For Likud and Jewish Home, an escalating sibling rivalry

Maybe you’ve seen it —  the clever video depicting Benjamin Netanyahu’s ex-coalition partners as preschool children.

Each child represents a party leader who was part of Netanyahu’s outgoing coalition: Jewish Home’s Naftali Bennett, Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid, Hatnua’s Tzipi Livni and Yisrael Beytenu’s Avigdor Liberman.

Each riffs off the person being mocked. As the child representing Lapid, wearing one of Lapid’s distinctive black t-shirts, pokes the kippa-clad “Naftali,” Naftali responds with “Ach, ach, ach,” or “ouch, ouch, ouch!” But the word ach also means “brother,” Naftali Bennett’s favorite term for fellow Jews and a regular title applied in the first months of the outgoing government to his closest political ally Lapid. In the video it’s depicted as a conversational tic, with Netanyahu calming Naftali with the words, “Yes, yes, he’s a brother, he’s a brother.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-agF4Dk8Iws

Liberman, who broke up his shared list with Netanyahu’s Likud last summer, is shown hogging toys, and Netanyahu, the only adult in the room, remonstrates: “Yvet, you have to learn to share with the other children.”

Ex-finance minister Lapid, meanwhile, holds a toy abacus that represents the economy. He shakes it violently, leading Netanyahu to chide, “Yair, stop playing with that! You’re breaking it.”

Livni comes in for a special critique. She’s shown running back and forth in the room. “Tzipi, Tzipi, stop running from place to place!” Netanyahu says – a reference to Livni’s multi-party political journey in recent years, from a Likud cabinet minister to Kadima leader to Hatnua founder to a shared list with the Labor party.

Likud may be in hot water over the video. By depicting children in a campaign ad, it may have breached Israel’s rather draconian electioneering laws. That, at any rate, is for Supreme Court justice and Central Elections Committee chairman Salim Joubran to decide.

But the video may have put the Likud in another tough spot. It breaks Likud’s agreement with Jewish Home in which the parties agreed not to run negative ads against each other.

Within hours of Likud’s video “leaking” – following the criticism over the inclusion of children in the campaign ad, the party has insisted the video was not released intentionally by the campaign – Jewish Home released its own polished video. It was a video that did not spare Likud – and that was readied beforehand for the possibility that Likud would break the truce.

As Knesset Channel anchor Yaron Avraham tweeted, “Bennett knew Prime Minister Netanyahu would break first.”

The ad recalls the most famous radio broadcast in Israel’s history, the 1947 live report from the UN vote on the establishment of Israel. But in this video, titled “The Declaration of Independence, 2015 Edition,” the voting countries are replaced by political parties – and the vote is on Palestinian, not Jewish, statehood.

The announcer, in a mediocre effort at a 1940s radio voice that comes out a mottled mix of present-day Hebrew with a tinge of something that might be Polish (think Shimon Peres), reads, “Meretz, yes. Yesh Atid, yes. Labor, yes. Shas, yes. Yisrael Beytenu, yes. Likud, yes. Jewish Home, no no no!”

The reading is interspersed with flashing images of Hamas leaders and armed fighters of the terror group.

The final screen reads, “The only ones who oppose a Palestinian state,” followed by the party’s campaign slogan, “No more apologies. Jewish Home.”

Meanwhile, Bennett launched a scathing critique of Netanyahu’s management of the war in Gaza last summer.

Is the truce over? Is a Likud-Jewish Home fight in the offing? As with any long-running relationship between two parties unhealthily close to one another, it’s complicated. For instance, rumors are growing that Likud-linked activists are hard at work brokering a deal with Jewish Home to run on a joint list – a broad-based right-wing list that would ensure victory on March 17 against the increasingly popular left-wing Labor-Hatnua union under Isaac Herzog.

And that’s the Likud-Jewish Home sibling rivalry in a nutshell: unable to resist campaigning against each other while eager to unite in a joint Knesset slate, all at once.