Bennett’s big bruise-up

A public feud between senior government ministers grabs headlines in the Hebrew press on Wednesday, while the daughter and husband of the Israeli woman murdered in the West Bank earlier this week speak to the press, offering a firsthand account of the terror attack.

Education minister and Jewish Home party leader Naftali Bennett came out swinging in a speech at the Institute for National Security Studies conference in Tel Aviv, accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon of endangering Israeli national security with their “antiquated” defense strategy and reactive approach to national security.

Haaretz calls the ensuing tit-for-tat between the senior ministers “venomous,” and reports that Bennett’s criticisms of the government were joined by opposition leader Isaac Herzog, Yesh Atid party leader Yair Lapid and former interior minister Gideon Sa’ar. The paper quotes sources close to Netanyahu saying, “Once again Bennett repeats his familiar mode of operation. He hears ideas that come up in various forums with the prime minister, and then uses them as if they’re his own ideas.”

Israel Hayom leads off, to nobody’s surprise, with Ya’alon’s response that Bennett’s remarks were “childish” and “irresponsible,” retorting that “leadership is first of all national responsibility, not just a desire to win headlines or a few [Facebook] likes.” Netanyahu himself didn’t snap back at Bennett, but the paper quotes “sources close to the prime minister” as saying that “someone apparently still doesn’t understand the difference between being a cabinet minister and an opposition internet commenter.”

Yossi Verter writes in Haaretz that Bennett has seen the public opinion polls and the growing discontent with Netanyahu’s security performance. “Likud seats are slipping to the right, some to Jewish Home, Bennett’s party, some to Yisrael Beytenu, that of Avigdor Liberman,” he says.

For the time being, however, Bennett has no intention of leaving the government, Verter argues. For now he’d rather have the cake of being in government and eat that of criticizing it, too — to be a “coaloppositionist.”

Nahum Barnea says in his Yedioth Ahronoth column that both Bennett and Ya’alon displayed juvenile behavior in their spat on Tuesday, making him long for the days of the late former prime minister Ariel Sharon.

“With Sharon, Bennett wouldn’t have dared; if he had, he would have been fired, or at least received an official reproach, as cold as ice, which would have put him in his place,” he says.

Bennett’s accusation that Netanyahu and Ya’alon were the greatest threat to Israeli security, he writes, is of the sort only usually heard from the left-wing opposition. Barnea concludes by heaping praise on Ya’alon, calling him a “moral man” who would never take bribes, steal from state coffers, or sexually harass his inferiors, thus making his stooping to Bennett’s level equally childish.

Natan Meir, whose wife Dafna was murdered earlier this week in a stabbing at their West Bank home, speaks to the press for the first time since the terror attack. “We don’t have anger,” he tells Yedioth Ahronoth. “I am not angry at anyone. We don’t fill ourselves with that. We don’t curse Arabs. I sit and talk with my kids and I haven’t heard a single word of that. We’re not people who hate. Dafna and I weren’t educated that way.”

Israel Hayom leads instead with the eldest daughter, Renana, recounting the moments when the Palestinian stabbed her mother at the door to their Otniel home. The big takeaway for the paper is the heroic act of a mother saving her children.

“I was talking on the phone downstairs and I heard my mom screaming upstairs, in the living room. I thought she saw a cockroach or centipede, like what’s happened a bunch of times, but the screams were different and prolonged,” she tells the paper. “I ran upstairs. When I got there he’d already knocked her down. He tried to pull the knife out of her body in order to hurt us but she didn’t let him. I saw them struggling. I screamed out of panic. I hope my mother didn’t hear my screams.”

Haaretz shuns such content and instead merely reports that IDF and Shin Bet officers on Sunday arrested a 15-year-old Palestinian on suspicion of murdering Meir. It cites Palestinian news reports that identified the boy as Murad Adais, of the village of Beit Amra, south of Hebron, not far from the settlement where the Meir family lives. Netanyahu, Israel Hayom reports, vowed Israel would destroy the home of the terrorist responsible for Meir’s death.