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Photo: Gil Yohanan
Prime Minister Netanyahu. His actions reveal a suspicious and haunted person
Photo: Gil Yohanan
Photo: Gabriel Baharalia
Tami Arad
Photo: Gabriel Baharalia

Who is Netanyahu so afraid of?

Op-ed: At the moment, there is still no Israeli Trump on the horizon to challenge Netanyahu’s rule, yet the prime minister seems intimidated by the idea that the ‘hostile’ media will create such a person.

People who look at heads of state from a point of view which I will define by using the general term “ethical” are amazed that many US voters have failed to notice that Donald Trump is a thug. The chance that an aggressive person with a big mouth and distorted moral values would take over the world’s strongest democracy seemed unreasonable until recently. An event attributed mainly to dictatorial regimes.

 

 

It seems that most of Trump’s supporters have neither gone blind nor lost brain cells. The reason they are voting for him is that they have really had enough. They are fed up with manipulations, lies and false promises, and are translating the political correctness into corruption and leaders who are drunk with power. And so, paradoxically, they will vote for a person who is driven by megalomania. “He is not a politician,” his supporters reiterate, as they try to explain what makes them favor him over his rival.

 

The candidate seeking to replace Netanyahu one day will have to come from within the Likud. In Israel, the majority still hates the Left more than it hates political manipulations (Photo: Gil Yohanan)
The candidate seeking to replace Netanyahu one day will have to come from within the Likud. In Israel, the majority still hates the Left more than it hates political manipulations (Photo: Gil Yohanan)

 

Theoretically, a Trump twin could get up tomorrow morning and sweep the elections here as well. Someone who will manage to convince Israel’s citizens that the prime minister “has lost it.” That instead of dealing with security and economy, he is dealing with the media and personal vindictiveness. The political manipulations used by the prime minister, that candidate will say, are putting the state in danger. He will expose emails of one of the prime minister’s close associates who, to the horror of Likud voters, will be revealed not as a pedophile, but worse – as a Breaking the Silence activist.

 

In our reality, there is still no Israeli Trump in the horizon to threaten Benjamin Netanyahu, yet the prime minister seems intimidated by the idea that the “hostile” media will create one. My assumption is that the majority of Israeli citizens are not interested in the establishment or the cancellation of the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC). There are two main groups – politicians and journalists – that are occupied with this issue. Their influence cannot be underrated, but they are a marginal percentage of the population. Without conducting a survey, I can safely say that most of the state’s citizens are much more concerned about other burning issues, such as the terror threat, the privatization of social, health and educational services, the future of pensions and the ability to provide for their families.

 

An example of this gap between what the prime minister is occupied with and what the public is occupied with is the battle being waged by northern authority heads. Last August, the government reneged on its decision to allot NIS 18 billion (about $4.5 billion) to implement a national plan for the economic and social development of northern Israel, and the authority heads failed in their attempt to convey a message to the government that the north is about to go bankrupt.

 

The young people are leaving because there are no workplaces, patients are traveling to the center to get high-quality medical treatment, and according to reports, there is no trace of the northern communities’ economic distress in the new state budget. But the prime minister won’t let such things confuse him. In his speech at the opening of the Knesset’s winter session, he took pride in major investments in the periphery and in new roads that have been paved at a total investment of billions of shekels. He just forgot to mention how the new roads will help northern residents who are looking for work – how odd – in the area they live in of all places.

 

Indeed, the prime minister’s speech was filled with molecules of promises, optimism and satisfaction scattered in every direction. He conveyed calmness and self-confidence, but a look at his actions reveals a suspicious and haunted person who is prepared to erase hundreds of millions of shekels from the state budget – hundreds of millions which could have been transferred to the periphery communities which are yearning for investments – as long as he can stop what he sees as an “existential threat.”

 

In any event, if we go back to the issue we gathered here for, since Israel is not America – the theoretical candidate seeking to replace Netanyahu one day will have to come from within the Likud. In Israel, the majority still hates the Left more than it hates political manipulations.

 


פרסום ראשון: 11.04.16, 20:05
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