Ben Caspit - The Netanyahu Years

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To those who dared to speak

March 2015

On Wednesday, March 11, 2015, six days before the general election, Benjamin Netanyahu summoned a few leaders of the settler movement to an urgent meeting at the prime ministers Jerusalem residence. It wasnt the ordinary forum of Judea and Samaria leaders, those who have ties with the media and regularly leak the contents of their meetings with the PM to the press. This was to be a key meeting; historic, even. Netanyahu required complete secrecy. He had invited only people in whom he had absolute faith: those closest to him, the most experienced and reliable activists on the ground, the people who could tell Netanyahu what he needed to know.

What he most wanted on that day were voters. The last weeks of the campaign had turned into a catastrophe for Netanyahu. Everything that could go wrong had gone wrong. After unilaterally calling the election to score an easy victory, he suddenly found himself slipping behind his enemy, Yitzhak Herzog, in all the polls. From a sure winner and eternal prime minister, Netanyahu turned into a lame duck waiting to be put out of its misery. Herzog was leading by a steady two to four points. The street was controlled by left-wing NGOs funded by American billionaires supporting the peace process. Those parts of the media that could not yet be controlled by Netanyahu filled the headlines with derogatory stories about his wife and him. A constant stream of former generals called for Netanyahus ouster and replacement, claiming he was jeopardizing Israels security. According to most pollsters the gap between Netanyahu and Herzog was even greater, and the wider it became, the sooner Netanyahus imminent collapse. Herzogs campaign managers spoke of a double-digit victory. It had happened before to Netanyahu in 1999 when he was pushed from office by Ehud Barak. Bibi had opened that campaign with a lead of 1 or 2 percent and ended it with total failure.

During the final weeks of the 2015 campaign, Netanyahu was subjected to a seemingly endless series of electoral catastrophes. The media were full of stories of his wifes obsession with collecting empty bottles for recycling and pocketing the deposit on bottles bought with public funds. There was the state comptrollers report on greedy and wasteful spending in the PMs residences (both official and private); a failed broadcast campaign comparing the countrys larger trade unions with Hamas in Gaza; and there was the ongoing housing and real estate crisis in Israel, most of the responsibility for which fell on Netanyahus shoulders. All this added to the fact that less than a year earlier, Tel Aviv had been bombed by Hamas nonstop for two months. There was more. In short, Bibi was everyones scapegoat. Led by the free daily Israel Today , financed by a staunch supporter, the American casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, he tried to fight back, but by this time Netanyahu was drowning in a flood of bad news that threatened his tenure in the prime ministers office.

Netanyahu was under siege. He was surrounded by political adversaries aspiring to replace him, or at least to kick him out of office. Moshe Kahlon, a former minister in his government, resigned and established a rival party, Kulanu. Kahlon had already closed a coalition deal with Labors Herzog. Kahlon intended to go with Herzog even in the event of a draw with Netanyahu. Kahlons wish to depose Netanyahu was an ambition shared by others: Avigdor Lieberman, who had sworn to depose Bibi, was in on it, as was Yair Lapid, who seemed to feel that getting rid of Netanyahu was his mission in life. Even Shas leader Aryeh Machluf Deri was sick of Netanyahu saying behind closed doors that he would do everything he could to rid the country of his leadership, even if this meant sitting in the same coalition as Yair Lapid.

In Likud, too, things were looking bad: Netanyahu had virtually no strongholds within his own party, except for that devoted stalwart, cabinet minister Yuval Steinitz. Many Likud MKs had already begun deploying for the day after. Some of them held secret meetings with former minister Gideon Saar, who had resigned several months earlier and swore to do everything in his power to remove Netanyahu from the prime ministers office. The knives were unsheathed and honed for Bibis downfall, which was meant to take place the day after his election defeat. Senior Likud members vowed to learn their lesson from the 2006 defeat, when the party, under Netanyahus leadership, won only twelve Knesset seats, an unprecedented political low, but at that time none of them had had the power to overthrow him. This time, the Likud leaders would not let that happen. They would not grant him a single minute of grace. According to the plan, Netanyahu would be overthrown immediately after his defeat.

Benjamin Netanyahu heard it all and saw it all. He was alone against the world. From Washington to the European capitals down to the city of Tel Aviv, everybody wanted to be rid of him. Yitzhak Herzog took wing and nested in Jerusalem, Likuds stronghold and Bibis city.

It was during these days that, against all odds, he was infused yet again with the Bibi Spirit made famous in his first campaign. Call it the spirit of resolve, the refusal to quit, the code of the last man standing. Suddenly, Netanyahu had gone back twenty years to the days when he was young and full of energy, the great white hope of the Israeli right. Then he had managed to achieve the unbelievable: to defeat Shimon Peres only six months after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Then, too, no one believed he stood a chance. The day after the Rabin assassination, he was sure the right didnt have a hope of winning an election for the next twenty years at least. But he won.

Netanyahus wife, Sara, was also present at the meeting in the PMs residence on the Wednesday before the elections. Bibi and Sara are two people completely united in personality and spirit. Several of the campaign leaders were also present at that meeting, including Shlomo Momo Filber, a long-standing Netanyahu associate and a successful operations officer in everything concerning the Judea and Samaria regional council. Filber was the campaigns operations officer, responsible, too, for the program devised at that meeting. Netanyahu looked at the assembled settlement activists before him before embarking on the speech of his life. As far as he was concerned, at that moment this speech was even more important than the one he had delivered to the U.S. Congress.

I suggest you start packing, Netanyahu told his guests. I am facing defeat. The left is about to win the election. I will be ousted from the PMs office, but its you wholl be paying the real price. You will be ousted from your homes. Remember the disengagement from Gaza? Its back. The left will form a government that will dry out the entire settlement enterprise. Some of you will have to leave the House; others will simply be dried out. But its not too late. It all depends on us and, especially, you. You have to understand the gravity of the situation. Its a war of to be or not to be, a war for our home, for the Land of Israel. First you need to know that a vote for Naftali Bennett and Jewish Home is tantamount to a vote for the left. So maybe Bennett will get three to four more seats, but Herzog will form the government. The minute you understand this, you have to pass it on. To your family, your friends, everyone who is part of this huge settlement enterprise. They all have to understand the repercussions of a vote for Bennett in this election.