Bennett’s retreat shows narrowing horizons for religious Zionist base

On Saturday night, Economy Minister Naftali Bennett at long last gave up his bid to be defense or foreign minister in the new government and officially notified Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu he would accept the education portfolio.

Under the terms of Bennett’s offer, his Jewish Home party would receive two additional portfolios: current Housing Minister Uri Ariel would become agriculture minister with responsibility for the Settlement Division, an agency currently under the purview of the Prime Minister’s Office that helps to plan and fund settlement building in the West Bank. A third ministry, likely the culture and sport portfolio, would go to MK Ayelet Shaked.

For Jewish Home, the retreat is a de facto admission that election results matter. With just eight seats in the new Knesset, Bennett’s negotiating power against Netanyahu’s 30-seat Likud was much reduced from its 12 in the previous Knesset.

But just how reduced surprised everyone. Earlier Saturday, perhaps the best assessment of political pundits was that Bennett would receive the same Economy Ministry he currently heads, expanded somewhat to include the strategic affairs and intelligence portfolio.

This turned out to be completely wrong information, leaked for tactical reasons by various parties in the talks.

It is important to note how secretive the coalition talks have been. The Knesset room in which the talks are taking place has been made a “sterile zone” by the Knesset Guard. The room, together with the entire corridor leading up to it, are under standing guard while talks are taking place. Documents are held close to the chest, and the best journalists can do is attempt to discern the shape of the developing talks through the fog of carefully managed leaks meant as much to manipulate as to inform.

Why then is the Saturday night announcement trustworthy? Two reasons: the information came from sources close to Bennett, and the development constituted a retreat for Jewish Home.

And the notice included a fascinating additional piece of information. Bennett was the one who asked the prime minister for the post, the announcement explained, after spending recent weeks speaking to former education ministers, ministry directors-general and educators.

It’s good news for Netanyahu. While Netanyahu was never worried about his ability to form a stable coalition, his partners have been busy maneuvering to expand their reach in the cabinet and make their imprint on the items of legislation the next government would pursue. Bennett was thought to be one of the key holdouts in those talks.

Kulanu’s Moshe Kahlon has already begun drafting the 2015 budget with Finance Ministry officials, despite not yet being on the job. United Torah Judaism has obtained all the cabinet and Knesset posts it sought and is busy negotiating, together with Shas, a long list of financial demands favoring ultra-Orthodox institutions and constituents.

But Bennett’s retreat has a more dramatic, perhaps historic, meaning for Jewish Home itself.

Bennett’s biography as a warrior in the ultra-elite commando unit Sayeret Matkal and a high-tech CEO who made millions selling a company he had helped build — twice — gave him the halo of a kind of incarnation of the idealized Israeli. Polling as high as 16 seats just a couple of months ago Jewish Home under Bennett seemed headed to unprecedented success, and Bennett talked explicitly about it eventually becoming Israel’s ruling party.

Key to this surge, and to Bennett’s influence, was the dramatic change he tried to lead within the party itself, branching out of the narrow confines of the ideological West Bank settler community and the religious-Zionist fold.

Like many sectoral Israeli parties – other examples include the ultra-Orthodox UTJ, the Arab Joint List, even in some sense the centrist secularist Yesh Atid – Jewish Home is not just a political party. For its base, it serves as an expression and symbol of religious and communal identity. While its overarching ideology is anything but sectoral, seeking the “redemption” of the land, nation and even the spiritual world of the Jews, it has succumbed to the same social segmentation that has come to define Israeli religious and political identity. Religious Zionists refer to themselves as migzar, a “sector” or “camp” distinct from the mainstream, from secular Israelis or from the ultra-Orthodox.

But Bennett’s vision for the party is larger. He has spent the past few years attempting to transform the nationalist-religious party into a mainstream home for patriotic Israelis yearning for a “new politics.”

“We don’t apologize anymore,” ran one election campaign slogan. “Brothers and sisters” was Bennett’s favorite salutation in his Facebook posts.

In the last election, Bennett used his prerogative as party leader to appoint unexpected new Knesset candidates to the party’s Knesset slate.

