Naftali Bennett-American-Style Politician Makes his Case in the Israeli Election – Michael Rosen
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/beyond-bibi_876836.html?nopager=1
It’s a Tuesday night three weeks before election day, and Naftali Bennett, the head of one of Israel’s oldest religious parties, is speaking in English to 1,000 mostly young, secular Israelis. For Bennett, 42, an ambitious, talented, American-style politician seeking to catapult his Jewish Home faction to third place among Israel’s parties, this isn’t all that surprising.
The contest is widely seen here as a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s second-longest-serving prime minister and a lightning rod for criticism across the political spectrum. The yard signs and billboards of the opposition declare “It’s us or him,” and an American-style PAC, reportedly funded, indirectly and in part, by the U.S. State Department, has launched ubiquitous anti-“Bibi” ads urging Israelis to “Just change.” Netanyahu’s highly controversial address to Congress about the Iranian nuclear threat only added fuel to the fire.
But while the “Bibi-or-else” theme has dominated the electoral conversation here and abroad, most outside observers have largely ignored the role of Bennett as a potential kingmaker. Polls show the leading parties, Netanyahu’s center-right Likud and the center-left Zionist Union, jockeying for anywhere between 22 and 27 seats each (out of a total of 120), leaving many seats to be filled by coalition partners—including Jewish Home, if Likud comes in first in the balloting.
The son of American immigrants from San Francisco, Bennett entered politics only after a successful career as a high-tech entrepreneur; he sold off his banking security software company for $145 million in 2005 after spending several years in Manhattan with his wife, Gilat, who apprenticed as a pastry chef at some of the Upper East Side’s tonier joints.
Bennett brings an American sensibility to the rigors of Israeli politics. He smiles a lot. He’s mastered social media. He’s run funny, clever commercials. He’s as comfortable speaking unaccented English on CNN as he is fluent Hebrew to local media. He smoothly parries tough questions and defuses tense situations with humor, as he did the evening I heard him speak in Tel Aviv when a dozen gay-rights activists unfurled rainbow flags during his remarks. And he’s even adopted an old Mitt Romney slogan—“No Apologies”—as his own.
He has also striven to widen his party’s reach beyond its core of “national-religious” voters, a relatively small but growing slice of the Israeli electorate. When he took the helm in 2012, Jewish Home held 3 seats in the Knesset—an “irrelevant relic,” in Bennett’s telling. The following year, the party won 12 seats, and some polls have predicted a total of 18 this cycle. But Bennett’s efforts to grow Jewish Home’s appeal have at times roiled its traditional base.
He has vigorously sought to steer the national conversation toward domestic politics and thus beyond the Arab-Israeli conflict, of which the country has wearied. As minister of economic affairs for the past two years, he’s applied his experience in the private sector to good effect, fostering investment from and forging joint ventures with other countries (China, most prominently), enticing Western companies to open R&D centers in Israel, ending price-fixing by the dairy and cement cartels, scrapping outdated regulations, and helping to lower the overall cost of most food products—a potent electoral issue.
Bennett has also enhanced job opportunities among certain troubled sectors of the economy. “We opened dozens of employment centers for Arab women,” he noted at the Tel Aviv event, offering “a one-stop shop” for these new workers and funding 30 percent of their salaries for three years. During his tenure, he says, the workforce participation rate among Arab women jumped 50 percent.
But try as he might to focus on economic gains, the everlasting conflict makes its presence known, again and again. And here, Bennett and his party embrace a maximalist territorial position, calling for the annexation of all Jewish areas in the disputed West Bank. This “stability plan,” Bennett says, would incorporate 50,000 Palestinians into Israel proper while granting “autonomy on steroids” to the remainder, who would live in contiguous territory encircled by Israel.
While Zionist Union proudly supports the creation of a Palestinian state, and Likud does so ambivalently, Bennett abhors the concept. “We have a problem in the Arab world,” Bennett told the AP in a February interview, “which is getting more and more radical. Throwing [the Palestinians] pieces of Israel’s land and hoping that will satisfy the radical Islamist beast won’t do it.”
