Sa’ar, not Sa’ar: 8 things to know for February 5

1. Primary time: Some 120,000 card-carrying Likud members are heading to the polls Tuesday for the party’s primary.

• With Likud the biggest party and one of only a handful with a primary, massive attention is being paid as to how the voting will shake out. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s place at the top of the party is already secured (thanks to another primary years ago), but the day will be make or break for many hoping to break into the Knesset, as well as politicians hoping to move up the party’s ranks.
• Given the nature of the primary, in which many vote according to pre-approved lists put out by specific political machines within the party, Yedioth Ahronoth reports that many candidates spent the last day not campaigning, but “in meetings and working the phones, in an attempt to improve their spot, close deals and thwart moves that could hurt their place on the party slate.”
• Nonetheless, Israel Hayom, which is seen as pro-Likud and pro-Netanyahu, calls it a “primary of wills, tension and democracy,” on its front page.
• Gideon Alon, writing a column in the paper, calls on voters to cast ballots based on what they think, and then goes ahead and lists the MKs he thinks they should think did a good job and should be placed high on the slate again.

2. Test for Netanyahu: The most closely watched story is whether former minister Gideon Sa’ar will be able to withstand Netanyahu’s open campaigning against him. That battle will also be a bellwether of how much electoral control Netanyahu still wields.

• Israel Hayom calls it most important battle in the primary, in which 150 people are competing for some 30 realistic spots.
• In Yedioth, Sima Kadmon calls Netanyahu’s open campaign against Sa’ar unprecedented. “A political assassination in broad daylight in front of 120,000 eyewitnesses,” she writes.
• Sa’ar isn’t the only person who could soon challenge Netanyahu, which is how he went from Likud golden boy to enemy No. 1 in the first place. Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer notes that many of the other top figures in Likud notably did not join in with Netanyahu when he began stepping up attacks on Sa’ar Sunday, which may point to this being the beginning of the end for him.
• “It’s much too early to say Netanyahu is losing control of his party. But for the first time, on the eve of the party primary in which his prospective successors will be testing their popularity against each other, it felt as if the Likudniks were hedging their bets. Bibi is still king, but Likud is in the first act of its palace coup,” he writes.
• The Walla news site notes that Netanyahu isn’t just going after Sa’ar, but anybody who has ever been near him, including minister Haim Katz, Sa’ar’s former spokesperson, and Katz’s former chief of staff.
• Channel 12 calls the whole primary vote a test for Netanyahu. “Will the final slate just have people he is okay with, or also those whose candidacy he tried to sink?”

3. No results until Wednesday: Polls open at 10 a.m. and close at 10:30 p.m, but Netanyahu and the rest of the public will have to wait until early Wednesday to find out the results, Yedioth reports, since the votes will be counted by hand.

• ToI’s Raoul Wootliff notes that turnout for Likud primaries is normally just over 50 percent, meaning just some 60,000 ballots to count. Labor, the other major party that holds a primary, does slightly better with 61.

4. Still sitting pretty: A Haaretz poll shows Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s chief non-Likud rival, continuing to maintain his bump in popularity a week after he launched his campaign, raising his poll numbers from the mid-teens to the low 20s.

• The poll also finds that 47 percent don’t want another Netanyahu-led government, while 35% do.
• But they may not have a choice. The paper’s Yossi Verter notes that if the numbers hold, Netanyahu will be able to form a coalition of “natural partners” taking up 64 seats. “Netanyahu’s nightmare scenario, in which one or two of the parties that are ‘natural partners’ don’t make it past the voter threshold, does not seem to be coming true – for the moment.”

5. Airplane! the party: The poll also showed Jewish Home garnering six seats, a strong showing given that earlier polls had it falling below 4, i.e., out of the Knesset.

• Speaking at a party event Monday night, new leader Rafi Peretz (a former IDF chief rabbi and helicopter pilot) said the party wasn’t crashing, just awaiting takeoff.
• “What I see is a plane that is ready and fueled, with its engines working and the cockpit open,” he said. “Only the pilot is gone.”
• He also attacked the party’s former pilot and navigator, Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, who he said used the party, ToI’s Jacob Magid reports.
• “There are those who think that our house is old. Not shiny enough. Not adaptable enough. They walk through it, enter for a short period, enjoy it, use it and continue on their way,” he said, without mentioning the two by name, and signaling that rather than join back together, they would fight for the same votes.
• At the same event, party activists chose Moti Yogev as Peretz’s No. 2. Though it’s not yet clear how its joint list with National Union will look, it likely means that Eli Ben Dahan, formerly the No. 2, will not make it back into the Knesset.

6. A raft of graft: Yogev is perhaps best known for quipping that a bulldozer should raze the Supreme Court as he fumed over a settlement evacuation years ago.

• Yet at the same time he was being elected, in Modiin Bezalel Smotrich, who will likely lead the joint Jewish Home National Union faction, told a good-government conference that “critics of the judicial system, including myself, do not ask, God forbid, to harm it.”
• Reporting from the conference, ToI’s Wootliff notes that while everyone from right to left agreed on fighting corruption, nobody could agree what corruption is.
• “Speaker after speaker offered dramatically different takes on the scourge, with each political leader projecting their own agendas onto their understanding of the graft they said needed to be stopped,” he writes.
• On the right, Smotrich called the judiciary corrupt, in the center Netanyahu’s attempts to sully the judiciary were called corrupt, and on the left, the West Bank occupation was the main corrupting influence.

7. Take my Kahanist, please: Smotrich also rejected Netanyahu’s attempt to get the party to join up with extremists from Otzma Yehudit, saying they would fit in better with Likud.

• Nonetheless, Israel Hayom reports that the nationalist camp agrees with Netanyahu, but is too busy squabbling to make it happen.
• “This fighting could keep us from forming a government,” it quotes minister Ze’ev Elkin saying.

8. Crappy situation: Whatever petty ego battles may be going on aren’t nearly as small as what almost got the US and Iran (and possibly Russia) into a direct confrontation in Syria: A port-a-potty.

• Foreign Policy reports that in 2017, after Iranians in Syria set up an outpost some 20 miles from the al-Tanf base near the Iraqi border, the US thought it came to some sort of understanding with Russia by which the Iranians could sit there, but not come any closer and not build it up.
• A day later, a port-a-potty was trucked in. US commanders called in an airstrike on the offending toilet, but drone operators in Qatar refused to comply with the command, saving the country from pooping the bed.
• An official is quoted calling the idea that the port-a-potty demonstrated a threat “ludicrous.”