Every parent knows you should never make the children decide who they love more, Dad or Mom. Surprisingly, that is precisely what Itamar Ben-Gvir has been doing for the past two weeks. For years he took great care not to go into direct battle with Benjamin Netanyahu. Every Otzma Yehudit voter wants Netanyahu as prime minister, so Ben-Gvir cast himself as an essential supplement to a Bibi government, or as the wounded party Bibi won’t be photographed with—but he never attacked him head-on.
And suddenly that is exactly what Ben-Gvir is doing. From the Altalena ceremony, through the charge that Netanyahu doesn’t want him in the government, to the humiliating refusal to meet and discuss a merger with Smotrich. A well-known rule holds that when two rivals run the same campaign, one of them is wrong. Netanyahu is going for Otzma Yehudit’s head himself, on the argument that Ben-Gvir is irresponsible, a narcissist who looks out only for himself.
This is a rare campaign error by the campaign artist from Hebron, and the results are already visible in the latest polls. On the one rare occasion when Netanyahu went for Ben-Gvir’s head, in the third election, his party took less than half a percent and came within a whisker of evaporating from politics for good. So why is it happening now? Perhaps because Ben-Gvir believes Netanyahu started it. He believes—wrongly, of course—that the column here two weeks ago on the danger in his continued growth was born of a briefing from Netanyahu’s bureau, which is interested in going with Eisenkot.
And perhaps, no less intriguingly, he feels strong and independent enough to begin preparing for the era after Netanyahu. His voter base is stable, in the IDF he is the second-largest party according to the polls, and this is precisely the moment to launch Operation Succession.
And then came Tally Gotliv. Scratch the (very) thin layer of class and right-wing conviction and you discover how completely the loud MK cares about herself and her slot alone. The threatening messages she fired off to the Prime Minister’s Office show that the depth of her lack of self-awareness matches the height of her decibels. She was glad to take shelter in a reserved slot with Ben-Gvir; one assumes that Achish king of Gath, before he made room for her, also muttered to himself: do I lack madmen?
