Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, and this is no secret, established the patched-together government and coalition that is currently breaking up as an experiment.
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"In the best-case scenario, this government will do wonderful things for the state of Israel, in the worst-case scenario – we won't succeed. It wouldn't be a disaster. The main thing is that we got out of the mud." This is what Bennett said in his first interview after he decided to establish the government. Regarding "it wouldn't be a disaster" and "we got out of the mud," we can see the bad polling numbers and the severe coalition crisis that threatens the government's survival less than a year after it was established, as well as the political tsunami that consumed the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem this week. But the laboratory is still active, the experiment on 9 million Israeli citizen guinea pigs is still at its peak, and the results are not impressive. Bennett and Lapid have been working on materials engineering, but every day it becomes clearer that some of the materials do not respond well to each other.
The dream that Meretz and Gideon Sa'ar and Ra'am and Yamina could lie down together has turned into chaos, and one can see mathematically how its parliamentary majority is fading. In any case, the political and national story that the government is telling goes beyond counting numbers in the Knesset. Governments rise and fall, coalitions form and break up. The real experiment Bennett, his party, and his government are carrying out is on substantial issues, and includes an attempt to completely change Israel's security conception and its status as a Jewish and a Zionist state, all in the name of an attempt to feed the government and keep Bennett on oxygen.
Engineering a new Israel
While David Ben-Gurion sought to create a new Israeli, Bennett and Lapid are engineering a new Israel, one in which all its citizens' security has been handed over to those who from the beginning saw a Jewish state as something that needed to disappear from the world. From the beginning of Zionism, and more so since the state was founded, Israel's security outlook has assumed the Jews must defend it and their Jewish brothers and sisters. This, of course, alongside alliances with the state's minorities and full civil rights for everyone. This week it became clear that Bennett has formulated his own conception and has entrusted control of our security to Ra'am, who have distorted what's happening on the ground, made false accusations against Israel, and in general haven't agreed to accept the sight of policemen defending Jewish citizens.
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Bennett's experiment, which determines whether our borders will be quiet, whether Jews wrapped in prayer shawls will be attacked on the streets of Jerusalem, and whether the government will survive an attempt to defend Jews from Islamic aggression, is dangerous and goes to the roots of our existence in this country. Instead of the old Zionism, which doesn't allow the tenure of a leader without a Knesset majority, the government is leading us to a place in which Zionism is unnecessary. In the same interview in which he explained "in the worst-case scenario – we won't succeed, it won't be a disaster," he clarified that the government would only deal with civil issues. "There is not a single word about national issues in the coalition agreements," he claimed forcefully.
This week it became clear just how national and religious everything is. The response of the prime minister was silence, ignoring Ra'am's demonstration of ethno-nationalist muscle, and essentially the sacrifice of Zionism and its grip on Israel and Jerusalem in exchange for the government's survival.
One of the coalition MKs, Vladimir Beliak (Yesh Atid), wondered in a Twitter post why everyone was shaken by the fact that the government of the state of the Jews was breathlessly expecting a decision from Shura Council as to whether it would survive. It's like the involvement of the Council of Torah Stages, he argued, so what was everyone getting worked up about?
This, of course, is in the spirit of the leaders Lapid and Bennett, who have handed responsibility for security issues over to the Islamic Movement and have given it a monopoly over policy on Jews responding to attacks on their brothers in the capital city. The materials bubbling in the experiments in Bennett's laboratory are leading to a state of all its citizens, the meaning of which is clear to everyone. The welfare of the coalition is deemed to be worth the elimination of the Zionist ethos and the values upon which the state was founded.
The victims of unity
Zion is Jerusalem, but nothing terrible will happen if it becomes Al-Quds by the time the rotation is implemented. After 100 years of Zionism that has protected and nurtured, we are left with a government that has withdrawn from the Temple Mount; allows the uprooting of trees planted in the Negev; which dreams of a more universal country, whose heads make more speeches, in lofty language disconnected from the roots that nurtured the tree they are currently threatening to chop down following threats from the Islamic Movement. In the face of a movement that insists on ethno-religious principles, Lapid and Benett are silent. They don't even have the courage to mention our right to this country.
While the sacrifices of peace were made on the altar of the Oslo Accords, the sacrifices of unity are made on the altar of the unity government. Tragically, in the new world being built by Lapid and Bennett, nothing is holy apart from the government's survival, there is no red line apart from ensuring there are enough votes in order to prevent it being dismantled. The price of the experiment of turning Israel into a state of all its citizens will be paid, paradoxically, by all its citizens.
