by Dr. Martin Sherman
It will take a long time, maybe decades, to repair the damage caused by the dishonest machinations used to ensconce the current coalition, not only on Israel's body-politic, but on the Zionist endeavor-if such repair is at all feasible. Ever!
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| Bennett Government meeting Hezki Baruch |
Whoever commits a fraud is guilty not only of the injury to him
who he deceives, but of the diminution of that confidence which
constitutes...the existence of society—Samuel Johnson, renowned English poet, playwright, essayist, (1709-1784).
Bennett
knows that if he goes to a military conflict, the coalition will fall
apart because Meretz and Ra'am won't agree to it. The presence of Meretz
and Ra’am limits the sharpness of any military decision...The moment
the government makes a decision about something military, there will be a
danger to the coalition—Meretz MK Ghaida Rinawie-Zoabi, cited in The Jerusalem Post, August 8, 2021.
The political process taking place in Israel is eerily similar to what took place in Lebanon following the foundation of Hezbollah—Mordechai Kedar, The Lebanonization of Israel, March 31, 2021.
Earlier this year, prominent Mid-East scholar, Dr. Mordechai Kedar penned two versions (here and here) of an incisive and insightful, but deeply disturbing article.
Cogent case
In
it, he warned that the petty, vindictive personal and partisan agendas
of Israeli politicians have brought the Jewish state to the brink of
disaster. He writes:
"The
political struggle in Israel has reached a deadlock because the actors
are focused not on issues and ideology but on personal, sectorial,
factional, and party-based considerations. National interests have been
relegated to the margins of political discourse..."
Kedar, an
acknowledged expert in the study of Islam, with years of experience in
both academia and military intelligence, made a cogent case for his
caveat that by letting the Muslim Brotherhood affiliate, the Islamist
Ra'am faction, into its mainstream body-politic, Israel was setting out
along the same perilous path that Lebanon took when it allowed the
Iranian-affiliated Hezbollah into its mainstream politics.
He ascribes
the roots of the Lebanese tragedy to "…the choice by politicians…to
subordinate the national interest to personal and sectorial interests.
They sacrificed the country on the altar of their own careers by
delegitimizing opponents… "
Sadly,
I find myself compelled to concur in large measure with Kedar's ominous
prognosis. For, similar patterns of behavior are emerging in Israel.
Indeed, as time passes, the abysmal truth in coming into ever sharper focus.
The entity that governs Israel today is nothing more than a toxic
brew of unbridled personal ambition and ideological nihilism; puerile
pique and devious duplicity. Nothing more. It is by its very nature,
wracked by impossible internal contradictions—incapable of generating
any common vision, towards which it can guide the nation.
Shattering all credence in campaign promises
The
newly formed, hodgepodge, Bibi-phobic governing coalition, ostensibly
led by Naftali Bennett, has been in power for a little more than five
months. Yet, it will take a long time—probably decades—to repair the
appalling damage it has already wrought on the fabric of the
body-politic of the country, and on the essence of the Zionist endeavor
itself—if such repair is even feasible. Ever!
Regrettably, it
would be no exaggeration to state that the current coalition has
shattered any credence that the Israeli public can place in campaign
promises of candidates during elections.
Significantly, this goes way beyond any healthy skepticism with which voters should treat the usual gamut of pre-election pledges, routinely peddled by candidates, to implement various aspects of their respective party platforms, and on which —due to political constraints—they eventually proved unable to fulfill.
For in the case of Naftali Bennett's accession to the post of
prime minister, the deceit and the duplicity far exceed the regular
shenanigans that have come to characterize the conduct of politics in
recent decades. After all, it was not that Bennett, once ensconced in a
post-election government, ultimately failed to advance his platform as
he pledged to do during the 2021-election campaign.
Rather, it was that he reneged on explicit commitments that he
repeatedly and resolutely undertook, joining up with his ideological
adversaries, whom he vowed to shun, in order to establish—indeed,
spearhead—a government he vowed to foil.
Thus, it was not that he failed to fulfill promises ex-post (i.e.
once in government). Rather, it was that he discarded promises ex-ante –
i.e. in order to facilitate a government, in which the overwhelming
majority of the component factions had very different (some, even
antithetical) ideo-political positions to those, on which he ran during
the elections.
Fake, fabricated & fraudulent
Indeed, so fundamental was this deception that it involved Bennet
jettisoning—or at least, suspending—virtually his entire ideological
frame of reference, and whose advancement was the very thing for which
he elicited voter-support in the election, so that he could participate
in precisely the government he vowed not to.
Thus, in a
pre-election press release (March 6, 2021), Bennett’s Yamina faction
pledged: Yamina will not be complicit in forming a government dependent
on Ra’am- not with its support; not with its abstention, and not in any
way.”
Elsewhere, Bennett himself vowed:
“ I won’t let Lapid become prime minister, with or without a rotation,
because I’m a man of the right and for me values are important.” Just to
eliminate any possible doubt, he reiterated:
“Never, and under no circumstances, will I ever lend a hand to the
establishment of a government led by Yair Lapid, not in a rotation or
any other way”.
Likewise, mere days before the March 23
elections, during a prime-time television interview, Bennett, expressing
his alleged sensitivity for the democratic process, proclaimed, unequivocally: “I won’t be a prime minister with 10 mandates. That’s not democratic”.
Of
course, Bennett showed little compunction or conscience in extorting
the post of prime minister with barely half that number—unless of course
he is so arithmetically challenged that he genuinely believes that 6 is
significantly more than 10…
Cratering support
Unsurprisingly then, a poll
conducted shortly after the elections, found that over half of Yamina
voters would not have voted for the party if they knew that Bennett
would act in the way he acted—which would have left it below the minimum
threshold for Knesset admission! Moreover, the poll found that a
majority of Yamina voters felt that the deal Bennett spun, together with
Lapid, constitutes a violation of the trust given him at the ballot
box.
