By Rabbi Dow Mamur
JERUSALEM — The bad news of recent days has been Prime Minister Netanyahu brokering the union of ultra-right-wing parties in the hope of securing a majority for his bloc at the April 9 elections. The price is to give extremists seats around the next cabinet table.
The most surprising, and the most biting, protest among many from abroad and from within Israel has come from AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), the powerful and normally very loyal pro-Israel lobby in the United States. It argues that you can’t complain about anti-Jewish racism (i.e., anti-Semitism) abroad while making common cause with Jewish racists at home. Netanyahu is due to address AIPAC shortly before the Israeli elections. Can he afford to castigate it by telling American Jews either to come to live in Israel or shut up? That has been the reaction of the ultra-right so far.
However, the prime minister’s critics may find some good news in his decision to make common cause with the extremist late Rabbi Meir Kahane who had been barred from the Knesset. It seems that Netanyahu and his party are panicking. Though the published opinion polls aren’t yet predicting for sure that he will lose this time, perhaps his party’s internal polls are telling him that and, in his desperation, he has taken steps that have come to brand him as a promoter of Jewish fascists/racists.
Netanyahu is being threatened, first and foremost, by the new Resilience Party led by three former chiefs of staff: Benny Gantz, Gabi Ashkenazi and Moshe Ya’alon. Israelis almost invariably respect their defense forces (the IDF) and pay homage to its generals. Of the three, Ashkenazi is said to be the most powerful. It’s he who apparently brokered the deal with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party giving Lapid the second spot on the list to be called Blue and White.
It’s a very strong contender to replace the present government, even though it’s short on women candidates which may cost it votes. The age of macho men belongs, mercifully, to the past.
If the new Bloc weren’t enough of a threat to Netanyahu, there’s also this: the Attorney General is due to publish his report this week. It’s bound to lead to the indictment of Netanyahu on a number of bribery and related charges. It’s thus also bound to diminish his standing in the polls and perhaps lead to his defeat. His argument that the Attorney General should wait until after the elections is hollow: he fixed the election for the Spring though it wasn’t due until the Fall, precisely in order to be able to argue that he shouldn’t be indicted beforehand.
We can now expect a series of spectacular efforts by the prime minister to secure another term for himself, including a visit to Putin later this week, a visit here by the new president of Brazil a week before the elections and many other performances of that ilk. Plus, of course, a speech to AIPAC.
Though it’s easy to point to Binyamin Netanyahu’s shortcomings as prime minister – including the former antics by his wife and current antics by his son Yair – we must not overlook his real achievements while in office. It seems, however, that in his desperate effort to cling to power, he’s showing himself increasingly less deserving of it.
If the President of the United States must call it quits after eight years, so should the Prime Minister of Israel. Netanyahu has been at the helm longer than that. All this leads many Israelis to the conclusion that, at the very least, his successor may turn out to be better just by being different.
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Rabbi Marmur is spiritual leader emeritus of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, Canada. Now a resident of Israel, he may be contacted via dow.marmur@sdjewishworld.com