"It's wide open," Netanyahu said the day before yesterday, after the Likud primaries. The race is wide open. He isn't buying the polls broadcast on the various channels – the ones forecasting him a defeat just shy of a majority for the Zionist opposition, and not the ones forecasting him a sweeping victory, the biggest of his career.
In any case, past experience teaches that at this stage of a campaign, the prime minister isn't occupied with the race itself, but with preparing for it. The Likud list elections were stage one. Ostensibly, he played it neutral. In practice, he hasn't been this involved in years. He's the one who shaped the recommended list for Israel Aerospace Industries' board, dropped David Bitan and Tally Gotliv from it, and made sure Nir Barkat was crossed off list after list.
The result: Gotliv remains a loud fringe act at the foot of the top ten; Barkat will wait until the lists close to see whether he's sent into retirement or Netanyahu takes pity on him. Bitan somehow survived, but lives on, weakened.
Now comes the turn of a different kind of list: a collection of small right-wing parties the likes of which haven't been seen since 1992. Two new ultra-Orthodox parties, Zelicha, Feiglin, Erdan, Winter, Noam, and in some respects Trooper too, who winks at part of the bloc's 2022 voters.
Netanyahu sees two of them as the strategic problem: Feiglin and Winter. The first is an unmanned, uncontrolled drone, whose 2019 run burned the right three seats and also knocked Bennett and Shaked below the electoral threshold. But he's since worn thin. The more serious challenge is Winter. This coming Tuesday, the reserve brigadier general will announce a Knesset run on a distinctly right-wing list, one that will sit right on the seam between Likud voters and religious Zionism. The odds of both Winter and Smotrich clearing the threshold look slim, meaning at least 100,000 votes will be burned one way or the other, paving Eisenkot's way to the premiership.
Unlike in the past, this time Netanyahu has no control over the bloc's components. His ties to Winter were severed long ago, and the PM's office is torn over whether Winter is a colleague or a predator: whether he'll bring in votes that would otherwise go to Liberman and Eisenkot, or whether he's actually planning to go with Liberman and Bennett the day after. Even the timing is short enough to raise suspicion. Winter intends to announce the party just two weeks before the lists close, leaving almost no room to withdraw or team up.
The Likud primaries all but erased religious Zionism's representation and left the list nearly devoid of security-establishment figures. On paper, Winter is the perfect combination: a senior officer with a religious Zionist knitted kippah. But these days, Winter refuses not just to join existing parties but even to meet other politicians in the same room. It'll be interesting, if and when he enters the Knesset, whether he'll agree to sit with himself.
An almost unbelievable poll was published last month by Shmuel Rosner and "The Index." The party the public rates highest on "handling crime and personal security" is, well, Otzma Yehudit. Four years have passed since Ben Gvir galloped to a record election result on a promise to tackle the crisis. Since then, the murder rate has spiked, crime families divide territory among themselves, the United States issues a travel advisory over organized crime here, grenades get thrown at businesses as a matter of routine, protection money is as fixed an expense as property tax and VAT – and the man best suited to handle the national crisis is the minister on whose watch all of it happened. Not sure why, but it brought to mind the joke about the Arab who considered voting for Kahane, Ben Gvir's spiritual father, "because he was the only one who promised to deal with the Arabs."
Here's a demonstration of the field where Ben Gvir leaves every rival in the dust: marketing. Yes, he's had achievements – yes, he dramatically worsened conditions for terrorists in prison and handed out weapons to the public so they could defend themselves, and credit to him for that. But only in a world where what people say about you matters more than what you actually did can someone come off as Mr. Governance after a term like this. Ben Gvir shouldn't be underestimated: he's the only member of the coalition for whom the polls predict a surge rather than a collapse. If I may venture a guess, the polls are still underselling his strength.
Video: Ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Idit Silman showcase their initiative to use crocodiles to prevent prisoners from escaping. Credit: Ministry of National Security
Precisely for that reason, and without risking being suspected of leftism, I'll go ahead and say that another government with Itamar Ben Gvir in a meaningful role would be a heavy disaster for the country. Four years of unrelenting artillery bombardment, aimed at short-term political gain at home, have caused long-term strategic damage abroad.
Our great friends in right-wing parties around the world struggle to understand why Israel handed a man like this the keys to its government at a time like this. There isn't a Jewish community I've visited in the United States, however Orthodox and right-leaning, where I haven't heard how hard it is to defend an Israeli government Ben Gvir belongs to, and quotes that made it all the way from his X account to the other side of the ocean. He's a celebrity on a global scale, and not in a good way.
