When does Netanyahu take off his mask? No one knows
Photo: Ido Erez
Elyakim Haetzni
Photo: GNET
Likud MKs must curb Netanyahu, even if it splits party
Op-ed: As long as Likud leader supports the creation of a Palestinian state, his party cannot be considered part of 'national camp.'
It is only on the final days of the election campaign, following the publication of the "concessions document,"
that the thing which actually defines the political division between left and right is being placed on the agenda: Keeping the land of Israel whole or dividing it.
This paper doesn’t include any major innovations. Its innovation is in the fact that it was published at an inconvenient timing. It matches the Bar-Ilan speech,
the construction freezes, the decision to put Tzipi Livni in charge of the negotiations over the Land of Israel and the compliments she gave Netanyahu, up to the very moment, over the generous scope of his concessions.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the document is an American draft, but American drafts don't just fall from the sky – they are presented after discussions and after receiving the consent of both sides that they will serve as a basis for negotiations "subject to reservations," in legal language. In people's language, there is no agreement but there is a basis for discussion.
Unavoidable Future
Eitan Haber
Op-ed: One horrible day, the American empire which we depend on will decide that 100,000, 200,000 or 300,000 people must evacuate their homes in Judea and Samaria.
Netanyahu's denials should be read carefully. His claim, for example, that he refused to evacuate the Jordan Valley doesn’t contradict settling for several military posts on the river, like the willingness to withdraw from the Golan Heights excluding several mountain ridges and the presence of an IDF representative within an American team.
Likud members have no other option but to pledge not to let any withdrawal, expulsion or introduction of a foreign sovereignty pass (Photo: Motti Kimchi)
When he focused on centrist voters, Netanyahu made sure to express himself with leftist codes. Now that his orientation is to the right, he is visiting communities which he had stayed away from for years, and is praising the Land of Israel. At the time, he voted both in favor of the disengagement-expulsion and against it. He destroyed Jewish construction, and also built quite a lot.
How does he do it? How can he present as "rightist" a stance which supports the establishment of a foreign state in the heart of the country and which will necessarily require the expulsion of Jewish settlers or abandon them to an Arab rule?
We shouldn’t call him a liar and say he is intentionally deceiving us. Netanyahu is not lying; he is playing a role. And when does an actor convince us? When he succeeds in totally identifying with the character he plays. When does Netanyahu get off the stage? When does he take off his costume and go back to being himself? No one knows that. That's why everyone, both in the right and in the left, believed him and was disappointed by him at some point in time.
Netanyahu is not the only one we should complaint about. His governments, with and without the masks, had many achievements, in the social area as well. The complaints should be directed at the victims of his games, and first and foremost the settlers, whose existence he is jeopardizing, and his party members, whose ideological faith and way he is deceiving. Because as long as the party leader supports a Palestinian state, the name "national camp" befits it just like "Zionist camp" befits Zuhair Bahloul (the Zionist Union's Israeli Arab candidate for Knesset).
How can Knesset Members Zeev Elkin, Yariv Levin, Yuli Edelstein, Tzipi Hotovely and many others get themselves out of this dead end of a party whose written platform contradicts its leader's declared policy? Under which banner will they call on voters to vote Likud?
They have no other option but to pledge not to let any initiative of a withdrawal, expulsion or introduction of a foreign sovereignty pass, even at the cost of splitting the party – as their friends did in Ariel Sharon's Likud. With such a curbing system, they will be able to say, calmly, that as long as Netanyahu is in the right, he is acting very well.
