https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-What-Gantzs-speech-revealed-605718
Upon officially receiving the mandate from President Reuven Rivlin to take a stab at establishing the next government, Blue and White Party chairman Benny Gantz put on a noteworthy performance.
After spending the past four weeks refusing to accept any of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposals for a national-unity coalition, Gantz took to the podium at the President’s Residence in Jerusalem on Wednesday night with the peculiar air of someone who had just won a landslide victory, yet delivered what can only be described as a campaign speech. He couldn’t have been more blatant about his belief that a third round of Knesset elections is in the cards if he had said so in no uncertain terms.
But then, waxing poetic and disingenuous is something at which Gantz has grown proficient since he first threw his hat in the ring ahead of the April 9 elections, and on which he greatly improved before the September 17 do-over – even with the occasional malapropisms that have provided the public, punditry and cast of the political satire TV show, Eretz Nehederet, with fodder for laughter, if not ridicule.
There was nothing funny about his mandate-acceptance address, however. On the contrary, it was a well-rehearsed exercise in feigned statesmanship with deadly serious flaws. Chief among these was Gantz’s effort to present himself as all things to all people: to the Israeli populace and the whole Jewish world, to the periphery and the center, to the ultra-Orthodox and National-Religious; to Arabs and Druze, to members of the LGBTQ community, and to the country’s young men and women whose military service earned them the right to enjoy chilling out at bars.
Gantz described Blue and White as a faction that came into being eight months ago to tackle “the schism and rift in Israeli society, out of a deep sense of responsibility on my part and on the part of my co-leaders, Yair Lapid, Moshe ‘Bogie’ Ya’alon and Gabi Ashkenazi. We put aside every personal consideration… and made a commitment to put Israel before all else.”