Thanks to a vote of confidence, obtained by a narrow and inglorious margin – sixty deputies out of 120 in the knesset plus one abstention – Naftali Bennett on June 13 became the head of the Israeli government. The fate of Israel today is in the hands of a leader from the religious far right. An almost troopless leader, with just six deputies in parliament. But it took a man of the right to embody the chimera represented by this coalition of eight parties, some also center and left, united by their willingness to depose Benjamin Netanyahu and aware that Israel voted mostly right over the course of the last four elections, between April 2019 and March 2021.
If, in two months, there is a return to the polls, Bennett and his Yamina party (right) would be wiped out. The man arouses bitterness within his Zionist and religious “family”. “Congratulations! Who would have thought that? Prime Minister with six deputies… It’s like walking into Fouquet’s with twenty euros in your pocket and ordering a plate worth a thousand euros ”, comments with irony Boaz Bismuth, editor-in-chief of the right-wing free newspaper Israel Hayom, loyal to Netanyahu.
Bennett will certainly be in a weak position in this coalition, as any minister could sink it with a veto. The centrist Yair Lapid, true director of the team and prime minister in “alternation”, should succeed him in 2023. But symbolically it is a colossal step: a defender of the divine right of Israel to dominate all the lands that extend from the Jordan to the Mediterranean inherits the seat of David Ben Gurion, founder of the state, socialist and secular.
The normalized man
Bennett may appear today as a compromise man, pragmatic or opportunist, because the Israeli political environment has normalized him. The trajectory of this 49-year-old former special forces exponent, a successful former high-tech entrepreneur, accompanies that of a country that has ignored the Palestinian question for a decade. Rarely put in trouble about the conflict, Bennett feeds a centrist illusion: he can dream of being not at the center of the political chessboard, but not far away.
Naftali Bennett is the son of liberal American Jews who immigrated to Israel after the 1967 war. He received a classical Orthodox religious education and was traumatized, like his family, by the Oslo peace accords, which in the 1990s led to believe that Israel would abandon part of the territories it conquered in 1967, and that the Palestinian state would be born.
“Bennett served in the army, as the vanguard of a group of young religious Jews who showed they knew how to manage not only the kosher canteens, but also the commands in the cabin of a military fighter and at the front,” said Yohanan Plesner, director of the Israeli Institute for Democracy (a study center) and who served alongside Bennett in the elite Sayeret Matkal commandos.
The young Naftali had enlisted as a volunteer in this unit, which also included Netanyahu and which in the past was led by Benjamin’s older brother, Yonatan – Yoni – who died in 1976 during the liberation of Israeli passengers on an Air France flight. hijacked by some Palestinians in Entebbe, Uganda.
Yoni’s letters to his family, steeped in devotion to the country, were then almost mandatory reading within the Bnei Akiva religious Zionist youth movement. And Bennett named Yoni his firstborn.
“Even today his speeches are those of a perfect follower of Bnei Akiva: a sincere nationalism, few ideas and many slogans,” says the leftist philosopher Assaf Sharon, who grew up within the same movement, in the colonies. The fact is that Bennett is not an ideologue. In front of his supporters he more willingly evokes his military achievements than the history of religious Zionism. It is said to be linked to the figure of Hanan Porat, a former paratrooper and one of the founders of Goush Emounim, a small group of radical militants from Hebron, who launched the colonization of the occupied territories in the seventies.
But in his public as well as private speeches, Bennett rarely and openly talks about the movement. As an officer he served in southern Lebanon during Operation Clusters of Wrath in April 1996. While his unit was in trouble behind Hezbollah’s enemy lines, he called for Israeli artillery to bomb enemy positions. The ensuing Israeli attacks resulted in two hundred deaths near a United Nations Interposition Force camp in Lebanon (Finul) in Qana, where civilians had taken refuge. A wave of international outrage put an end to the Israeli operation.
Humiliation and cold blood
After six years in the military, Bennett made his fortune in the world of technology, selling in 2005, in the United States, for 120 million dollars, a start-up specialized in cybersecurity, founded with three rather secular and progressive friends. The following year he entered politics, as chief of staff of Netanyahu, at the time leader of the opposition, and in full crossing of the desert after the dismantling of the Gaza Strip colonies, ordered by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in 2005. .
