It seems like for every few hours this government remains in office, another embarrassing report becomes headline news.
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On Monday, Prime Minister-designate and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid mocked the 35,000 Jews who make the ascent to the Temple Mount every year. "Let them pray at the Western Wall, which is the holiest place to the Jewish people," he suggested. In that one sentence, Lapid both erred and caused incredible damage.
The Southern Wall is in fact more sacred than the Western Wall, and the Temple Mount is more sacred than both the walls. The Israeli government, the Israel Police, and the pilgrims making their way to the Temple Mount in recent years have led to Jews finally being able to pray there after 1,300 years. Why on earth would any Israeli minister want to cancel this achievement?
This is the same Lapid who, in a speech last week, determined antisemitism and the slave trade were one and the same. His remarks were not just complete nonsense, they caused great diplomatic damage as they negated the many years of work the Foreign Ministry has invested in defining Jew hatred as a unique phenomenon.
Prior to Lapid, cabinet member and Labor party leader Meirav Leader determined that the US "was the first to break the weapons embargo on Israel, and made the IDF the people's army with the most advanced weapons." Everyone knows the US in fact abstained from the orderly sale of weapons to Israel until after the 1967 Six-Day War.
Beyond these missteps, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and his office have been the stars of this unserious show.
Last week, the Prime Minister's Office announced Bennett had invited Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro to a meeting at his country's embassy in Jerusalem, but no such embassy exists. According to various reports, Bennett's people also managed to annoy German Chancellor Angela Merkel when they leaked the news of her planned visit to Israel. Leaks about Bennett's secret visit to Jordan also angered King Abdullah II.
Unconfirmed reports from the Prime Minister's Office have also caused damage on the issue of the Temple Mount. If Bennett did in fact offer his support for "freedom of worship" at the Temple Mount, why did he rush to walk back his remarks? If he folded, why did he deny changing his position on the matter?
There is a direct connection between the series of missteps, of which there are too many to list here, and the negligent handling of the pandemic. Who exactly do you think you are fooling when you announce an infantile-named "happy badge"? Do you see us as children?
The government has lost control of the pandemic, that much is clear. The people have gotten the message from above, and thousands of people are rushing to travel overseas, including to "red" states with dangerously high infection rates, so that despite Bennett's assertions, the breach at Ben-Gurion International Airport remains open. On Monday, Bennett was forced to remind Israelis that "government decisions are mandatory and are not a recommendation." Good to know. In the meantime, vaccines are the only thing saving us from catastrophe.
A chorus of prominent journalists has stepped up in defense of the government's failures. Just as they did with former Prime Minister Ehud Barak, they are now covering for Bennett and Lapid. Ever since June 13, their biting sarcasm has all but disappeared.
A government, in particular a fledgling government, is allowed to make mistakes. Yet this seems less like a series of mistakes and more like negligence. Everything has been sacrificed to form a government that achieves one particular goal – the ousting of Benjamin Netanyahu from the Prime Minister's Office. When the prime minister and ministers boast that in their new government, every minister can run their office as they see fit and no one is fighting to take the credit, the mouthpieces cheered, ignoring the resulting chaos that now reigns.
It's not a question of Right versus Left, nor is it a question of Opposition Leader Netanyahu versus Bennett and Lapid. It is a question of superficiality versus professionalism.
This is a government in which the prime minister is not really the prime minister, and the decision-makers are not really making the decisions. In this government, members walk on eggshells. Any remark made out of place, any inaccurate statement, threatens to bring down this house of cards. This paralyzed government, which has not found itself in a debacle but rather brought all of its troubles on itself, has whitewashed the price we will pay for its establishment, and with the help of its emissaries in the media and on Twitter, continues practically unhindered to inflict damage on a near daily basis.
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