Netanyahu brokers deal with racist party to save his job

The furor has aggravated already fraught relations between Israel and Jews in the diaspora, undercutting American and European Jewry’s efforts to fight anti-Semitism at a time when it is on the rise on both continents.

Israel President Benjamin Netanyahu to meet US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo today: Israeli PM's office — Netanyahu, his future imperiled by prosecutors and political challengers alike, has enraged Jewish leaders in Israel and the United States by striking a bargain with a racist anti-Arab party whose ideology was likened by one influential rabbi to Nazism. (REUTERS File photo/Corinna Kern)

Written by David M. Halbfinger

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made something of an art form of cutting deals with small Israeli political parties, but his latest alliance has earned him denunciations from quarters where he has usually been able to count on unshakable support.

Netanyahu, his future imperiled by prosecutors and political challengers alike, has enraged Jewish leaders in Israel and the United States by striking a bargain with a racist anti-Arab party whose ideology was likened by one influential rabbi to Nazism. Even pro-Israel groups in the United States that prefer to air their disagreements quietly have issued public condemnations.

The furore has aggravated already fraught relations between Israel and Jews in the diaspora, undercutting American and European Jewry’s efforts to fight anti-Semitism at a time when it is on the rise on both continents.

1m 5s

Israel PM hails common front with Arabs on Iran in Warsaw talks

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu hails as a breakthrough a conference in Warsaw where he is standing side-by-side with Arab powers to confront Iran, hoping their common front can pave the way to greater normalisation of relations.

The embattled Netanyahu, grasping for every potential vote, has turned to the extremist party Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power, whose leaders have a long history of expressing support for violence against Palestinians, expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the occupied territories, and a ban on intermarriage or sex between Jews and Arabs.

The prime minister arranged for the organization to merge into a somewhat more mainstream party of religious Zionists, the Jewish Home. That pact, announced Wednesday, could easily catapult Otzma Yehudit from the disreputable fringe into Israel’s next governing coalition.

Otzma Yehudit’s leaders proudly call themselves disciples of Meir Kahane, the New York City-born anti-Arab militant who served a term in Israel’s parliament in the 1980s before his Kach party was outlawed in Israel and declared a terrorist group by the United States. He was assassinated in 1990.

Much as Kach did, Otzma Yehudit’s platform calls for annexing the occupied territories, rejecting a Palestinian state, expelling “enemies” of Israel — a euphemism for Arabs — and taking “ownership” of the Temple Mount. The site, in Jerusalem, is holy to both Muslims and Jews, and is overseen by Muslim clerics under Jordanian supervision.

The pact between Netanyahu and the Kahanists set off a predictable eruption from liberal Jewish groups like J Street and Americans for Peace, as well as the Union of Reform Judaism, which normally stays out of Israeli politics.

But the outrage was not limited to the left.

On Friday, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the American lobbying group known as AIPAC, and the American Jewish Committee, both of which rarely weigh in publicly on Israeli politics, declared Otzma Yehudit’s ideas “reprehensible.” They vowed not to have any contact with its leaders even if they become part of the next government.

In an equally extraordinary step, Rabbi Benny Lau of Jerusalem, a pillar of religious Zionism, repeatedly assailed the merger over the weekend, warning on social media that “the defilement and destruction of the land serves as a guarantee for the loss of the land.”

Lau lamented that the prime minister seemed concerned only with winning re-election, and, from his pulpit at the Rambam Synagogue, likened Kahanism to Nazism and its ideas to the Nuremberg Laws.

“The entry of the racist doctrine into the Knesset is the destruction of the Temple,” he wrote on Facebook on Sunday.

In Israel’s chaotic parliamentary system, small parties, like the ultra-Orthodox Shas, can be essential when it comes to forming a majority coalition after an election, and Netanyahu has routinely struck deals giving them outsize influence.

But this time, he is running with his indictment on corruption charges widely expected, and facing his toughest challenge yet from Benny Gantz, a centrist and popular former army chief. So desperate to prevent any right-wing ballots from being squandered on a party unable to win its own seats in the Knesset, Netanyahu has pre-emptively stretched his coalition’s margins farther to the right than ever before.

