naftali Bennett of Yamina and Gideon Sa’ar of New Hope to oust him.
“In this week’s Bible portion we will read about the affair of the spies – public representatives in the nation of Israel who spoke slanderously about the Land and weakened the people's spirit solely out of concern for their personal positions,” Netanyahu wrote.Similarly, he continued, “in our generation, in our time, those elected by the right-wing must stand up and do the right thing." They must "establish a strong and good right-wing government that will preserve the Land of Israel, the citizens of Israel and the State of Israel,” Netanyahu emphasized.
Netanyahu’s words are part of a series of attacks by himself or others against Bennett and Sa’ar, in which their forming a governing coalition with left-wing parties and the Arab Islamist party Ra’am has been called “dangerous” to the state and even to the global right-wing movement.
It’s the latest in a prolonged drama in which Netanyahu attempts to label the leadership battle between himself and his opponents as between Right and Left, as if this was a simplistic black and white situation.
Within that archetypal dichotomy, Netanyahu has a right-wing government almost in his grasp, if only Bennett and Sa’ar would agree to sit in his government.
On paper he is correct. With those two parties in tow he would have a stable right-wing government. But could it advance a right-wing agenda? The answer is, it could not.
One needs only look backward at one of the key yardsticks for the Right – issues relating to Judea and Samaria, also known as the West Bank – to know why this is so.
Here is what did not happen while Netanyahu has been prime minister for 12 years:
• The E-1 construction project by Ma’aleh Adumim has not been given final authorization.
• The advancement and approval rate of new settler construction projects has been high, but actual building was fairly consistent with past trends, and as a result the rate of settlement growth dropped.
• Settler outposts have not been authorized en mass, and even a declaration of intent to authorize them never came before the government.
• Save for one isolated case, new settlements were not built from scratch.
• Most significantly, the promised application of sovereignty over all the West Bank settlements never materialized.
True, Netanyahu did not always have a complete right-wing government, but he had enough support enough of the time to have accomplished the entire list, including annexation.
That he didn’t speaks to the limits of what a right-wing government can do when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Time has shown that for a right-wing government to be effective, it must also have the support of a US president, and even then, such activity has limits.
With former US president Donald Trump at the helm, the United States under Netanyahu’s watch relocated the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Trump also recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
But Trump has now been replaced by President Joe Biden, who has spoken against settlement activity, and who is unlikely to allow a right-wing agenda to move forward when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
At best, a right-wing government could play defensive ball. When Trump was in office, a right-wing government had meaning. With Biden, the situation is likely to be in a deep freeze thereby opening the door for Bennett to join a broad based coalition led by himself and Yesh Atid party head Yair Lapid.
As proof, one need only look at the warning put out last week by the Yesha Council on a freeze on the advancement and authorization of new settle homes by Netanyahu.
Simultaneously, Binyamin Regional Council head Israel Gantz spoke of his support for Netanyahu, and urged Bennett and Sa’ar to support him least they set the cause of the settlements back years.
But once one understand the importance of a US president to settlement policy and looks at the credential of the three men on paper, Bennett and Sa’ar have much more of a right-wing standing than Netanyahu.
Neither men support a Palestinian state, while Netanyahu agreed twice – once under president Barack Obama and again under Trump – to a two-state resolution to the conflict, albeit with a demilitarized Palestinian state.
Bennett and Sa’ar both believe that all of Area C should be part of Israel’s final borders, whereas Netanyahu agreed to Trump’s peace plan that designated portions of Area C for a Palestinian state.
Bennett was the first high-level politician to speak of annexing West Bank settlements, doing so almost a decade ago. Sa’ar followed, with Netanyahu coming to it only two years ago, as one of the last of his party to support it.
Netanyahu has sat in coalitions with Lapid and with the left-wing Labor party. And he spoke in April of creating a coalition that was dependent on Ra’am from the outside, leading people to believe that he might have even formed a coalition with him. He was only blocked from doing so by Religious Zionist Party head Bezalel Smotrich.
Ironically, Bennett and Sa’ar can now sit in a government with Ra’am because Netanyahu made the possibility acceptable.
But that is not the only way Netanyahu helped them weave their path to the current coalition, which will have left-wing, centrist and right-wing parties.
Netanyahu success has been his ability to make compromises, to lean left when needed, in pursuit of a lager goal. He is known for believing that one should be flexible when needed, to be better able to stand one’s ground later in the battle.
With an eye to creating good will with Obama, he agreed to a 10-month moratorium on new housing starts in 2009-2010. Last year Netanyahu broke his promise to the voters to annex West Bank settlements, when he agreed to suspend that application of sovereignty in favor of the Abraham Accords under whose rubric Israel normalized four peace deals with Arab states.
That is just in this current premiership. His first time in office, from 1996 to 1999, he divided Hebron, and shook hands with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Netanyahu has mastered the art of asking the right-wing public to forgive his compromises in the short run, and to trust that he will achieve their goals in the end. It was his success with this tactic that allowed him to speak of a coalition with Ra’am in the first place.
Bennett and Sa’ar are simply taking a page out of his political playbook with the argument that a compromise does not mean they have abandoned the right.
The argument that only Netanyahu can make such compromises but fellow right-politicians cannot falls flat when viewed against the backdrop of reality.
The issue is not that Bennett and Sa’ar have made compromises or abandoned the right, but rather that they have abandoned Netanyahu. In his playbook, there is only one Right and he leads it, and no one else can follow in his footsteps.