The prime minister is not liked in Israel, but no opposition figure comes close to his popularity
[Jerusalem] — Israel awoke on Wednesday to a brewing scandal: Israel’s Interior Minister, Aryeh Deri, who was forced to quit the same post and was jailed in 1999 following his conviction on bribery charges, is once again being investigated by the police for criminal wrongdoing.
This is not good news for a government that has a thread-thin majority of 61 out of 120 parliamentary seats. Nevertheless, Deri’s shaky political fortunes represent the least of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s problems right now.
The case of an Israeli soldier who shot dead a Palestinian assailant who had been shot and lay wounded on the ground in the West Bank city of Hebron has once again exposed the fact that the most dangerous place for Netanyahu is at his own cabinet table. One year and ten days after Israel’s last elections, the right-wing seems to be bent on moving even further to the right.
For prominent members of Israel’s right-wing, the incident that inspired calls for the Obama administration to investigate claims that Israeli security forces have committed “gross violations of human rights,” means little more than another opportunity to engage in their favorite sport: trying to topple the prime minister.
After the incident came to light in a video filmed by a field-worker for the human rights organization B’Tselem, Netanyahu commented that the actions did not “reflect the values of the Israeli army.”
The military police is investigating the soldier for murder.
But, on Facebook, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, who hopes to become Israel’s next prime minister, asked “Has anyone heard the soldier? The entire state leadership quickly piled onto the soldier…Were you there? Did you understand his thinking? The considerations? Perhaps there was a fear that the terrorist was rigged with explosives? That he’d explode onto the soldiers and civilians? Did you ask the soldier before condemning him? Had the terrorist been rigged to explode, the soldier would have been seen as a national hero; could any of you, in his shoes, have known what the situation was really like?” “Senior politicians,” he said, were “dancing to the tune of B’Tselem.”
Haaretz political analyst Yossi Verter said that, “If we are to use a phrase from the battle terminology so favored by Education Minister Naftali Bennett, what he did Sunday to the prime minister was to fire a (political) bullet at him right between the eyes.”
Next to lash out was Avigdor Lieberman, Netanyahu’s former foreign minister, who resigned from the current government a year ago because it was not ‘national’ enough. “How can a soldier even expect a fair investigation, a fair trial, when all in the proper authorities in the IDF already know what the commander wants?” Lieberman asked. He then called the prime minister “spineless,” and claimed “all he’s trying to do is please public opinion.”
For good measure, Lieberman then demanded the impeachment of Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who came to the defense of IDF procedure. “I expect the Likud members to sign the petition demanding to impeach the defense minister immediately.”
Speaking with The Media Line, Elazar Stern, a parliamentarian representing the centrist Yesh Atid party and formerly Head of the IDF Manpower Directorate and Chief Education Officer, said, “what’s happening in the cabinet, with the ministers running all over themselves to see who can be more extremist on the right, is not helping matters.” Stern’s boss, Yair Lapid, a former Netanyahu finance minister and right-veering centrist, has already named himself “Israel’s next prime minister.”
“The two have spotted a golden opportunity to distinguish themselves from Netanyahu, who since the last elections has been moving so far to the right that there’s almost no room left for them in that corner,” Verter noted.
With the opposition moribund and the right-wing fighting itself, Israeli political analysts live in thrall to the idea of a centrist hero who may yet save the day.
A poll last week by Haaretz suggests that a new party headed by former IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, dissident former Likud minister Gideon Sa’ar or current Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon, another Likud deserter, would get the highest number of Knesset seats if elections were held this week.