1
Assuming that it happens, and we know about it, and it's legitimate in parliamentary terms, we are about to be exposed to one of the most amusing ironies in the history of Israeli politics: the man who becomes prime minister will get there with much less public support than the man who leaves. In effect, it could go downhill from there: to judge by the reactions on social media, this guy will go to Balfour St. with less support than he had on Election Day.
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And the absurdities will continue. This is what Meretz MK Yair Golan tweeted about a rotation with Naftali Bennett: "It's a bizarre and unstable solution, but for the future of Israel I'll swallow it." Here you have the difference between entering the Prime Minister's Office with a huge base of public support and the faith of a coalition in your leadership, and launching a government when your desperate partners see you as a "toad" they have to swallow. Go try and lead policy with them.
2
The rhetoric of the replace-Bibi bunch should be read as a group dynamic. What argument isn't being pulled out of the auto-suggestive bag for a little self-convincing. Suddenly, Yoaz Hendel explains that a unity government under Yair Lapid is an ideal of a dream, rather than a last-ditch attempt to save face after a humiliating fiasco of six seats. Soon the Norwegian law will be in place to leave behind the members who were amazed to find that the people, in contrast to Twitter, didn't want them in the Knesset.
And then Naftali Bennett joins the propaganda about "a stalled state" and "we can't go on like this" and "anything other than another election." Let's admit the truth: what these hobbled transitional governments accomplished with one hand tied behind their backs is what a "healing" government will only need to maintain – a government that brought Israel out of COVID in a way that made Europe go green with envy is probably not the "worst government Israeli government ever." The dropping unemployment rates dropping and the recovering economy aren't because of some invisible hand. Diplomatic agreements that bear fruit every day, and especially operational successes that leave Israel's enemies open-mouthed, don't take place thanks to bureaucracy. It's time to toss away this demagogy, because things could be much worse, and even have been in the not-so-distant past.
3
There is something red in the stubborn propaganda that explains to us that there is nothing more urgent at the moment than "change." And it's disappointing to see Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, of all people, getting swept up in the absolutism of "If we don't do something extreme now – the country will go to hell." With all due respect, it's time to reply to this nonsense.
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When the bloc to replace Netanyahu promises to put us back on the path of sanity and healing, and Merav Michaeli and Yair Golan have the guts to state that Netanyahu is dangerous to Israel's security and that the country must be freed from his chokehold so the damage he did in his years in power can be repaired, we might need to ask this bunch to get into a time machine and go back to 2009. In the decade leading up to that year, Israelis were definitely under a chokehold. There really was an atmosphere of threat in the streets. We really were experiencing economic fear. And we really were being torn apart by internal disputes. Let's think back to the tail end of the Oslo Accord agreements and the terrorist attacks they brought, the events of October 2000, the dot-com crash at the start of the millennium, the Second Intifada, the disengagement from the Gaza Strip, the Second Lebanon War, the Goldstone Report – when we think about all that, is there a single serious person who still clings to the babble about the destruction Netanyahu has sown in his 12 years as prime minister, and how difficult it will be to recover from it?
So the idea is simple – a government can't be built on a bluff. It can't be built on hidden motives and aspirations, or on whitewashing absurd ideologies, or on the lack of any foundations, which people have just remembered are necessary. There is room to assume that in their hearts, deep down, Bennett, Sa'ar, and even Lapid realize that unlike the ruins Netanyahu received in 2009, they don't have much to rehabilitate now. For a start, it would be all right if they just rode the coattails of Netanyahu's success and tried not to wreck things themselves.
