The coalition and its propaganda outlets’ determined effort to prevent voters from abandoning its camp is focused on demonizing two centers of influence: MK Mansour Abbas and the Democrats party. The former is already rejected by most members of the opposing bloc, but the campaign against Yair Golan and his allies has achieved no small amount of success, as evidenced by the statements of Avigdor Lieberman.
Precisely because of this, the remarkable meeting revealed Tuesday night on Channel 13, in which the Ger Rebbe, Rabbi Yaakov Aryeh Alter, was seen socializing with billionaire Yoely (Joel) Landau of the anti-Zionist Satmar Hasidic community, should be considered a seismic event. The fact that the leader of the wealthy and powerful Hasidic sect, whose representative in the Knesset served as housing minister until a year ago, maintains warm ties with a group that takes pride in denying the existence of the State of Israel is evidence of extraordinary hypocrisy.
The Ger Rebbe exits Landau’s private plane
Every figure on the left is expected to check 500 times that they are not sharing the same air with “haters of Israel” (meaning, for example, those who oppose the occupation), but the top authority over MK Yitzhak Goldknopf is allowed to fly to the United States on Landau’s private plane, as reported by Shilo Freid in ynet. Landau is a man who calls the IDF a “defiled army” and uses his wealth to campaign against any compromise in the dispute over Haredi military enlistment. He said of rabbis who sought to examine what could be done that they were “make compromises to defile the yeshiva students of Israel and send their sons to the Zionist Moloch.”
In the meeting with the Ger Rebbe, which was also attended by political operatives such as Motti Babchik, who knows the corridors of power as if they were the synagogue where he prays, it became clear that even this was not enough: The rebbe was asked his opinion on turning to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague to complain about the state’s treatment and, apparently, to impose sanctions on it.
Political activist Israel Gefner also revealed that a team had already been established in America to handle complaints about police violence.
Although the Ger Rebbe is 87 years old, he is still capable of uttering phrases such as “unthinkable,” “God forbid” and “get out of my sight” — but he chose not to. The result is a complete absurdity: Every interview in which someone on the left merely hints at the need for the world to intervene in what is happening in the West Bank, for example, sparks an uproar and demands for condemnation and disqualification. Here, in front of the cameras (and the Ger Rebbe is not an influencer, this does not happen every day), the public is informed of the establishment of a foreign-funded, anti-Zionist informant network, and it is being launched under the auspices of the Hasidic sect that much of the right (Likud, Otzma Yehudit and Religious Zionism) considers a “natural partner.”
Naturally, the silence from the coalition, which spends all day warning against a government “with the Arabs,” is unsurprising: Standards are not the strong suit of a government in which the defense minister allows himself to walk out of a cabinet meeting on the day two soldiers were buried, simply to attend a family event of a convicted criminal such as Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto.
What is puzzling is that the other side and its leaders are also failing to take advantage of every possible platform to tear away the mask and expose the ruling bloc’s deep ties with clearly anti-Zionist elements, in a way that would make a mockery of the delegitimization campaign against parties such as the Democrats and Ra’am.
The possibility that a Ger representative could sit around the next government table — a faction that is no longer merely flirting with the Satmar Hasidim but is engaged in a passionate affair with them — should launch a simple campaign: Not only do Netanyahu, Smotrich and their allies complain about a government with Ra’am while intending to form a government with non-Zionist parties, but they and their colleagues are also doing nothing to stop the growing influence of anti-Zionism in Haredi politics.
How is it that Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman have not come out and said that the Ger Rebbe is setting a table for Israel’s enemies and that forming a government with him is madness? Is this the usual helplessness? Or is it preferable not to get entangled with someone like Motti Babchik? In the end, the votes will be counted, and who knows whether the Satmar allies will be the difference between a shekel and a penny.