Amid uproar, Katz launches self-aggrandizing Likud primaries campaign video

Amid a major uproar over his live-on-television announcement last night that he was removing IDF Central Command chief Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, and after his attempt today to walk back the move, Defense Minister Israel Katz launches a Likud primaries campaign video presenting him as a rare true right-wing defense minister.

“At last, a right-wing defense minister” is the slogan of the campaign, in which Katz claims he broke free of the security conception of his predecessors that enabled Hamas’s October 7, 2023, onslaught, and led an “offensive” rather than defensive policy that weakened Iran, eliminated terror chiefs and “increased the IDF’s freedom of action.”

סוף סוף שר ביטחון ימני. הצביעו 121 בפריימריז. pic.twitter.com/XShCHTT1Zq

— ישראל כ”ץ Israel Katz (@Israel_katz) August 3, 2026

The video itself features a montage of airstrikes from the war soundtracked with an apparently AI-generated hard rock song featuring lyrics extolling Katz’s ostensibly terrifying military potency, including the assertion: “The Iranians say, ‘God help us’.”

It ends: “Israel Katz, what a beast [totach / cannon in Hebrew].” And finally, bizarrely, “such a graceful smile.”

The Likud holds its primaries on August 17, with over 100,000 party members set to choose most of its Knesset slate — with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyah adding in selections of his own. Katz placed a rather middling 12th in the last Likud primaries, in August 2022.