COVID haunts Bennett at home, but a warm welcome awaits him in Washington

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As someone close to Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told me this week, except for the delta variant, things aren’t looking bad at all. The government is functioning. The cabinet ministers are working. The cabinet unanimously passed the budget, which will also be passed in the Knesset. Reforms are gearing up. The cabinet of extremes, which initially looked like a car wreck foretold – with many rookies and a prime minister who entered with hardly any public support – is chugging along in relative harmony without any bloody clashes.

But I told him ruefully: The problem is that things are never perfect. Governments work in chaotic environments, not in a laboratory. There’s always someone who spoils the idyll that could have been.

LISTEN: How German submarines are fueling Israel’s anti-VAX movement

On Wednesday Bennett called a press conference to sum up the government’s first two months. This time he also deigned to answer questions, and returned home unscathed. Had it been somebody else, we could have said that not a hair on his head was harmed.

His main message was unchanged: No to a lockdown, which would “destroy the future of the country,” except as a last resort. He links the economy and health in a single breath. We can be impressed by the authenticity of his commitment to the self-employed, the business owners and the overall economy. But it must be said that if Israel had not been largely vaccinated, he would have had to act like Benjamin Netanyahu did back in the day and yes, impose a lockdown.

His ministers speak well of him, both publicly and in private. They describe him as an attentive administrator, inclusive and fair. “Sometimes he’s too nice,” one minister told me. “People talk too much at meetings, they repeat themselves and he’s very patient with them.” But this past week, other opinions surfaced from Bennett’s colleagues in government.

It was said that, amid the pandemic and its various variants, he tries to pass responsibility on to his colleagues. For example, I was told, there is the ceaseless punting to Education Minister Yifat Shasha-Biton. She speaks her mind openly, without concealing anything and without leaks, and gets slammed. What do they want from her? She has said that any cabinet decision on vaccinations in the schools is acceptable to her. She has also asked that the full cabinet or the coronavirus cabinet meet to discuss the issue and decide.

Israeli education minister Dr. Yifat Shasha-Biton, last month.Ohad Zwigenberg

Nothing is by chance, my interlocutor believes, even the op-ed writers suggesting that the head of her New Hope party, Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar, fire her. It all flows from the same spring.

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Then there’s the leak that Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid don’t attend meetings of the coronavirus cabinet. This too is part of the same method.

A colleague of the prime minister wonders: What’s the problem with Lieberman dividing the labor with the minister under him at the Finance Ministry, Hamad Amar? Since the finance minister is busy with the national budget and the arrangements bill that goes with it – to be brought before the Knesset at the end of the month – the other minister from his party goes to the coronavirus cabinet meetings.

One minister griped to me: What does he want, for us to hold his hand? It’s like the way Netanyahu would complain that his interior minister, Arye Dery, wasn’t being interviewed enough about the coronavirus. The moment Naftali started hearing mentions of the booklet he wrote on how to defeat a pandemic, the moment the news shows started rebroadcasting his statements as an oppositionist criticizing Netanyahu and his government, he had to divert the fire elsewhere.

And then the leaks against the ministers began, about Lieberman and Lapid, about the party heads, about Bennett’s scolding of Shasha-Biton. As this source put it, Naftali boasts that he gives credit to his ministers, and that’s true – on the surface. Under the surface, he sticks it to them. Dr. Naftali and Mr. Bennett.

Pampering Bennett

I quoted these remarks to a close associate of Bennett’s. “Nu, really,” he snorted. “That’s gossip.” Still, I said, there are signs that people are disgruntled.

“Bennett doesn’t slam anyone in briefings,” the associate said. “The leak about Lapid and Lieberman came from one of the ministers, for sure.” (He named who he believed was the culprit.) “And there’s no basis to the accusation that Bennett is looking for partners in taking responsibility. He’s managing it all himself.

“The decision to be the first in the world to give the third dose was entirely his, with the backing of the experts. I remember the skepticism, the suspiciousness. They said people would be hestitant to get it without approval from the FDA, yet already about 1.1 million people have been vaccinated. The data on the increase in antibodies is clear as can be. In a month from now the United States will offer all its citizens the third dose, and soon the Europeans will be following suit.

“Take the nighttime vaccinations. A huge success. Take the doubling of beds and the addition of permanent job slots at hospitals. These are all his decisions. True, his public-opinion situation isn’t good. That’s how it is. Not one leader in Europe where the infection rate is growing and restrictions are being imposed hasn’t lost support. The coronavirus is screwing everybody.”

Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, August 2021.RONEN ZVULUN – Reuters

That’s true. Support for Bennett on the coronavirus has dropped. There is no confidence that the steering wheel is in good hands. Still, the numbers could change and in all likelihood will.

And as always, the international arena provides a convenient refuge for leaders having a hard time in their native lands. On Thursday we’ll watch the well-oiled White House machine coddling the young prime minister as his heart races, covering him in affection and esteem.

