Three days ago we asked here [2]whether Naftali Bennett is about to take from Netanyahu not only a quarter of his voters but also his mantle as Israel's superstar in the international media. Now in addition to having become a regular interviewee in some of the world's leading newspapers, Bennett can also boast that he is the main focus of a 9,100-word feature in this week's New Yorker, [3] written by no less than the magazine's editor in chief, David Remnick.
While Remnick's piece is an in-depth assessment of the entire election campaign, he is convinced that "the central story of this political moment" is not Benjamin Netanyahu's inevitable victory but the role of the Habayit Hayehudi chairman. Remnick notes that he has "rarely seen a novice politician so confident, and with such reason." He conducted two interviews with Bennett and the result is a more insightful and informative profile of Habayit Hayehudi's leader than anything available in the Israeli media so far.
So what new details can we learn about Bennett from The New Yorker?
- His wife makes a creme brulee to die for.
- He uses "Seinfeld" and "The Sopranos" as cultural references.
- He is guided by a quote from Teddy Roosevelt.
- He has been gay-friendly since his army days ("I could tell you stories.")
- Bennett earned between $3 million and $4 million before taxes from the sale of his software company Cyota, not the $145 million some have claimed. Sure, it's a lot of money, but it certainly won't make him the richest member of the next Knesset, as at least one newspaper has described him.
But Remnick's article offers a lot more than these intriguing details. Much of it is a historical and contemporary analysis of the Israeli religious right, including a short but very interesting bit about the man who was the most famous religious rightist in the country before the dawn of Bennett, Likud's troublemaker Moshe Feiglin.
Bennett, Remnick diagnoses, is not another Feiglin or just some other settler leader, but "the face of the next generation of religious nationalism." He is the man who is normalizing the view that Israel will rule the West Bank forever, blurring the Green Line and divisions between religious and secular Israelis.
But we now that we know where Bennett fits in the historical narrative of Zionism, do we know yet what his core values are? I don't think this is any omission on the part of Remnick, I just don't think Bennett has much depth and while his radicalism is believable, he is much more an opportunist who has hijacked a venerable party and used it for his own purposes than an ideology.
He certainly has little sense of history or Jewish learning. Remnick writes how he arrives at Bennett's Raanana home just as he is finishing a tutorial with a local rabbi on parshat ha-shavua (the weekly Torah portion). I doubt he would be spending valuable campaigning time, boning up on the most basic of Jewish texts, or would need the help of a rabbi, if he much of a grounding and did not urgently need some bright ideas or vortim, for his appearances before more knowledgeable crowds.
Bennett's talks of the land of Israel belonging to the Jewish people "for thirty-eight hundred years," but displays his ignorance of more recent Israeli history when he presents his role as "a handover of the baton from security-based Zionism to a Jewish-based Zionism" and says that among "the national-religious leaders, that stuff—corruption, et cetera—doesn’t happen. In the army, in the settlements, whether you like it or not, there is idealism.”
No corruption? He probably missed the headlines this week about Colonel Erez Wiener, a national-religious army man, and a settler, who was just drummed out of the IDF for being part of a ring that collected incriminating information on senior officers and the defense minister's close circle. And it's true that Habayit Hayehudi, or as it was called not long ago, the National Religious Party's (NRP) leaders, were not involved in corruption over the last three decades, but was that because they were all such upstanding citizens or that they were rarely politically powerful enough to carry out any major sleaze.
But going back to the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s when NRP was still a major player in every government, some of its most prominent members featured in some of the most famous corruption cases of the age. Bennett apparently likes googling information on his smartphones, he should check out Yitzhak Rafael and the Tel-Giborim bribery case, Aharon Abuhatzira (larceny, bribery, breach of trust, fraud) and the Afarsek (peach) File cover-up.
Bennett seems certain to return the national-religious movement to the center of power. We shall see if he and they remain as clean as they were when they were political minnows.
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