Justice has been served.
The ruling party’s members, in their primary election Monday, removed some of its most unfit and brazen lawmakers.
The least significant of these is Nissim Vaturi, a coarse ignoramus who tried to impress Likud voters with preposterous statements throughout his parliamentary stint. These included a charge that the judicial coup’s protesters were deployed by Hamas, a call to kill all Gazans, and a conspiratorial hallucination that Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yair Golan helped Hamas on October 7 (in fact, he rushed to the Western Negev and fought.)
Now, having shoved Vaturi down to slot no. 43, Likud voters told him he is too much, even for them. However, Vaturi was an anecdote all along, having held no executive position. That cannot be said of May Golan, the minister for social equality and women’s advancement. Having pushed her down to slot no. 30, Likud’s members effectively said they don’t think a suspect of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust, who ignored police summonses to investigate her, should represent them, whether in the government or in the Knesset.
Then again, Golan didn’t impact history, which will recall her as a footnote, if at all. That cannot be said of Idit Silman, the outgoing environment minister.
Silman falls after controversial defection from Bennett coalition
Silman's claim to fame is not about her ministerial record. Ever focused on herself, the Environment Ministry’s duties and dilemmas hardly interested her. Instead, Silman will be recalled, for posterity, as the turncoat whose defection from the Bennett coalition paved the way for the regime that presided over the worst four years in the history of the Jewish state.
Now, having pushed Silman down to slot no. 37, Likud’s members effectively said about her betrayal-for-office deal what a steady client might tell a prostitute when dumping her: this was never about love.
Then again, Silman, an airhead whose campaign’s highlight was a video clip of her making somersaults (I am not making this up), is no loss to Likud, much less to the rest of the political system. That cannot be said of Ze’ev Elkin, a worldly intellectual and chess master who is clearly smarter than most people.
Elkin and his friend Gideon Sa’ar ran as the disillusioned protégés of Benjamin Netanyahu who became his outspoken critics, a role they played with even greater relish after Likud had introduced its judicial reform. That was the ticket on which they were elected. But, alas, when they sank in polls, the duo betrayed their voters and fled to Netanyahu’s bosom, for a pair of cabinet seats.
Now, having sent Elkin to slot no. 32, Likud’s members effectively said they see little difference between him and Silman. For that, too, these voters deserve applause, as they do for having ousted Finance Committee chairman Hanoch Milwidsky, a suspected rapist and documented misogynist who publicly disgraced his committee’s legal adviser, nearly bringing her to tears.
You would think, then, that this primary election was a corrective act that cured the ruling party of its ailments.
If only it were that. In fact, at a time when Israeli politics begs heroism more than ever before, Likud’s new candidate list brandishes, salutes, and prizes the hero’s exact opposite: the coward.
Sa’ar and Katz avoid Likud primary battle through reserved slots
Coward number one is Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar. The man whose political treason is second only to Delilah’s betrayal of Samson did not have the guts to run in Likud’s primaries. Yes, he had good reason to expect defeat. But in preferring disgrace and self-service over honor and the national interest, he unveiled a coward for all to see.
The same goes for Defense Minister Israel Katz. No, he did not betray his voters, much less Netanyahu. On the contrary, he is where he is only because he has been servile to his party’s leader, for decades. However, he too manipulated for himself an exemption from the primaries, as one of the eight slots the party decided to let Netanyahu personally handpick.
Never mind that when Likud’s members gave Netanyahu this power, they thought he would use it to bring in new faces from outside politics. The problem is that Katz, like Sa’ar, did not have the guts to face his party’s popularity test. Instead, he fled the contest that might have demoted him. That, too, is cowardice, as is Interior Minister Haim Katz’s similar deal.
Nir Barkat survives primary battle amid Netanyahu tensions
Then again, these displays of cowardice dwarf compared with Economics Minister Nir Barkat’s.
Barkat seems to have survived the primaries, but he did so by the skin of his teeth. The reason is that Netanyahu himself pushed for his ouster. And the reason for that is that shortly after Hamas’s October 7 attack, Barkat tried to have the Knesset remove Netanyahu. That is what Dan Illouz, until recently a Likud lawmaker, recently told TV’s Channel 12. Barkat denied this, but no one believes him. And the best proof of this report’s accuracy is Netanyahu’s effort to push Barkat out, which is why he ended up on slot no. 24.
And so, the question to Barkat is not why he wanted Netanyahu replaced, but why he didn’t make that quest public. And the answer is that he, too, like Sa’ar and Katz, is a political coward. Had he been brave, he would have made his revulsion with Netanyahu known, regardless of the risk to his political fortunes.
Katz, Sa’ar, and Barkat are not just another three of Likud’s candidates. They are Netanyahu’s aspiring successors.
And so, the prime minister who did not have the courage to visit even one mourners’ family of the kibbutzim Hamas molested; the man who did not have the courage to confront ultra-Orthodoxy’s rabbis and demand their boys’ enlistment; and the man who did not have the courage to face a judicial commission of inquiry – is leading a list of candidates molded in his own image: the image of the coward-in-chief.
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestseller, The Jewish March of Folly (Yedioth Books 2026), now available in English on Amazon.