In Washington in recent weeks the Bennett file has been followed very closely. Joe Biden and his top aides are a bit flabbergasted by the strange political enterprise that was established here on June 13 and are hoping for its success. They see the new Israeli government and its leader as the last line of defense against Netanyahu’s extreme nationalist, ultra-Orthodox and messianic shadow cabinet.

They’ve noted that the man who promised to refrain from imposing Israeli sovereignty in the territories for three years after the signing of the Abraham Accords supported legislation in that spirit proposed by a member of his own Yamina party. They’re taking notes.

The invitation to Washington was made public almost simultaneously with an invitation to Cairo to visit President Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi. The invitation was presented to Bennett by the head of Egyptian intelligence, Abbas Kamel, who visited Israel on Wednesday. It has been reported that the visit is expected to take place “in the coming weeks.”

In Egypt there will no doubt be less pomp than with the Americans, but the importance of the meeting between the Egyptian president and Bennett (who have already spoken by phone at least once) is no less important than the one to take place at the White House.

Like many of his predecessors, Bennett finds himself fighting on several fronts: Hamas in the south, Hezbollah in the north, Iran everywhere and the pandemic and its variants. He’s working long, hard days. It’s doubtful he expected the intense burden inherent in the job he desired since he was very young.

In Israeli management culture, vacation is a dirty word. We don’t have Camp David every weekend, there are no long hours on the golf course, there’s no such thing as les vacances that last two or three weeks like in Europe. Here, it’s expected that the leader will work for his salary day and night, 24/7.

Last Friday afternoon, the Bennett family set out for a weekend vacation at Moshav Shomera in the north – a modest little break during which the prime minister was briefed on coronavirus matters, security matters and any other urgent item. It boiled down to him forgoing face-to-face meetings during those 72 hours (and in any case, he also observes Shabbat).

On the websites and in the studios, tongue-clucking reigned. Eyebrows were raised to record heights. How dare he take a weekend break when the infection rate is at its peak! The broadcasters waxed indignant, as if it were a duty doctor in a coronavirus intubation ward leaving for Lake Kinneret in the middle of a shift.

“A strange vacation,” one commentator declared, adding that it “was causing a tempest.” “He must not leave,” asserted a young reporter, and in the same breath he koshered Netanyahu’s vacation trip to the United States with the immortal words: “He deserves it.”

A veteran commentator suffered an anxiety attack on live television as, trembling with rage, he compared the conduct of the government and its head – including that criminal vacation – to the period just before the Second Lebanon War. When the infection rate drops and the fourth wave is halted, he’ll reiterate his commentary in reverse.

That’s how it is when populism and pomposity meet. But there’s another way to put it: Go, Bennett, go. Go for a second brief weekend break, read a book, talk with your wife and children, have a drink, gaze at the view. Above all, think. And relax.

Feiglin’s furies

In 2010 and 2011, two years into Netanyahu’s second government (and the first in the series that was recently ended), he was absorbed in a key political project: getting rid of Likud’s Jewish Leadership faction headed by Moshe Feiglin.

The “Feiglins” had been embittering his life ever since he returned to lead Likud in December 2005. When their boss ran against Netanyahu for the Likud leadership in 2005 and 2007, he won considerable support.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, greets Zehut party leader Moshe Feiglin, during a joint press conference in Tel Aviv, Israel, August 29, 2019.Ariel Schalit / AP

Feiglin was an indefatigable oppositionist, venomous and blunt. Netanyahu scorned him and deeply loathed him. “They’re our Tea Party,” he said about them, and that was putting it mildly. He spared nothing to prevent Feiglin from appearing high enough on the party slate to make it into the Knesset, even when Feiglin had been legally elected.

One evening in 2011, the prime minister invited some of the ministers closest to him to the prime minister’s residence on Balfour Street. He was beyond fed up, he confessed to them. The Feiglins were taking over the party. He told them he was seriously considering leaving Likud and starting a new party, free of malevolent, messianic elements that don’t respect the rule of law.

He wanted to do what Ariel Sharon and his breakaway Kadima party did: Exit with the “sane ones.” (And back in those prehistoric days, most qualified: Dan Meridor, Benny Begin, Moshe Ya’alon, Gideon Sa’ar, Reuven Rivlin, Moshe Kahlon, Michael Eitan, Yuli Edelstein, Limor Livnat, Tzachi Hanegbi, Yuval Steinitz.)

This intention remained suppressed. He and Feiglin continued to tangle. Before the second election in the recent series, in September 2019, Feiglin, this time as chairman of the Zehut party, announced his support for Netanyahu. In return, the prime minister promised him a ministerial position in the government that was never established. And at the beginning of this month a circle was closed: The Feiglins came home to Likud, this time through the front door, on a fast track and with the chairman’s blessing.