Nor has Bennett’s performance since then—or that of his coalition—instilled greater public confidence in either.
According to a November 2021 poll,
the combined right-wing elements in the present government (Bennett's
Yamina and Gideon Sa'ar's New Hope) comprise a mere 6 seats—less than
half the number they won in the March elections—and barely 5% of the
total number of seats in the Knesset. Even if we add the 4 seats, which
the poll assigns Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beytenu, the overall number
of seats won by coalition factions, usually considered to be
"right-of-center", amounts to 10—roughly half the Knesset seats they
have at present. Significantly, very similar findings emerged from an earlier poll
conducted in October, in which a Netanyahu-led Likud mustered mandates
in the mid-30s, while the Bennett-Sa'ar-Liberman trio's tally was once
again a paltry total of 10.
This shows a dramatic cratering of
public support for the allegedly "right-of-center" parties, who
preferred to shun their own long-standing pledges and throw their lot in
with parties, whose political credos are antithetical to those they
profess to hold—indeed, largely negate them.
“There can be no allegiance to Israel...”
Arguably,
one of the most disconcerting elements of the Bennett-led coalition is
that, it in effect, left the fate of a purportedly Zionist coalition
totally dependent on the whims of a blatantly anti-Zionist party, openly
committed to a doctrine of stripping Israel of its status as the
nation-state of the Jewish people.
Indeed, the 80-page Ra’am charter quickly dispels
any doubt that may linger on this matter and how utterly discordant it
is with the professed belief system of Yamina, and of the constituency
it purports to represent. It asserts: “The State of Israel was born of
the racist, occupying Zionist project; iniquitous Western and British
imperialism; and the debasement and feebleness of the Arab and Islamic
[nations]. We do not absolve ourselves, the Palestinian people, of our
responsibility and our failure to confront this project.”
In similar vein, it proclaims:
“There can be no allegiance to [Israel], nor any identification with
its Zionist, racist, occupier thought, nor any acceptance of any of the
various forms of ‘Israelification,’ which would shed us of our identity
and particularity and rights.”
The Left-leaning Israel Democracy
Institute gives the following synopsis of Ra’am’s political credo:
"Ra'am supports the establishment of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem
as its capital, with an end of the occupation and dismantling of the
settlements. It also seeks the release of Palestinian prisoners and the
right of return of Palestinian refugees. The party advocates the
recognition of Israeli Arabs as a national minority and seeks to ensure
their rights in a constitution".
Mortgaging Zionism to anti-Zionists
This,
then, is a snapshot of the political faction to which Bennett has
mortgaged the fate of the current government, charged with safeguarding
and developing the Jewish state and the Zionist endeavor—which Abbas and
his anti-Zionist cronies are committed to impeding and eliminating!
Of
course, in order to cobble together this bizarre—almost
Kafkaesque—political potpourri, Bennett (and his co-conspirator, Yair
Lapid) was compelled to confer far-reaching benefits on the
anti-Zionist, Islamist co-participants to ensure their continued
maintenance of a bizarre kaleidoscopic coalition.
Accordingly, Ra’am secured an agreement
for the allocation of more than 53 billion shekels ($16 billion) for
development and to curb the soaring violent crime in the Arab
sector—including a half a billion shekel slush fund for “discretionary” spending over five years.
One
can only imagine the uproar had it been a Jewish haredi party that
managed to extort such an inordinate sum to advance the needs of its
constituents and to further its political objectives, in exchange for
support of/participation in a coalition.
But financial bonanzas
were not the only benefits that Bennett’s newly found anti-Zionist BFFs
were awarded. Indeed, the non-financial concessions to Ra’am are more
directly detrimental to Zionist endeavor than the lavish funding of the
anti-Zionists in the coalition.
For, these clearly contribute to
cementing the pervasive illegal Bedouin presence in the expanses of the
Negev in southern Israel, a stronghold for Islamist support. Thus, the
agreement provides for Israel
(a) immediately recognizing three unauthorized Bedouin villages in the southern Negev desert;
(b) extending the freeze already placed by the outgoing government on the demolition of illegal housing in the Arab community by three years (Clause 18), and
(c) presenting within nine months a proposal to legalize all[!!] unlawful Bedouin villages (Clause 19).
The blight Bennett brought: Devastating & durable damage
The
crucial point to grasp about the devastating damage wrought by Bennett
and his fickle Bibiphobic cronies is that it will not be remedied by any
later feats of governance.
For not only have they empowered
political adversaries, who they assured their voters they would not,
they gravely—hopefully, not irreparably—impaired at least two seminal
pillars of Israeli democracy.
Firstly, they have sent an
unambiguously clear signal that voters cannot give any credence to
pre-election pledges, no matter how apparently passionate and resolute
they appear, even when they involve the allegedly core ideology of a
candidate. By perpetrating this, they have effectively emptied
elections—and the entire democratic process—of any significance, have
given the stamp of approval to unadulterated deceit and endorsed
fraudulent duplicity.
Secondly, they have legitimized political parties, which repudiate the founding principle upon which Israel was founded as the nation-state of the Jewish people and normalized their political agenda of de-Judaizing Israel.
History has given the Jewish people the rare—arguably, unique—opportunity of reestablishing its national sovereignty after being stripped of it for two millennia. Bennett, and his crony cohorts, Sa'ar and Liberman, are on the cusp of squandering it.
After all the effort and sacrifice invested in the reemergence of a Jewish nation-state, it is difficult to conceive a greater tragedy.
Martin Sherman is the founder & executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies
Source: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/317254
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