His presence at the centers of decision-making is a daily terror attack on Israel's standing in the world. There's no Netanyahu interview, even on the most right-wing channels, where he isn't asked about Ben Gvir, and mutters something about the Israeli system of government where "only I decide." And of course, the follow-up question, always the same: how did you end up in a place where he's a senior minister?
"We shall die, and we shall not unite"
Here's the answer: we got this far because of the boycott of Netanyahu. In 2019, as the indictment against Netanyahu took shape, the election turned from a political contest into a religious war: "We shall die, and we shall not unite." The center-left's willingness to lean on the Arab parties led Netanyahu from disqualifying the Kahanist party to coordinating moves with it. First, folding it in with other right-wing parties; then, willingness to lean on it in the coalition; finally, sitting together in the cabinet. Everyone who's nostalgic – rightly – for the days when Likud wouldn't join up with Kahane in 1984 is invited to feel nostalgic, while at it, for Peres and Rabin, who that same year refused to lean on anti-Zionist Arab parties too.
This pendulum swing sharpened when the "government of change" rose in 2021 with the backing of Ra'am. That, and only that, is what launched Smotrich and Ben Gvir to 14 seats. Now the pendulum is swinging back the other way, and according to most polls, it will end with a center-left minority government at the mercy of the Arab parties, with Gaby Lasky and Moshe Radman, and with Yair Golan not a deputy minister but deputy prime minister. Just before that happens, it's worth remembering that a pendulum building momentum doesn't just suddenly stop in the middle. It will bring Ben Gvir back with 17 seats next time. Here's news from the future: drop the "National" from his current title, and you'll understand where he's headed.
Some people do just fine on the pendulum: a run of fringe players who, thanks to polarization's patronage, land positions and influence they'd never achieve in a saner climate. But the State of Israel is gravely harmed by this. You can fight terror supporters sailing to Gaza, or instead, you can run an inflammatory prayer tour among detainees that even makes friends like the Czech Republic and Austria recoil and demand explanations. You can fight Jewish hate crimes out of an understanding of the injustice and folly involved, or you can flirt with support for them, and with a message trickling down to police that there are criminals of our own – the kind you don't touch.
You can legislate an effective death penalty for terrorists, like the one from MKs Melinovsky and Rotman, or you can legislate empty words like Ben Gvir, while wearing a gilded hangman's noose on your lapel. To hell with substance, to hell with the fact that any reasonable person waking up in Europe or the US and seeing that image concludes they're dealing with a bloodthirsty fascist. Who else gets a birthday cake with a sugar-icing hangman's noose? Who else decorates his living room with a picture of the despised mass murderer Baruch Goldstein, so the kids see it every morning on their way to the kitchen for cereal? And no, it's not because Goldstein was a doctor. If that were the reason, why not an oil painting of a gynecologist and Arafat's advisor, Ahmad Tibi?
As noted, extremism is a double-edged sword. My late grandfather used to drill into his kids, whenever they got into schoolyard fights, "don't start it, and don't keep it going." So, without deciding who started it, it's clear everyone kept it going. Alongside Otzma Yehudit's rhetorical rampage, there's a rhetorical rampage from the Democrats too. "Baby killers as a hobby" flew around the world just as fast as any of Ben Gvir's provocations, because here, apparently, was the smoking-gun proof that Israel murders – in the form of an explicit admission from a former deputy chief of staff.
When a fringe party accrues power in government, a fringe party accrues power in the opposition. Every side feels the need to escalate to pick up a few more votes, and the result is an unholy bargain: a senior coalition member and a senior opposition member together foul the country's name in the world. In economics, this is called an "externality": everyone suffers heavy damage so that you can pocket a small gain.
A broader government, with less power for extreme elements, would sharply reduce the damage from statements like these, and reduce even further their legitimacy to be heard at all. There's no reason Netanyahu and his allies, and Eisenkot and his, should hold back from speaking clearly just out of fear that their own camp will suffer for it. Shamir and Peres despised each other, but they would never have lent legitimacy to this madness or to that one.
No column, of course, will dent Ben Gvir's seat-count trajectory – if anything, the opposite. But his power doesn't come from his number of seats; it comes from the fact that he's been melted into the right-wing bloc, seemingly with no way to pry them apart. From an abomination to a necessity, from a necessity to a partner, from a partner to a fellow traveler. Netanyahu is wary of him, Deri is careful to give him his due, and Likud already has his outposts in the form of Tali Gottlieb and May Golan.
Everyone draws their own lessons from October 7. My conclusion is that the reviver of modern Hebrew, Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, didn't choose that particular term by accident – "a tight government," which in Hebrew also means a "government of trouble" – to describe both a coalition with few members and a coalition that is itself a problem. There are countries protected by two oceans that can afford such luxuries. Israel is not one of them. You would do well to cut Ben Gvir down to his natural size.
