Israel’s Minister Without ApologiesA rising conservative star says the old formulas for pursuing peace with the Palestinians are obsolete. The two-state solution? Not anytime soon.
Tel Aviv
It’s election season in Israel, and so far the most talked-about campaign ad features an Orthodox politician in an unorthodox role. In a YouTube video that quickly went viral, Naftali Bennett plays a fashionably bearded Tel Aviv hipster with a compulsion to say sorry—especially when he’s the one being wronged.
A waitress spills coffee on him: He begs her forgiveness. His car gets rear-ended: He steps out to tell the offending driver how sorry he is. He sits on a park bench and reads an editorial in a left-wing newspaper calling on Israel to apologize to Turkey for the 2010 flotilla incident, in which nine pro-Palestinian militants were killed aboard a ship after violently assaulting Israeli naval commandos. “They’re right!” he says of the editorial.
At last the fake beard comes off and the clean-shaven Mr. Bennett, who in real life is Israel’s minister of economy and heads the nationalist Jewish Home Party (in Hebrew, Habayit Hayehudi), looks at the camera and says: “Starting today, we stop apologizing. Join Habayit Hayehudi today.”