On Monday morning, a shiny blue and white Boeing 767 took off from Ben Gurion Aiport and made the short flight southwards to the Israeli Air Force’s Nevatim Base. Six years after the former Qantas airliner first landed in Israel, the now comprehensively refurbished and upgraded prime ministerial plane was going into storage indefinitely.
It was purchased at the urging of Benjamin Netanyahu, who along with his wife Sara was involved in choosing the colour of fabrics used for the interior cabins. Mr Netanyahu christened the plane Knaf Zion (Wing of Zion) and never got to fly on it.
According to a recent State Comptroller’s report, the cost, including upgrades, was 580 million shekels (£137 million). It is seen by many Israelis as an emblem of the former prime minister’s sense of grandeur and his lengthy period in office.
Knaf Zion’s short service and uncertain future could symbolise Mr Netanyahu’s successor as well. Naftali Bennett was not averse to using the plane for his foreign trips as prime minister.
However, his partner in power and the architect of his coalition, alternate-Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, has vetoed the idea. Back in his opposition days, he slated its purchase as a frivolous waste of money and as long as he has a say, it will never carry a prime minister abroad.
Meanwhile, Mr Bennett is about to mark his first year as Israel’s 13th prime minister and no-one is willing to bet that it was not his last year in office as well.
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The Knesset
Under the terms of the coalition agreement, he is scheduled to hand power over to Mr Lapid in August 2023, but for now he’s struggling even to remain in the job for the duration of the Knesset’s summer session until the end of July.
The precariousness of his position is not his fault. This was the only government he and Mr Lapid could cobble together in the current Knesset, from eight diverse parties with contrary policies and beliefs, who were united only in their desire to replace Mr Netanyahu. And those parties had a total of just 62 Knesset members, two of whom, both members of Mr Bennett’s Yamina party, have already defected (one of them even before the new government was sworn in), leaving the government without a functioning majority. Even before losing the defectors, Yamina was one of the smallest parties in the coalition.
Getting half a Knesset term as the coalition’s first prime minister was the result of deft political maneuvering but it also means that he is in many ways the weakest prime minister in Israeli history, forced to rule through the consensus of his colleagues and with very little control over the policies of his fellow ministers.
Some see this the fatal weakness of his government but it is also a corrective for Israel’s parliamentary system. After long years of Mr Netanyahu’s presidential style, Israel’s prime minister is in a very real sense merely the first among equals.
That doesn’t mean Mr Bennett is devoid of power.
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Yair Lapid
Even in this unwieldy and unruly government, the prime minister’s job comes with prerogatives and duties that his cabinet colleagues cannot share. The prime minister decides the security cabinet agenda, controls the intelligence services, chairs the atomic energy commission, makes the major calls on foreign policy and is left having to make the decisions no one else wants to be held responsible for.
The most recent example was the decision to allow the “Flags March” on Jerusalem Day this Sunday to pass through Damascus Gate, rather than bypass the Palestinian areas of east Jerusalem and the Old City. Technically, it was the decision of Public Security Minister Omer Bar Lev, but it was really up to the Prime Minister.
Last year, under threats from Hamas, Mr Netanyahu ordered a change in the route at the last moment.
That didn’t prevent Hamas from launching rockets, sparking 11 days of bloody war with Gaza. Hamas issued threats again this year and Mr Bennett’s decision to stick to the original route led to ugly confrontations between far-right marchers and Palestinians at Damascus Gate, but no escalation beyond that.
He is more decisive than the constantly prevaricating Mr Netanyahu and can point to that quality in his decision-making earlier in his term when dealing with the fourth and fifth waves of Covid-19, when he refused to impose more lockdowns, relying instead on booster vaccines. He had to carry the responsibility for that decision alone, as most of the ministers preferred to avoid the Coronavirus Cabinet debates.
The other main change of policy under the Bennett government is pursuing a more aggressive campaign against Iran on the ground, with air strikes in Syria and covert missions within Iran itself, which the government does little to hide, while at the same time pursuing a much lower profile engagement with the Americans over the future of the nuclear agreement.
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Gilat and Naftali Bennett
Unlike in the days of President Barack Obama, when Mr Netanyahu took on the administration openly, travelling to Washington to speak against the Iran Deal in Congress, the Bennett-Lapid government has largely kept its differences with the Biden team quiet, which has yielded results in the American decision not to take the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps of the Foreign Terror Organisation list.
But even Mr Bennett’s achievements on the Iranian issue, in fighting Covid, and in swiftly cracking down on the wave of terror attacks that began two months ago (without causing an escalation during the tense month of Ramadan), have not made him a popular prime minister.
The right wing and strictly-Orthodox community cannot forgive him for ending the rule of their leader and forming a coalition without Charedi parties, but with the left-wing and Islamist ones. Over the past year, some of his advisors have urged him to seek a new political base in the centre of Israeli politics. But it was never going to work.
Most Israelis on the centre-left are grateful to Mr Bennett, not just for ending the Netanyahu reign, at least temporarily, but for trying to restore a calmer, more consensual and less divisive style of politics, where the government deals with the actual business of running the country, like passing a long overdue state budget. But they’re not about to vote for him out of gratitude.
He remains a man of the right and there are plenty of centrist parties already there.
Instead of bringing him new voters, his tilt towards the centre and his focus on the prime minister’s job, which he loves doing, caused him to neglect his own Yamina MKs, leading to the latest defection and bringing the coalition to the brink.
The irony of his position is that even if he somehow manages to survive in office for another year, it will be so he can hand over power to Mr Lapid next August.
Some of his coalition partners now suspect of him of trying to pull the government rightward, in the hope of provoking defections from the left. If these happen and the Knesset is dissolved, he will at least get a few more months in office as interim prime minister. Mr Bennett’s response to these accusations? “I’m just focusing on being a good prime minister.”
