Exclusive interview: A new kind of PM pitching high-tech Israel to the world - The Jewish Chronicle

Just over five months ago, on Shabbat, 29 May, Naftali Bennett’s life changed forever. Eight days earlier, a ceasefire had ended 11 days of rocket attacks and airstrikes between Hamas and Israel. And the violence was not limited to the skies.

There had been clashes, not seen for decades, between Jews and Arabs in east Jerusalem and Israel’s “mixed” cities. These had seemingly ended the prospect of a new coalition including parties of the right and left wings and Islamist Ra’am. But the ceasefire had reopened these options.

“On Shabbat morning, I gathered my four kids, who are aged six to 17, and I told them that Abba will have to do something difficult tomorrow and people will be saying very bad things about me,” Mr Bennett told the JC.

“I told them that I’m doing it to save our country from spiraling down and being torn apart by polarisation and they should know that I’m doing it from good motives.”

The next evening, Mr Bennett made a pivotal speech in which he announced that there was no option of forming a right-wing government, opening up the way to the formation of Israel’s unlikely coalition.

That was the first of what Prime Minister Bennett, 49, calls “the two big decisions” he made.

The second decision was just over two months ago, when he made the call to focus on “booster” vaccinations and keep Israel open over the High Holiday period.

“It wasn’t a gamble,” he insists now. “We knew by then for certain that the vaccine is safe and we were 80 per cent sure it would be effective.

“When I assessed the price of a lockdown to the Israeli economy and the mental health of Israelis, alongside the effectiveness of the booster campaign, I decided to go ahead.”

In retrospect, with Israel’s infection and hospitalisation rates way down, it seems like the obvious decision. But ack then, at the height of the Delta variant wave, Mr Bennett was being told by many of Israel’s senior public health experts that a Rosh Hashana lockdown was the more sensible path.

On Tuesday, when he met Boris Johnson at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Mr Bennett had a rare moment of satisfaction. Mr Johnson said: “We need everybody in our country to learn from the Israeli booster campaign and get their jab.” Britain, he added, needed to go about its own booster campaign with “Israeli speed”. He concluded: “I want some of that spirit.”

There can be no doubt that after just four months in power, Mr Bennett is a very different type of Israeli prime minister.

It’s not just the contrast between him and his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is 23 years older and has dominated Israeli politics for quarter of a century. Or the fact that as the leader of one of the coalition’s smallest parties, Mr Bennett has to run his government on much more consensual lines than would have been conceivable under Mr Netanyahu.

Together with his team — to which he very recently added the 31 year-old Finchley-born Keren Hajioff as international media spokesperson — he is energetically trying to build a new image of himself and Israel. Even the decision to lead a 140-member delegation to the climate summit wasn’t a natural move for an Israeli prime minister.

Mr Bennett’s predecessors barely, if ever, focused on environmental issues. For a small country in a tough neighbourhood, carbon footprints didn’t seem the most pressing of matters.

The summit fell in the same week that the Israeli government hoped to pass its crucial budget and the prime minister would have been unable to travel if he wasn’t relatively confident the coalition had a secure majority. But he wanted to go, as the summit was the perfect venue for projecting that new image. And an Israeli prime minister with a green agenda is part of that.

“Naturally our environmental footprint is small,” Mr Bennett acknowledges. He is aware that Israel’s commitment to zero-emissions by 2050 is hardly going to save the planet. But at heart, though he entered politics 16 years ago, he’s still a tech entrepreneur pitching for investors’ money. In Glasgow, he was pitching the new Israel: a high-tech economy with a broad-based government, and a pragmatic problem-solver at its helm.

It’s a bold vision. But Mr Bennett seems certain that the world will focus on “the dramatic influence that Israeli innovation can have in fighting the climate crisis” rather than on the Israel-Palestine dispute.

“[The conflict] can’t define us,” he tells the JC. “I don’t think that defines us.” Instead, he’s focusing on launching a series of solar energy and desalinated water networks, all utilising Israeli tech, “which will create a win-win situation with our neighbours”.

Meanwhile, he says, the Palestinians will benefit from improved economic conditions because under this government he promises “stability without too many sharp turns in either direction.”

So how is that different to the status-quo policy of the man he calls “my predecessor”, without mentioning his name once in the interview?

“There is an alternative to the moribund diplomatic process with the Palestinians, and that’s people-to-people peace,” he says. “Prosperity on the ground.

“It was talked about for years, but only as lip-service. I didn’t wait for anyone, because I have a clear interest in there being prosperity for Arabs and Jews in Judea and Samaria. One of the first things I did was to authorise 700 million shekels (£163 million) of trade between Jordan and Judea and Samaria, and we’re expanding the number of workers allowed in to Israel, from Gaza as well. I’m happy with that because I believe in it.”

And he believes that both Arab and Western leaders will be happy with that too, even though they’ve condemned Israel’s latest decision to build 3,000 new homes in settlements on the West Bank, and questioned the government’s designation of six Palestinian NGOs as terror organisations.

Those, he insists, are “disagreements in defined areas”. The Prime Minister adds: “[Other leaders] understand that the incremental approach is the right one, not a solution for generations forward. What will happen in another century? We’ll see in another century. For now that’s the way me and my coalition partners see it and our friends understand it as well.”

That’s the other part of the Bennett pitch to the international community: give him space so he can keep the coalition afloat. And with Mr Netanyahu reinventing himself as an ultra-aggressive leader of the opposition, that is no easy task. “There’s a very big machine working to warp everything we’re doing and it has an effect,” he says.

“But I’m optimistic. If over the next four years we focus on not getting dragged in to this argument, then there’s no fight. We will continue to prove ourselves by actions. Like we did when we crushed Covid.”

Mr Bennett is aware that many of the more left-leaning Western leaders are anxious to see illiberal, autocratic-minded leaders in countries such as Hungary and Turkey replaced by a coalition like the one he leads, which weaves disparate political strands together. He’s eager to play up this “Israeli [political] model”.

“I see it as one of my main missions,” he says. “Beyond getting Israel out of Covid, economic growth and strengthening it against Iran, is creating an example of dialogue and cooperation between those who think differently and listen. And it works.

“We are carrying out a critical programme now of formalising the status of the Bedouin in the Negev Desert.

“There’s been a problem for decades of illegal building on every hill and we’re going through a complex process of building new towns for them so they can move there. I’m not ashamed of doing it. It’s a great thing for the national interest of Israel — for Jews and Arabs and Bedouins. It’s a win-win-win.”