One right makes a wrong for Netanyahu: 7 things to know for July 30

1. The right are all right: Right-wing parties New Right and United Right-Wing Parties decided to unite the right to make a united right-wing party made up of parties on the right on Monday, after days of talks and with a deadline later this week looming.

• The joint slate will be called United Right and be headed by Ayelet Shaked, whose New Right party will take four of the top 10 spots.
• Makor Rishon reports that merger almost didn’t happen, with New Right’s Naftali Bennett threatening to walk away if the party did not get the number 9 spot on the list. According to the paper, National Union head Bezalel Smotrich saved the day when he agreed to push Orit Strock back to 10th place. In exchange, the Knesset funding for the No. 4 spot, which will be filled by Bennett, will go to URWP and not New Right.
• The deal was reached “after another night of talks that looked like they were going nowhere,” writes Yedioth Ahronoth.
• As part of the right-wing deal, New Right also committed to recommending Benjamin Netanyahu as premier after elections, assuming Likud remains the largest party on the right.

2. Boohoo for Bibi: Nonetheless, Netanyahu and his party are not pleased about the merger, which leaves out extremist party Otzma Yehudit.

• A spokesman for the Likud party releases a statement blasting the merger as “a fake union” due to its failure to bring all right-wing parties under one umbrella.
• The real problem? ToI’s Raoul Wootliff writes,“Instead of gathering the fringes of Israel’s right-wing, the new union has, so far, just brought together the mainstream factions on the right, all but guaranteeing their own political survival, but not necessarily Netanyahu’s. At the same time, it has specifically boosted two of his own rivals on the right, whom he had hoped to eliminate in April.”
• “For now, there’s only one loser in the right-wing merger: Netanyahu,” writes Yaki Adamker in Walla news.
• Both Adamker and Haaretz’s Yossi Verter blame the capriciousness of Sara Netanyahu for Shaked coming back to haunt Likud.
• “Instead of acting according to his and his party’s best political interests, as suggested to him privately and publicly by lawmakers in his party, Netanyahu was dragged by emotions and vengefulness. Last night he got his comeuppance: Shaked, who begged to be incorporated into Likud and was turned down, and who was fired by Netanyahu from her post as Justice Minister, along with Education Minister Naftali Bennett, is back, and in a big way,” Verter writes.

3. Shotgun wedding: Likud is not giving up on forcing United Right and Otzma Yehudit into an awkward marriage yet, though.

• “Seeking more mergers,” reads the top headline in Likud-backing Israel Hayom, and they don’t mean in Likud, with the party having made clear that it won’t be making room for anyone else, but expects the United Right to take the extremist bullet for it.
• Columnist Haim Shine writes in the paper that the right needs to learn to be more like the left when it comes to holding your nose and shaking hands, as with Ehud Barak: “On the left, they can paper over a friendship with a pedophile and accept an apology for killing Arabs, and on the right, they can’t bridge ideological gaps to ensure the wholeness of the land,” he writes enviously.
• A cartoon in Yedioth shows Otzma Yehudit’s Itamar Ben Gvir as a baby left by United Right on Netanyahu’s doorstep.

Cartoon in @YediotAhronot showing the United Right leaving baby @itamarbengvir on @netanyahu's doorstep pic.twitter.com/3VCA3jZyQA

— Raoul Wootliff (@RaoulWootliff) July 30, 2019

• Likud minister Zeev Elkin tells Army Radio that Likud taking Otzma is “a dumb idea,” since it means the party will lose votes to Blue and White, which is its real rival.

4. No respect: All this “no, you take him” business likely has Otzma Yehudit’s Itamar Ben Gvir feeling like an unwanted Palestinian facing the population transfer policies he espouses. (And gives this writer traumatic flashbacks to being picked last for sports in school, if picked at all.)