This process, far from the eyes of the media, perfectly reflects what’s happening in Likud. Netanyahu is the man who scorned and excluded Gideon Sa’ar and Zeev Elkin in Likud, basically triggering their departure from the party (while Netanyahu passed a resolution prohibiting them from returning in the next eight years). And he’s the man who’s unfurling a red carpet for the deeply loathed Feiglin. Make no mistake: He is still deeply loathed.

Now that Netanyahu and his people (now a majority in the Knesset caucus) have become the local Trumpists, Bibi is good with anyone willing to lend him a hand. Extremist, wacko, however dangerous, however much a coronavirus denier, however much a vaccine refuser, anyone who has a few hundred obedient soldiers in tow is a welcome guest in the Bibistan party, on condition that he or she swear loyalty to the king who has lost his crown (and the queen who has lost her castle).

In the Likud caucus, the current assessment among those who aren’t enthusiastic about the new colleague is that between Feiglin and Netanyahu a discreet agreement exists for mutual support. Incidentally, these legislators were astonished to see Feiglin sitting among them at a meeting of the caucus two weeks ago, an honor hitherto reserved only for former MK Osnat Mark.

Not only were they astonished, they winced. That guy, as is common knowledge, hasn’t had a single dose of the vaccine, as he himself says.

Feiglin is light years from the peak of his power in the April 2019 election. Opinion polls were predicting six Knesset seats for him. At the ballot box, he brought in less than three, about 100,000 votes, half of them from secular young people captivated by his economic vision, his support for the legalization of marijuana, his libertarianism and his general grooviness. Since then, they’ve sobered up and left for other exciting electoral adventures.

Feiglin doesn’t have any voters but he does have 700 or 800 devoted activists who see him as their messiah. It’s the closest thing to a cult. Its members have again become card-carrying, dues-paying Likud members. In any election, for party head or the Knesset slate, they’ll vote as a bloc for whomever the boss orders them to vote for.

This is a political force not to be sneezed at. They’re capable of bumping way down the Likud slate anyone Netanyahu perceives as a threat – Edelstein, Hanegbi, Nir Barkat, Yisrael Katz – and bumping way up the chairman’s favorites: our new culture hero David Amsalem, demolition contractor Amir Ohana, and the woman with the syntax and grammar, Galit Distal Atbaryan. Then there’s Miri Regev, the Joan of Arc of the Mizrahi uprising.

Likud lawmakers Miri Regev, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Yuli Edelstein at the Knesset, earlier this month.Ohad Zwigenberg

Feiglin should be totally abominated by the Israeli public, if only because he opposes vaccines and scorns science, medicine and the Israeli health system. The connection between him and Netanyahu is a dangerous variant.

Menachem, too

Of all Israel’s prime ministers, Netanyahu is apparently the one most compared; he gets compared to David Ben-Gurion, Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon. His admirers say there has never been a better prime minister. His haters say he’s the worst ever.

The haters like to reminisce about Menachem Begin, the antithesis of Netanyahu regarding the rule of law, they say, someone who honored the rules of the game and acknowledged the supremacy of the judiciary. The usual observation is that Begin, the strict parliamentarian, would never have considered kneading the Basic Laws for his own political convenience the way Netanyahu has so often done – especially when with Benny Gantz he established the first government of “alternate prime ministers,” which was copied by Bennett and Lapid.

So here’s a story told about a week ago by Aharon Barak, a former Supreme Court president and the attorney general during the Begin government. Barak took part in a Zoom conference organized by the governing coalition before efforts begin for the Basic Law on Legislation that Sa’ar wants to pass.

A few months after the turnaround of 1977, when for the first time the Labor Party lost its Knesset majority to Likud, headed by Begin, the centrist Dash party wanted to join Begin’s government. The condition stipulated by Dash’s leader, Yigael Yadin, the second chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces and an archaeology professor, was that he be appointed deputy prime minister. But Begin had already appointed Finance Minister Simcha Ehrlich, the chairman of the Liberal Party. Under the Basic Law on the Government, there could only be one deputy.

Barak told the Zoom conference – ministers, lawmakers and academics – that Begin asked him: “‘Aharon, what should we do? How can we grant Yadin’s request?’ I told him we couldn’t. The law prevented it.”

The prime minister’s face fell. “What are you saying, is it really impossible to do something? Are you sure?”

“You could go to Yadin, and I’m also willing to go to him, and I’ll explain to him that there’s no legal way to do it.”

Begin, in Barak’s amused description, looked agitated and discouraged. (I have to note here what Golda Meir said of Begin: She didn’t know if he deserved the Nobel Prize, but he should certainly win an Oscar.) “Really, is there no solution?” Begin asked Barak again. The attorney general told him no.

That day, or the next day, the prime minister pushed through the Knesset, in a single day, with the required three votes, an amendment to the Basic Law. Dash joined in and Yadin was appointed the second deputy prime minister.

As Barak put it, “I said to him, ‘Et tu, Brute?'”