Bennett makes nice with coalition partners after shakeup
At Knesset’s first Q&A, equilibrium apparently restored between coalition, opposition — minus personal jabs
Marissa Newman is The Times of Israel political correspondent.
After weeks of furious coalition wrangling and spiraling threats of new elections, coalition-on-opposition fighting was restored Monday in a mostly tame, mostly empty, first-ever Q&A session with Education Minister Naftali Bennett.
Bennett indicated that he was satisfied with the concessions on the security cabinet reform reached overnight Sunday, while defending his ultra-Orthodox coalition partners against Yesh Atid.
But the Jewish Home minister also signaled he would support a bill by Zionist Union MK Merav Michaeli to cap the number of years a prime minister can serve to eight — a move that may well provoke a future coalition fight.
During the session, which was primarily focused on the Israeli education system, the minister maintained that within hours of cutting a deal on the security cabinet, he was already setting up meetings to be briefed on security matters.
“There is a change,” he said. “Will we receive everything we want? No… but it’s better than doing nothing.”
For years, the security cabinet “functioned very poorly,” he said, giving as an example the fact that ministers in the high-level cabinet were not informed of the tunnel threat from the Gaza Strip through June 2014, a month before the war there.
“I don’t think we need to know everything, but I think we need to know about the tunnels and I think we need to know the stance of the Shin Bet [security service] on Area A [where most Palestinian cities are located],” he added.
The concession, mediated by Health Minister Yaakov Litzman, will see acting head of the National Security Council Brigadier General (ret.) Yaakov Nagel, or his deputy, temporarily act as a military attaché to the cabinet.
The temporary position is to remain filled until a suggested committee — formed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to find a more permanent solution — has finished its work. “After this week, [Litzman] could make peace between Israel and the Palestinians,” Bennett joked in the plenum on Monday.
When Meretz leader Zehava Galon, who had supported Bennett’s demand for greater intelligence-sharing with ministers, stood up to ask a question, the education minister jokingly told the left-wing lawmaker that she should refrain from complimenting him. “You know what that does to me?” he asked. Galon shot back: “Would you care to elaborate?” To which Bennett replied, “Not at all.”
Bennett also indirectly referred to the coalition negotiations with the Likud while getting a jab in at opposition leader Isaac Herzog. After Herzog stood up to ask whether his rhetoric fuels racism and extremism, Bennett said he noticed the Zionist Union leader “remembered, belatedly” that he is the opposition. “If you’d told me last night, I would have done better in the negotiations,” he said.
The fairly civil session was punctuated by jeering only when Bennett accused the Yesh Atid party of being “anti-Haredi,” drawing heckling from the Yesh Atid lawmakers.
Asked by MK Aliza Lavie (Yesh Atid) why he would support the demand by the ultra-Orthodox to reverse a Yesh Atid bill requiring secular studies in ultra-Orthodox schools, Bennett attacked the party for implementing free summer camps for Israeli children that exclude the ultra-Orthodox. “Your approach is anti-Haredi. You’ve inflicted terrible harm,” he said.
“I am adding the core studies [to ultra-Orthodox] schools, but through agreements,” Bennett added. “The ultra-Orthodox are our brothers, not enemies.”
Later in the session, his attacks on Yesh Atid’s “terrible, terrible policy” persisted after MK Yael German accused him of “incitement” against the opposition party. “Why did you and Yair Lapid discriminate against Haredi children from camps? You don’t have an answer, because there is no answer.”
He also ridiculed Lapid for “dressing up as a Breslov [Hasid] for a year,” a reference to Lapid’s efforts to appeal to the ultra-Orthodox. “You went to the Western Wall with a tallit and now you’re back to being Yesh Atid.”
Bennett was also asked by Michaeli, the Zionist Union MK, whether he would support her bill to limit the number of years a prime minister may remain in office. “It’s a very important point,” he said, noting that “power corrupts.
“We have not yet formulated a party stance” on the bill, he said, but “the direction is welcome.”
The Likud party is firmly opposed to the bill, saying it targets Netanyahu personally.
In a departure from the coalition niceties, new Likud MK Yehudah Glick, a Temple Mount activist, reprimanded Bennett for the “mocking” tone he took with Galon.
“As education minister, you need to be very careful about the level of discourse,” Glick said, before asking Bennett about how he plans to change the awareness surrounding the Temple Mount status quo. That was when Bennett got a dig in on Netanyahu.
“We haven’t yet had a leader courageous enough to change” the status quo at the Temple Mount, he said. “If you want to change things, it requires bravery.”
The hour-long Q&A session was extended by 20 minutes for the minister with two portfolios — the Education Ministry and Diaspora Ministry — though no questions related to the Diaspora were raised. None of the questions referred to incoming Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman or the Yisrael Beytenu party.
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