After Netanyahu: Israel’s new government and American Jewry

Many observers of Israeli politics, myself included, have opined regarding former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s increasingly desperate efforts to hang on to power and his churlish behaviour once it became evident that he would be relegated to the opposition benches. Netanyahu has not been shy about asserting that he will do everything he can to return to office; it is the only way he can be sure to avoid conviction and possible imprisonment on the multiple charges of bribery that have been brought against him.

Naftali Bennett’s maiden speech to the Knesset [parliament] as Prime Minister could not have marked a greater contrast between his character and that of Netanyahu. Netanyahu had called Bennett among other epithets, “a serial liar” and “a habitual liar”— this from a man who alienated his closest allies when they no longer felt they could trust him. On the other hand, Bennett magnanimously praised his predecessor. “As Prime Minister”, he said, “you acted throughout many years to embolden Israel’s political, security, and economic strength.” He even had a good word to say about Netanyahu’s highly controversial wife, Sara.

Bennett and his new government have established a set of priorities that likewise differ in several significant ways from those Netanyahu pursued. To begin with, whereas Netanyahu thrived on internal conflict within the Israeli populace, Bennett has made it clear that his objective is quite the opposite. As he put it in his address, “The ongoing rift in the nation, as we see in these very moments…continues to rip apart the seams that hold us together…Such quarrels, between the people who are supposed to be running the country, led to paralysis…The time has come…to stop this madness.”

In addition, and again in contrast to Netanyahu’s several terms of office, Bennett, whose coalition includes for the first time an Arab Islamist party, promised “a new approach toward Israel’s Arab citizens”: to “fight against crime and violence, the housing crisis, the gaps in education and infrastructure.” In that context he also committed to “begin the process of regulating the Bedouin settlements in the Negev [Israel’s southern desert], so that Israel’s Bedouin citizens can live in dignity.” He made numerous commitments to improving the welfare of Israel’s other underprivileged groups, including its older citizens. And he began the process of unravelling the ultra-Orthodox dominated Chief Rabbinate’s stranglehold on the social and personal lives of Israel’s Jewish population. 

Bennett and Yair Lapid — his leading coalition partner, Foreign Minister-designate and alternate Prime Minister-designate — have assured the Israeli public that they, like Netanyahu, would work to deepen Israel’s burgeoning relationships with Arab states, while also continuing to oppose the renewal of the Iran nuclear deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA). Nevertheless, both made clear that their opposition would not be anything nearly as strident as Netanyahu’s had been, and that in general one of their leading foreign policy priorities would be to repair the rupture that Netanyahu had almost deliberately caused with the US Democratic Party, primarily through his opposition to the deal. As Lapid put it, “The outgoing Netanyahu Administration took a terrible gamble in focusing only on the Republicans and abandoning Israel’s bipartisan standing.” In fact, the gamble did not pay off. There is a growing movement among both younger Democrats and those on the party’s extreme left wing to punish Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. And among those younger Democrats are many Jewish Americans, who have come to see Israel as little more than a powerful bully that refuses to countenance a two-state solution, but instead continues to expand the settlement enterprise on the West Bank. 

Both Bennett and Lapid have recognized that it is essential to close the widening gap between Israel and the liberal, overwhelmingly Democratic, and heavily non-Orthodox American Jewish community. Bennett knows America and Jewish Americans well. His parents were American born; he spent time and made his fortune in America; and his English is as fluent as Netanyahu’s. He has visited American Jewish schools, making a point of relating to younger schoolchildren. 

For his part Lapid has long maintained excellent ties with many American Jewish groups, and has been supportive of efforts to promote religious equality in Israel, which long has been a sore point for the Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and even the Liberal Orthodox streams of American Jewry. As Lapid put it shortly after the new government was voted into office, Israel’s relationship with Jewish Americans “is the most important relationship, and the one that needs to be worked on more than any other”. Indeed, the key to winning at least some degree of greater support among Democrats will be the extent to which Lapid makes good on his promise to America’s Jewish community. 

It will not be easy. Netanyahu’s base includes the ultra-Orthodox Haredim whose sole objectives have been to stifle any attempt to loosen their grip on Israeli Jewish religious life and to obtain maximum funding for their seminary students, while exempting them from military service. His base also includes religious settlers, the Hardalim, whose rabbis share many of the views of the ultra-Orthodox but also are among the most radical proponents of West Bank settlement. 

These two groups bitterly oppose any concession to non-Orthodox Jewish Americans, and have convinced Netanyahu and his closest advisers that there is no need to accommodate them because within a few decades they will have disappeared through assimilation and intermarriage. I was told as much by Tzipi Hotovely, when she visited my synagogue in suburban Washington, DC while serving as Netanyahu’s Deputy Foreign Minister (she is currently Israel’s Ambassador to the UK). Whether that assumption will prove correct is highly debatable, and in any event does not address the challenge posed by the American Jewish community as it is currently constituted. Whether Lapid and, for that matter, Bennett, can begin to accommodate Jewish American concerns, which revolve around reducing control over personal status issues, like recognition of non-Orthodox conversions, is an open question. 

Netanyahu may succeed in dividing a fragile coalition government against which he has promised to conduct a “daily battle…to topple it”. Even if he fails to do so, Bennett, Lapid and their colleagues had better be serious about their commitment to a new outreach to American Jews, and perhaps through them to the Democratic Party. That is, if they wish once again to command the strong bipartisan American political support for the Jewish State that Netanyahu has disastrously dissipated over the past decade.

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