• “Am I a black sheep? A class D citizen?” Ben-Gvir asks on Army Radio, doing his best Rodney Dangerfield impression.
• He also tells the station he is demanding two spots on the slate, including No. 5, which is a Tacko Fall-sized order.
• Even Noam, the proudly homophobic party Otzma Yehudit has ganged up with, has no self respect. Party founder Rabbi Shlomo Aviner writes on the Srugim website that he doesn’t think his party is worth even a single Knesset seat. “We’ll get it next time. You need epic patience.”
• It’s an interesting strategy, playing the long game on the assumption that homophobia will eventually come back into style.

5. And why not throw alleged voter suppression into the mix? ToI’s Jacob Magid reports that Likud will spend some NIS 2 million ($570,000) on a program to put hidden cameras in polling stations in Arab towns.

• The amount is double what the party spent last time around on the same effort, and this time it apparently will not be a surprise.
• The party is expected to ask Central Elections Committee head Hanan Melcer to clearly detail for them what they can do with their cameras in the polling stations.
• Channel 13 reports that Melcer is less than excited about the idea.
• Likud claims the cameras are meant to deter or catch voter fraud, but the company hired to run the last program (and the new one) boasting that they successfully tamped down on Arab turnout likely doesn’t help that case.
• In fact, a more likely factor affecting turnout may have been the splitting of the Joint List, which has now gotten back together. Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer writes that the merger fever among nearly facets of the political arena are a sign that “Israel’s politics is contracting, bracing itself for a cathartic event,” namely Netanyahu’s ouster.

6. I love the way you don’t move: A report by Kan news that Netanyahu has asked the security cabinet to approve 700 homes for Palestinians in Area C of the West Bank may also hurt Likud politically.

• The request itself is strange, as Netanyahu does not need the security cabinet to approve such a move, just the permission of the defense minister, one Benjamin Netanyahu. It could be that asking the cabinet, though, will allow him to shunt blame for the move onto his partners.
• Already there are signs that Netanyahu may be attempting to do damage control. Haaretz, quoting an unnamed “expert,” says that Israel also approved 6,000 homes for settlers, though it does not have any details about when or where those approvals took place.
• Smotrich, who is in the security cabinet and who might be expected to oppose the move, actually comes out in support of allowing Palestinians to build homes.
• “We have a responsibility to Palestinians who lived in this place before 1994,” Kan’s Asaf Liberman quotes Smotrich saying.
• Don’t call him a dove yet, though. Smotrich, who founded the Regavim movement that protests Palestinian building in Area C, writes on Twitter that the plan is part of a master vision to take control of the territory after “a decade of Arab strategy.”
• “Building will only be that which serves Israel’s strategic and security interests, in order to torpedo [Palestinian] strategies,” he writes.
• “What enlightenment. 94? Palestinians should not only be submissive, but also static,” anti-occupation activist Daniel Siedemann responds sarcastically on Twitter. “Moved to Area C? You are a criminal. The only good Palestinian is a stationary Palestinian.”

7. Bombs over Baghdad: Israel is certainly not staying stationary, at least when it comes to its bombers. A report in pan-Arabic daily a-Sharq al-Awsat details that an Israeli F-35 fighter jet bombed an Iranian position outside of Baghdad on July 19, distracting a modicum of attention from elections for but a moment Tuesday morning.

• The paper says that “Israel has expanded the scope of its Iranian targets in Iraq and Syria,” attributing the information to Western diplomatic sources.
• “The sources revealed that the strikes targeted Iranian ‘advisors’ and a ballistic missile shipment that had recently arrived from Iran to Iraq,” the paper reports.
• The Saudi-based al-Arabiya network reported at the time that members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps and Hezbollah had been killed in the strike. It said the base had shortly before the strike received Iranian ballistic missiles, which had been hidden inside trucks.
• Minister Tzachi Hanegbi, who last week boasted about Israel killing Iranians, refuses to confirm the report when asked by Ynet. But he does say that Israeli attacks are mostly happening in Syria.

Asked if Israel has attacked Iranian targets in Iraq, Minister @Tzachi_Hanegbi offers neither confirmation nor denial, but says the military campaign to curb Iran's force deployments and arms transfers toward the the Levant is focused "mainly in Syria". (@Attilus @YnetNews)

— Dan Williams (@DanWilliams) July 30, 2019