Bennett already dreamed of becoming prime minister, but only after Netanyahu, of whom he has always been an admirer. “Netanyahu told me then that he had found this guy who would work for free: he had made millions thanks to technology, and he didn’t want a salary,” recalls a former Netanyahu adviser, Odelia Karmon, who observed the rapid deterioration of their relationships. Bennett, in difficult relationships with Netanyahu’s wife Sarah, was kicked out in 2008. “Bibi is looking for you because you are talented. Then he fears you, puts pressure on you and gets rid of you for the same reason, ”explains Karmon.
The ambitious Bennett spent fifteen years prodding Netanyahu into the radical right, digesting his constant humiliations. “He was at the best school, even though his professor never wanted to take that role,” says a Likud historian, very close to Netanyahu. At 37, Bennett had assumed the leadership of the Yesha council, the body that defends the West Bank colonies with state authorities. This allowed him to be openly racist when his interlocutors tested his cold blood.
During a televised debate in September 2010, Arab-Israeli MP Ahmad Tibi called him a “colonialist” and a “usurper”, only to be told: “You Arabs still climbed trees when a Jewish state already existed”. For Tibi there is no doubt: “He is one of the most extremist right-wing men in Israel. But try to hide it out of ambition. Its centrist partners today so desire to get rid of Netanyahu that they are willing to rehabilitate Bennett ”.
Since 2012, seven years before Netanyahu, Bennett has proposed a plan to annex part of the West Bank, even though he has never translated this statement of principle into a bill. When in 2013 he entered parliament at the head of the historic party of religious Zionism, The Jewish House, the essential thing for him was elsewhere. Married to a secular woman, residing in Raanana, a wealthy suburb of Tel Aviv, and not in the colonies, Naftali Bennett wished to embody a “modernist” renewal of the movement.
Against the old guard
Alongside his long-time partner, Ayelet Shaked, he fought against an old guard who hesitated to turn against Netanyahu, showing little interest in the advice of the rabbis, and with the ambition to embody a synthesis for this very diverse electorate, which represents less of 11 percent of Israelis, and is divided between a traditionalist “bubble”, a youth who thinks they are integrated into the country, religious frightened by the drifts of secular society and Jews who rarely attend the synagogue.
His first political gesture was to make a “pact between brothers” with centrist Yair Lapid in 2013 to break into Netanyahu’s government by force. Appointed minister of education in 2015, Bennett wreaked havoc by deleting a novel by Dorit Rabinyan, which tells a love story between a Jew and a Palestinian, but mostly avoided conflict.
The “prodigal son” break with Netanyahu took place after the May 2020 elections, when, as defense minister, Bennett discovered he had been sidelined on the eve of the formation of a new government backed by centrist Benny Gantz. The covid-19 crisis has given him the opportunity to return to the limelight, overcoming partisan divisions. Its slogan has resonated throughout the country: “Anything that does not concern covid-19 is not important”.
At the polls, however, he remains a lightweight. “Bennett has never had the support of the laity and will never be legitimized by the center,” predicts the Likud expert. His religious Zionist “family” continues to be divided between the Likud and small radical formations. Among the settlers themselves, Bennett raises more than one doubt.
Jordan Valley Regional Council President David Elhayani admits he doesn’t know if Bennett is one of them. But he grants him the credit for never having spoken out in favor of a Palestinian state, contrary to what Netanyahu did in 2009. He also bets that his government will not oppose a process that overcomes political differences: “We will continue to build in colonies, and the state will better develop road infrastructure and electricity and water networks in the West Bank ”.
Bennett takes note, hoping for a recomposition of the right. “Political life is no longer a matter of parties, but of people. After Netanyahu, the Likud can split into two, three or four formations: nothing unites its leaders, except the hope of replacing Bibi, ”according to Jeremy Saltan, an early Bennett collaborator. But it is necessary for this government to hold, and for Bennett to make the religious right accept his own rupture.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
.