The Prime Minister Who Cried "Wolf"

23 Tevet 5779

You could see it coming and the Times has called it well...

In an interview with the pro-settler NRG news site just a day before the 2015 parliamentary elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a warning to the Israeli right.

Asked whether he would renew Jewish construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank if reelected, the premier dodged. “The question is not about additional building. There is a real threat now that a leftist government will join the international community and do what they want,” he said, arguing that the last time a left-wing party led the coalition, roughly two decades earlier, former prime minister Ehud Barak was “willing to give up everything.”

Netanyahu waited until a day before the elections to release such flares directed at settler voters. They were said to have been part of a last-minute fear-mongering campaign that polls subsequently indicated helped pull as many as four seats from the national-religious Jewish Home party to the prime minister’s Likud, boosting his faction to a solid 30-24 seat victory over the center-left Zionist Union.

Last Wednesday, just two days after the 2019 elections were announced, Netanyahu showed that he was not planning to waste any time, and opened his meeting with settler leaders with a nearly identical warning to the one he gave four years before.

“In the upcoming election campaign, we will see an attempt by the left to oust us from power,” the prime minister told West Bank settlement council chairmen at his Jerusalem office.

“It’s a battle over our homes,” he continued. “The fate of the state and the settlement enterprise are not to be taken for granted… Because later on, under a leftist government, everything will be reversed immediately.”

I really can't imagine any knowledgeable person falling for this political trick, but then there are a lot of uninformed people out there. If you know any of them, please remind them of the following as presented in a 2009 BBC article...

Right-wing withdrawals

To begin with, there was Menachem Begin, the first right-wing Israeli prime minister.

Thirty years ago, he concluded a peace treaty with Egypt, which involved Israel withdrawing from the Sinai peninsula - a huge area Israel had conquered in the 1967 war.

In the nineties, in his first tenure as prime minister, Mr Netanyahu agreed to hand over parts of the West Bank, and much of Hebron, to Palestinian control.

...Four years ago, Ariel Sharon took Israeli settlers out of Gaza.

Neither of these withdrawals brought a peace deal closer.

Indeed, both men won power, in part, precisely because they positioned themselves as rejecting the Oslo accords of the early nineties.

And the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, the Labour prime minister who signed those accords, robbed history of discovering whether significant territorial concessions would have followed.

What we do know is that the withdrawals ordered by Mr Netanyahu and Mr Sharon were reviled by those on the hard right.

And, according to Silvan Shalom, deputy prime minister and foreign minister in the last Likud government, they exploded the myth of the left as the only partners of peace.

"History shows us that the leftists never withdrew from an inch of any territory," he says,....

..."Historically, only leaders from the so-called right have made territorial concessions. So paradoxically - although for me it's not a paradox, because no leader of the left will dare to do it - those who are pro-concessions to the Arabs should vote Netanyahu."

And why have elections been called just now? Of course, to prepare the way for the worst concessions ever agreed to in Israeli history - "The Deal of the Century." Having just come off of new elections, whoever leads the government will have carte blanche for agreeing to anything.

...And as Tom Segev, one of Israel's foremost historians, points out, should the Americans be keen to push a peace deal..., Mr Netanyahu might be receptive.

"Netanyahu is a man who thinks America, he grew up in America," says Mr Segev.

Some people are catching on to this trick. Some younger settlement leaders are not so easily manipulated, but their influence is being seen as limited, that they...

...represent a fringe group of settlers that will eventually return to [Netanyahu's] limited embrace when they realize that at the end of the day, he is the only thing preventing the rise of a left-wing, settlement-evacuating prime minister.

How many times can Netanyahu cry "wolf" and get away with it?

In truth, it is only HKB"H who is the only thing standing between us and disaster.  That's why, when it comes to elections, our only choice is to support the most righteous, God-fearing, Torah-observant person to lead us and leave all other calculations to HKB"H.

May He have mercy on us and bring us at long last to the rule of our righteous redeemer.