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"Israel Election: Ben-Gvir Just Took Another Major Step in Mainstreaming Jewish Supremacy"
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29. august 2022
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29. august 2022
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28. august 2022
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/elections/2022-08-28/ty-article/.premium/ben-gvir-just-took-another-major-step-in-mainstreaming-jewish-supremacism/00000182-e555-dcde-a9d6-e5ffd63f0000
HELE artikkelen i Haaretz 28. august 2022:
Israel Election: Ben-Gvir Just Took Another Major Step in Mainstreaming Jewish Supremacy
Itamar Ben-Gvir relinquished a couple of potential Kahanists in the next Knesset because the legitimacy he gained from partnering with Benjamin Netanyahu is worth much more to him
The agreement reached just before Shabbat on Friday, in a neighboring
villa to Benjamin Netanyahu’s private residence, has already assumed the
grand title “the Caesarea deal” in the Israeli media – as if the
temporary merger of Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit and Bezalel
Smotrich’s National Union-Tekuma (which markets itself as “Religious
Zionism”) into one joint slate for the November 1 election is an event
of historic proportions.
There’s more than a slight degree of exaggeration here from a media that is trying to create some interest in yet another election, especially one being drawn out over a long hot summer.
On the surface, nothing has changed. The two parties already ran together in the last election under the Religious Zionism banner. Ben-Gvir, follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane and true believer in Kahane’s fascist and supremacist ideology, has been a lawmaker for a year and a half. The time for treating him as a representative of a tiny minority, as an aberration, is long over.
Nothing is new with Netanyahu either. He was the matchmaker for Ben-Gvir and the only slightly less extreme Smotrich – in many ways the more religious fundamentalist of the two – last time around as well. He went about it a little more overtly this time, announcing publicly that he was summoning them to a meeting and then announcing the agreement himself.
But this no longer shocks anyone. Netanyahu’s predecessor as Likud leader, Yitzhak Shamir – a man of staunch nationalist ideals – regularly led the party out of the Knesset auditorium whenever Kahane got up to speak in his lone term as a lawmaker between 1984 and 1988. Likud then ensured, together with nearly all the other parties, that Kahane’s Kach party would no longer be allowed to run in another election. Netanyahu has no such scruples.
Ben-Gvir is essential to Netanyahu in his mission to eke out the far-right vote, which could ensure his return to power. Polling shows that a third of Otzma Yehudit’s potential voters are those who have barely, if ever, voted in the past. Bringing out those who habitually stay home on Election Day is a rare political achievement and could be the key to Netanyahu reaching the 61 lawmakers that would give him the majority that has been so elusive in the past four elections. But all this was true in the last election as well.
What is different this time around is that in previous elections, Netanyahu tried to make sure that Ben-Gvir would be included in one of the far-right slates as part of a strategy not to leave any right-wing votes lying on the floor.
In the elections where it had run separately, Otzma Yehudit never crossed the 3.25-percent electoral threshold and its votes were wasted. In the round of polling carried out last week, after Ben-Gvir had announced that he had failed to reach an agreement with Smotrich and Otzma Yehudit was therefore running alone, the party easily passed the threshold. In fact, in all of the polls, on the right it received the second-highest number of seats after Likud, either equaling or surpassing Shas.
This of course could have been a blip. Ben-Gvir is certainly cautious
enough to think this may be the case, which is why, despite dwarfing
Smotrich’s party in the polls, he agreed on Friday to merge the tickets
on the basis of a 50-50 split of the top-10 spots – with Otzma Yehudit’s
candidates getting lower spots on the slate. (Ben-Gvir himself is
second on the ticket to Smotrich and his next candidate is placed at
number five.) Now, though, there is no question about him being a
doubtful candidate who risks dropping below the threshold. Instead, he
is a major power broker in a possible Netanyahu governing coalition. He
has banked those polls.
Despite his polling advantage and their well-known personal loathing of each other, Ben-Gvir still preferred to join Smotrich because there’s one thing more important to him than the number of lawmakers he personally controls in the next Knesset.
More than anything, he craves legitimacy.
The 46-year-old Ben-Gvir was the head of Kach’s youth department back in 1994 when, in the wake of the Hebron massacre carried out by Kach veteran Baruch Goldstein – whose picture until recently hung in the Ben-Gvir family’s living room – the movement was proscribed as a terror organization. He was arrested dozens of times and forbidden to join the Israeli army as a result.
Ben-Gvir’s life mission is to succeed where Kahane failed and make the
movement, which was renamed Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) and changed
parts of its platform so it could run again for the Knesset, as a
legitimate, mainstream political party. That’s why he ostensibly
accepted the rules and became a lawyer, and it’s why he admonishes his
young admirers when they cry “Death to the Arabs!”
Every time Ben-Gvir is interviewed as a legitimate politician, as he is nowadays daily, he is another step closer to his goal.
He could quite likely have won more Knesset seats in this election if Otzma Yehudit had done it alone. But he craves the little bit of establishment respectability that Smotrich has within the religious Zionist community that once shunned Kahane. And, more than anything, he wants to be openly acknowledged by Israel’s great leader Netanyahu.
This is his opportunity to fit in with Netanyahu’s grand plan and it’s worth it, even if he has a few fewer lawmakers in the next Knesset.
Netanyahu didn’t go all the way. He is still maintaining the slightest of distances. He didn’t put out a joint photograph or promise that Ben-Gvir would be a minister in his next government. There is still the possibility that after the election, he will offer to exclude Otzma Yehudit if Benny Gantz’s National Unity Party agrees to join his coalition.
Ben-Gvir is perfectly aware of such an outcome. But for now, he is on an equal footing with the other party leaders in a potential Likud government, a senior partner to Netanyahu. This is a feat that was unimaginable back in the days when he and his fellow Kahanists were outcasts on the furthest margins of Israeli politics.
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