Naftali Bennett has already decided it. On Sunday, he will sit down with his party members to make sure that none of them gets cold feed at the moment of trust. His biggest concern, and nearly the only hope that remains for the Right, would be repeat of what happened in 1990. The dirty deal. Shimon Peres, while still a member of Yitzhak Shamir's government, secured the signatures of 61 MKs to set up a government with himself as leader. At a celebratory Knesset session convened during Passover of that year to swear in the new government, it turned out that two of his signatories had failed to show up.
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The event was cancelled, and Peres went home with his head hanging. Two MKs he had thought were with him the entire way had fled, saving the situation, and left the Right in power for another two years. After that, Yitzhak Rabin and Peres were elected and the dismal result of the Oslo Accords, suicide bombings, and casualties, we already know. There is now way of knowing how things will turn out this week, but there is already one major difference: Back then, it was Peres and the Left who were subverting the Right. Today, it's Naftali Bennett, from the Right.
In the different party headquarters – the Likud, the National Religious Party, and the new Gush Emunim HQ, where the atmosphere is similar to the one that prevailed prior to Oslo or the disengagement from Gaza – activists are not aiming for Bennett himself. Everyone understands that he's already in. He's crossed the Rubicon. One official described his situation as an "ego trip," the early signs of which had glimmered in the past, but he shrewdly managed to cover up and hide his true intentions in order to prepare the groundwork for this moment. The moment at which he would reveal to everyone that "Yamina" [to the Right, in Hebrew] is nothing more than a name, and certainly not an ideology. The signs, they say, were there at the start, back when Bennett, as director general of the Community of Jewish Communities in Judea and Samaria visited a protest tent on Rothschild Blvd. in Tel Aviv during the social justice protest movement of 2011. It continued with him ordering private investigators to look into former MK Zvulun Orlev, extensive ties to Yedioth Ahronoth and its publisher, Arnon "Noni" Mozes, in attempts to promote a bill to shut down Israel Hayom, and of course, the notorious alliance that effectively busted the right-wing camp.
Apart from a handful of Yamina supporters, the vast majority of those who are backing Bennett and his latest moves are supporters of the left-wing parties. Bennett will be joyfully welcomed to the Prime Minister's Office with trumpet blasts from Labor, Meretz, and Yesh Atid voters, and wept over by people on the Right, the religious, settlers in Judea and Samaria, and the ideologists, who in the past few years Bennett has done everything he can to go after.
On Sunday, for the first time, Bennett will rip off his mask and tell everyone the truth, including the journalists and media people who followed him through fire, bewitched, and placed him at the head of the camp.
As far as the people tailing him, the story is a bit different. It still isn't clear whether the weakness of Yamina MKs, other than Amichai Chikli, will keep them at his heels like the rats following the Pied Piper of Hamlin, or whether they still have a smidge of values or ideology that haven't been extinguished and could at the last minute be re-sparked and save them from themselves.
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