Yinon Magal, editor-in-chief of the popular Walla news and entertainment website, was appointed to the list despite not being a religiously observant man. “It doesn’t matter if I’m secular, religious, or traditional, I love the land of Israel, the people of Israel and the Torah of Israel,” Magal said in announcing his Knesset bid.

On his Facebook page, Bennett kept his own response as simple as his broader message: “My brother, welcome home.”

All of Israel had a “home” in Jewish Home, Bennett insisted – and that truth would only be driven home to the public if the party’s Knesset slate actually represented a broader cross-section of the Israeli mainstream Bennett was trying to attract.

But it all came apart with Bennett’s appointment of Eli Ohana to the Knesset list. Ohana is famous for his exploits as one of Israel’s greatest soccer players from the 1970s to the 1990s. Ohana was famous, beloved, Sephardi, a Likud member and close friend of Likud leaders – all the ingredients that would make his entry into Jewish Home a powerful symbol of the party’s growing constituencies and relevance.

But Ohana also represented Israel’s soccer culture – fame, promiscuity, boisterous fans, games scheduled on the sacred Sabbath. While he declared that his heart was in the right place, Ohana could not bridge the divide. He was a cultural hero for another Israel, a stranger to the religious sensibilities of the religious-Zionist base.

The outcry over Ohana was so great that Bennett was forced to retract the appointment just three days after announcing it in late January. Within days, Jewish Home’s poll showing had dropped by roughly two Knesset seats.

Bennett’s desire to grow Jewish Home into the mainstream electorate is rooted in something larger than personal ambition. Jewish Home, Bennett often says, is the only party that is clear in its rejection of Palestinian statehood in the West Bank, “without apologies or compromises.”

At the start of the Oslo peace process in the early 1990s, that was the position of Likud itself; before Netanyahu pulled out of Hebron in the mid-90s, Likud under Ariel Sharon withdrew from Gaza, and Netanyahu entered American-led peace talks in his more recent terms.

Jewish Home’s rise was the only way to prevent what Bennett sees as a historic disaster — Israel’s withdrawal from much of Judaism’s sacred Biblical heartland that is now part of the West Bank.

Likud ran a powerful campaign pushing back against Bennett’s strategy of appealing to a broader center-right electorate, arguing that dividing the right could lead to a left-wing victory. The strategy worked: Jewish Home dropped from 12 seats to just eight in the March 17 election.

In his comments the night after the vote, Bennett praised his “camp,” who, he said, “got under the stretcher” – sacrificing their own party’s power, and thus their community’s influence, to ensure a right-wing government for the country as a whole. It was a face-saving statement, but also an acknowledgement that Bennett was reined in not by Netanyahu, but by his own base.

No one understood Bennett’s new situation better than Netanyahu himself. Two weeks ago, Likud sources close to the prime minister floated the idea that Bennett, who was still posturing and demanding the Foreign Ministry, should take the Education Ministry instead.

Education was a traditional bastion of the religious-Zionist camp, a source of influence from which the idealistic “sector” could bring its religious and political program to larger audiences. Zevulun Hammer, then-head of Jewish Home’s precursor the National Religious Party, held the post from 1977 to 1984, from 1990 to 1992 and again from 1996 till his death in 1998. NRP MK Yitzhak Levy then took over until the first Netanyahu government fell in 1999.

Netanyahu’s leak, then, was not really aimed at Bennett, but at his dissatisfied base. While Bennett sought to take over Israel’s foreign policy, or failing that to remain in an expanded Economy Ministry that would include the strategic affairs and intelligence portfolios, the national-religious electorate has a distinctly more domestic and “soft” agenda. Education, not diplomacy, lies at the heart of its own sense of its place in Israeli society.

Two weeks later, Bennett all but announces – the announcement is still informal until Netanyahu formally accepts – that he has spent the past two weeks “learning” the education portfolio and speaking to those who held it in the past. It might be more accurate to say that Bennett has spent the past two weeks speaking to his own camp to gauge the sentiments of his constituents. What he heard, as Netanyahu knew he would, was that it was time for religious Zionism’s ambitious, tech-savvy young leader to return to the party’s traditional priorities: the sacred tasks of education and settlement.