The two leaders of Otzma Yehudit who could win Knesset seats, depending on the merged party’s share of the vote in April, are Michael Ben Ari and Itamar Ben Gvir. They are co-founders of Lehava, a group that opposes Jewish-Arab relationships and was implicated in a 2014 arson attack on a school for Jewish and Arab children in Jerusalem.

Ben Ari calls Arabs the “enemy” and advocates expelling them. He was denied a visa to the United States in 2012 as a member of a terrorist organization.

Ben Gvir, who was a legislative aide for Ben Ari, has acknowledged having a picture in his home of Baruch Goldstein, the Kahane follower who massacred 29 Palestinians while they were praying at a mosque in Hebron in 1994.

He first gained notoriety in 1995, as a radical opponent of the Oslo peace process, when he stole the hood ornament from Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s car and said, “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him, too.” Weeks later, Rabin was assassinated by a member of a group that also had roots in Kahanism.

The chorus of outrage over Netanyahu’s actions reflected pent-up concern and frustration in the United States and elsewhere over the prime minister’s right-wing and ultra-Orthodox-approved policies and how difficult they are making it for liberal Jews to defend Israel against growing opposition, including among new members of Congress.

AIPAC did not comment beyond a terse Twitter post Friday, but that alone was exceptional: In 2017, when Netanyahu infuriated American Jews by reneging on a deal to improve access to the Western Wall for non-Orthodox worshippers, the group sent emissaries to register objections but said nothing in public.

Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin of Temple Solel in Hollywood, Florida, called Netanyahu’s actions a “slap in the face to American Jews” as they grapple with new political challenges posed by Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and other supporters of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

AIPAC clearly understood “that if they need to defend Israel to America, then Israel needs to be able to be morally defensible,” Salkin said.

Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, said it was the first time AIPAC had spoken out on domestic issues involving Israel’s character as a democratic state. Netanyahu’s move, he said, had made it harder both to preserve bipartisan American support for Israel and sustain enthusiasm among American Jews.

“There’s a difference between a racist party entering the Knesset — the fringes of Israeli democracy can unfortunately contain such elements — and their being encouraged by the prime minister,” Plesner said. Still, on Sunday, AIPAC said it was “honored” to announce that Netanyahu would attend its conference next month.

For Netanyahu, his push to harvest every last right-wing vote is not merely about winning re-election. With the attorney general expected any day now to announce that he will seek Netanyahu’s indictment in a sprawling bribery scandal, the prime minister hopes to line up enough lawmakers to keep him in power even if he is put on trial — “what you may label an indictment-proof coalition,” Plesner said.

“He’s entering this campaign with much fewer inhibitions than in the past,” Plesner said.

Indeed, in just the last few weeks, to score political points Netanyahu has antagonized Arab diplomats by leaking a video of a private meeting with them; attacked members of his own party he sees as potential successors; bragged publicly about secret military strikes in Syria; warned darkly that a victory by Gantz would give Arab politicians enhanced power; and warned that “a Palestinian state would endanger our existence,” just months before the United States is expected to issue its peace plan.

In pushing the Otzma Yehudit deal, Netanyahu even threw his own party, Likud, under the bus, giving away one of its Knesset candidacies to a member of Jewish Home as recompense for the merger. Moreover, he promised Jewish Home both the housing and education ministries.

That itself raises concerns among more moderate right-wing Israelis. A leader of Jewish Home, Bezalel Smotrich, who could be handed one of those posts, has called himself a “proud homophobe,” supported segregated maternity wards for Arab and Jewish women, said Jewish developers should not have to sell homes to Arabs and favored a shoot-to-kill policy against Palestinian stone-throwers.

With old lines between Likud and the farthest right wing growing blurry, Yossi Klein Halevi, a scholar at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, observed that campaign ads had popped up on city buses showing Moshe Kahlon, the foreign minister, who heads his own center-right party, alongside Menachem Begin, the first Likud prime minister.

“The sane right,” the ads say, in an implicit attack on today’s Likud.

Halevi, who was a Kahane follower in the 1970s but renounced his ideas long ago, said Israelis had yet to absorb the ramifications of the Otzma Yehudit-Jewish Home merger. “We’re in for a major moment of self-reckoning,” he said. “More and more Israelis are going to realize what that means.”