Benjamin Netanyahu has been in office for so many years that there is hardly a scandal that doesn’t echo something in his past — or a previous case that contradicts it — or at least something that rhymes with it. With nine defense ministers and seven IDF chiefs of staff who have served under him, the most prominent example is the 2010 Harpaz affair, when a fierce disagreement between then-Defense Minister Ehud Barak and IDF chief Gabi Ashkenazi led to Ashkenazi’s camp leaking a fabricated plan for a public smear campaign against him.
It was a highly unusual event because the prime minister himself — a figure who is no stranger to diving into the details — was completely absent. Barak and Ashkenazi fought each other for two years, but the prime minister did not say a word. Both hawks expected backing, which never came.
Then as now, Netanyahu refrains from expressing an opinion. Perhaps it suits him to let the boys play before him — play and be worn down.
They say that children who were abused become abusive parents. There are similarities between the odd and baseless hazing the prime minister inflicts on the defense minister he appointed, and the excessive and public hazing that the defense minister inflicts on the chief of staff he appointed. Netanyahu has recently been poking Defense Minister Israel Katz at every opportunity, humiliating and belittling him. Katz has not disagreed with Netanyahu on a single issue, and yet he was scolded at the start of last week’s cabinet meeting by the prime minister for allegedly launching “a primaries attack, [and] an unprecedented tweet attack on security matters.”
Sharp-eared observers already noticed at the historic Knesset session with Trump, on the eve of Simchat Torah, that the defense minister wasn’t mentioned at all — noticeably absent. Have we run out of enemies that we must invent one by force?
Likewise, it is unclear why Katz chooses to lash out at IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir again and again. The public statements targeting Zamir began 19 days after he took office, when the defense minister protested the investigation of right-wing darling Brig. Gen. (res.) Oren Solomon, and received a swift response: “The chief of staff does not take instructions through the media.” Then came the public (and very justified) cancellation of the military advocate general’s appearance at the Bar Association conference, with public clashes over appointments in between.
Maybe Netanyahu is right and Katz is subversive; maybe Katz is right and Zamir refuses to accept authority. But any reasonable person sees that the defense minister has never publicly opposed the prime minister, and that the chief of staff is very careful about issues important to the defense minister. Despite the calls from the Kaplan protesters and Haaretz, Zamir refuses to utter the words “state commission of inquiry” and did not complain to the media when Katz decided to shut down Army Radio despite Zamir’s own recommendation.
What’s more likely is that Netanyahu and Katz have just been walking around with a hammer for so many years that every subordinate looks to them like a nail whose head must be struck.
And only the outside observer wonders: have all the state’s security problems been solved that such tensions at the top can be tolerated? After all, it was Netanyahu who walked around delighted after replacing Yoav Gallant with Katz, and Katz who boasted about appointing Zamir in Herzi Halevi’s place. If both chose such allegedly subversive protégés, what does that say about their judgment in making appointments?
This is an excerpt from my Shabbat column in Israel Hayom. Read it on Israel Hayom’s website here.
