Miriam Peretz, an Israel Prize laureate, a national symbol of determination and hope, the mother of two fallen IDF soldiers, and as of this week also an MK for Yashar!, told her friends in shock what had happened to her son. Eliasaf posted in favor of a Zionist government, ostensibly something self-evident. In response, he was flooded with abuse as if he had proposed sitting under Itamar Ben-Gvir in a coalition, rather than simply expressing the party’s official position.
His life is still easier than Benjamin Netanyahu’s. At 77, the prime minister finds himself in an uncharacteristic position: he is the subject of the coalition negotiations, but not their predicate. Put simply, his span of control over events is extremely limited.
Usually Netanyahu always has something to give: a reserved slot, a role, an interesting pairing. Now, in a caretaker government, with 46 seats and without the most important seat of all, which is parked with Gadi Eisenkot, the Yashar! leader, for now, he is trying to gather intelligence on the other side’s plans. Instead of collecting defectors from the other side, Netanyahu faces rumors in the Likud of defection in the opposite direction. Likud veteran David Bitan is mentioned there with apprehension (he denies it, of course). He has no government to offer the Haredim, and no roles or horizon to offer defectors.
At the start of the week, Netanyahu was convinced that a minority government relying on the Arabs would be brought to a vote by the end of it. Then all the red lights went on over the cooperation between Avigdor Liberman, the Yisrael Beiteinu leader, and the Haredim. On the morning of the Knesset swearing-in, after a long overnight conversation with the chairman of United Torah Judaism, a temporary all-clear sounded. If you join the coalition, Netanyahu told Asher, they will appoint an attorney general and ten Supreme Court justices. “And then even a majority of 70 seats won’t help you. You’re furious at the conduct of the legal system, but you’re going to entrench it for 30 years.”
With or without a connection, the briefings that followed from the Haredi camp turned tougher. And so came the speech at the Knesset swearing-in. Netanyahu had prepared a relatively conciliatory speech, but on the short way from the Prime Minister’s Office to the Chagall Hall, it turned into a diatribe. It’s not the first time this year. Since she retired, Sara Netanyahu has been spending more and more hours at her husband’s job. So have the new MK Yaakov Bardugo and the old adviser Natan Eshel. All three take a firm-to-aggressive line. “Did you see how Miriam Peretz applauded the words?” they rejoiced in the Likud.
But she is not necessarily their audience. The Likud’s goal is that in two to three months, if the Liberman-Haredi axis is foiled, Change Bloc MKs will face a choice between a minority government and going to elections, on one side, and a unity government with Netanyahu first in the rotation, on the other.
Eisenkot’s logic is that if the country goes straight to elections, this is not permanent reliance on the Arabs, only an episode whose purpose is removing Netanyahu from the Prime Minister’s Office. For that he will need Liberman, but mainly every member of his own faction. Will MKs who strongly oppose a government with Arabs leave Netanyahu’s speech feeling that unity should be given a chance? Or exactly the opposite? It was enough to look at the faces of the party leaders during the traditional photo. They looked like a wedding family portrait where the father and mother are divorced, the brothers and sisters aren’t speaking to each other, and the photographer, unaware of all of it, shouts: cheeeese.
This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.