Unfortunately, it’s not just the Islamic world challenging Israel. Many European allies have recognized a Palestinian state, and sentiment in world capitals—especially on the left—has turned sharply against
the Jewish state in recent years.
While center-left Israelis fear the long-term diplomatic and economic repercussions of the current Arab-Israeli stalemate, Bennett is unfazed. “If it means that the world will penalize us,” Bennett told the AP, “that is unfair, but so be it.” After all, he reckons, the international community already refuses to recognize Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, so why not also parts of the West Bank?
And anyway, from Bennett’s perspective, and that of many Israelis, the time is inauspicious for compromise, given the turmoil convulsing the Arab world. Territory governed today by the relatively moderate Palestinian Authority could fall tomorrow to Hamas or, worse yet, to ISIS. “Trying to apply a Western full-fledged solution to a problem that is not solvable right now,” Bennett told the Wall Street Journal in January, “will bring us from an okay situation to a disastrous situation.”
Bennett doesn’t look like a typical settler, and he resides in the leafy Tel Aviv suburb of Ra’anana, not the West Bank (our children attend
the same elementary school). But while the packaging of his territorial argument may be more alluring than his predecessors’, its content is every bit as forceful. And last summer’s bruising Gaza war has only heightened its appeal among a growing swath of Israeli voters.
Jewish Home has run a mostly engaging campaign, including an amusing, creative ad featuring Bennett as a bearded, bespectacled, beflanneled Tel Aviv hipster apologizing for everything. He’s also widened the party’s orientation by tweaking its rules—candidates no longer have to observe the Sabbath or keep kosher—and including more female and secular pols on the list.
But the campaign has been far from flawless, and the party’s expected vote total has shrunk in the wake of several tactical mistakes.
In late January, Bennett appointed former soccer star Eli Ohana to a prominent spot on the party list in an effort to enhance its star power. But Bennett caught flak from all sides. Religious supporters saw in the secular Ohana an opponent of their values, while others regarded him as a political novice unsuited for high office. After a painful week, Ohana withdrew his candidacy.
Worse, the Ohana episode triggered a breakdown in the uneasy political truce between Likud and Jewish Home. Regarding the soccer star’s recruitment as an invasion of its secular-but-traditional turf, Netanyahu launched his own incursion into Bennett’s electoral heartland, targeting religious-national communities in the West Bank and elsewhere. Polling revealed Likud had captured a handful of extra seats—from Jewish Home, not Zionist Union.
Then in early February, Bennett tripped alarms among the politically correct for highlighting—and promising to reverse—above-average crime rates in Israeli Arab towns and cities. These remarks earned him an angry response from the left, including a tweet by a journalist claiming Bennett had “called all Arabs car thieves.” Of course, several Israeli Arab leaders candidly acknowledged the crime problem within their communities, even if they couldn’t bring themselves to praise Bennett for underlining it.
He’s also absorbed criticism for his party’s handling of prickly religious issues. Jewish Home has traditionally served as a moderating force between the secular parties and the ultra-orthodox, who compose more than
10 percent of the Israeli population. But its muddled positions during the last Knesset term on issues of conversion, marriage, and divorce have drawn fire from both religiously liberal and conservative supporters.
Eventually, Netanyahu and Bennett mended ties—the latter, in fact, got his start in politics as the former’s chief of staff—with the Jewish Home leader taking to Western airwaves in support of Bibi’s speech on Iran’s nukes, by far Israel’s greatest existential threat.
In a February appearance on Fox News, Bennett amplified Netanyahu’s caution against negotiating, noting that “just a decade ago [Iran was] not allowed to even have one centrifuge,” while under the deal Obama reportedly offered the mullahs, they’ll enjoy “six or seven thousand centrifuges that they’re allowed to have spinning.” Echoing a widespread consensus in Israel, Bennett vehemently insists that Iran has engaged in “deceit and delay” and that the West is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by playing along.
Exactly how many secular Israelis will cotton to Bennett, and how many religious supporters will stick with him, remains to be seen. But if he can thread that needle and increase his vote total, expect to see him forecast as Israel’s next prime minister—after Bibi exits the scene, of course.
Michael M. Rosen, a San Diego-based attorney and writer, is living in Israel with his family this year.
Comments are closed.
