Israel: An Offer Neither Side Could Refuse

If we were an adviser to Israel’s opposition leader — a stretch to be sure — we’d say something like this. It stems from the fact that even though the ex-general’s faction placed second in the election, he’s been offered the first chance — ahead of the putative winner, Prime Minister Netanyahu — to put together a government. It’s also a stretch to imagine that Mr. Gantz would listen to us, but this is what we’d say.“Look, General,” we’d say, “you’re in a bind out of which you don’t know how honorably to get. You promised that you wouldn’t be a prime minister dependent on Arab parties. You promised that you wouldn’t sit in one government with Mr. Netanyahu. Plus you promised that you wouldn’t allow there to be yet another round of elections. And now you don’t see any way of keeping all your promises.“So here’s one maneuver of which you mightn’t have thought. Go to Mr. Netanyahu and say to him, ‘Listen, there’s a case to be made for my having won the election and a case to be made for your having won it. Yet there’s no case to be made for my breaking my promises. So I propose: you promise me certain things — you’ll refrain from annexing any territories for a year and from obstructing process that’s bringing you to trial.“Aaaaand, you’ll stop your anti-left and anti-Arab demagoguery. I’ll instruct my Blue & White party to support you for another year. You’d be a prime minister, and we’d be a loyal Opposition. When the year’s gone by, we can have elections again. Meanwhile, you get to run the country, and I get to know that you won’t do anything that I would consider catastrophic while running it. And, I’ll have kept my promises.”We understand that some will say that this is a slippery suggestion, even for the Sun, and is, in any event, unlikely to come to pass. It came into focus for us as Mr. Netanyahu spoke to the nation Monday evening. He’s been doing that for several nights. He spoke Monday about the latest sets of restrictions designed to slow the spread of the virus and government steps to aid the economic victims of the crisis.The Prime Minister radiated assurance — as he generally does, but even more so — and exuded warmth, which is important in times like this. It’s easy to see why, in all the polls, the percentage of Israelis who think Bibi is more fit for premier than Benny Gantz is far higher than the percentage of Israelis who actually voted for the Likud or the other right-wing parties supporting Mr. Netanyahu.Our guess — at the moment no one is polling anything save for corona — is that were yet another election held today, Mr. Netanyahu would do considerably better than he did two weeks ago. In general, Israelis, like people everywhere, are concentrated on corona now, and on surviving it physically and economically, and have lost what interest they had in political intrigues and political power games.There’s always a tendency in times like these to consolidate around strong leadership, and no one can deny that Mr. Netanyahu has been a strong leader. They really don’t care who runs the country as long as he runs it well in terms of fighting corona, and Mr. Netanyahu has been convincing in that role. Nor do they have patience for the kind of parliamentary maneuvers to which Blue & White has been resorting.Or, at least, talking of resorting to, in order to oust Mr. Netanyahu. Nor is Mr. Gantz winning any popularity points by engaging in political plots. Our guess is that most Israeli voters would like to see a Likud-Blue & White unity government, but were that not possible, we’d think, even some Gantz voters would rather see Mr. Netanyahu stay in power than have him forced out of it in an ugly political fight.Particularly one that centers on a deal with, in the Arab Joint List, a faction that opposes Zionism itself. It is certainly true that the greatest of the early Zionists dreamed of Arab participation in the government of the Jewish State. Not even the most excited of the dreamers, though, could have imagined the kind of hostility that emanates from the Joint List. Hence the deal we’d propose to break Israel’s political deadlock.

Israel: An Offer Neither Side Could Refuse

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