“Whoever plans to hurt us during the day can never be sure that he will make it through the night.” These chilling words were delivered by Naftali Bennett, back in 2019, when he held the position of Israel’s interim Defence minister. Today, he is the country’s Prime Minister. And, it appears that his politics remain ultra-nationalistic, openly threatening and unapologetically aggressive. Could he, then, be touted as the next saviour for Israel’s settlers; who continue to colonise Palestinian land?
In the midst of this latest political earthquake that has shaken Benjamin Netanyahu out of power after 12 consecutive and brutal years, many are curious about the two men who have replaced him. For Bennett and his Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid, have agreed on a power-sharing deal that will see them split the premiership between them over the next four years. The new government has assumed power against a backdrop of increasingly common settler attacks on the Palestinian people. Thus, one would not be wrong in concluding that this latest development acts as a foreshadowing of sorts; a dire future awaiting the Palestinian cause.
In order to understand the situation fully, one must delve deeper into how Israel has found itself in the midst of such fundamental change. Over the past two years, Netanyahu’s desire to hold onto power has plunged Israel’s political system into crisis. He has become so individually polarising that a range of ideological allies turned against him. The new Israeli government is an unprecedented eight-party alliance of the political right and left, Jews and Arabs, all dedicated to one goal: ending the Netanyahu era. At the same time, there are ways that, even under new leadership, Israeli policy is unlikely to change.
Naftali Bennett is Israel’s first Prime Minister to identify as religious, rather than secular, and is also the first to have lived in one of the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank; which are illegal under international law
With Netanyahu out of the picture, the coalition remains divided on pretty much everything else. In addition, it enjoys the smallest possible majority in parliament. This means that to get anything done, every single member will have to reach consensus. It is unclear how long this alliance will last; previous ones that were more ideologically coherent have fallen apart quicker.
As independent journalist and author Antony Loewenstein put it to Turkish public broadcaster TRT World back in May: “Netanyahu’s replacement, Bennett, will not help to improve Israel’s image. He’s a right-wing, pro-settler ideologue who believes in Jewish supremacy and the denial of equal rights for Palestinians.” Loewenstein is not wrong. The five overriding facts that anyone interested in Middle East politics needs to know about Bennett are: he has bragged about killing Palestinians; uses scriptures to defend apartheid; denies that Palestinians have ever been displaced by Israelis; proposes to annex 60 percent of the West Bank; and opposes Palestinian statehood. He also makes a point of referring to the West Bank by its Biblical Hebrew name of Judea and Samaria.
In 2013, he said Palestinian “terrorists should be killed, not released”. He has courted controversy on several occasions, once stating that the West Bank is not under occupation because “there was never a Palestinian state here”, and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could not be resolved but must be endured. Beyond holding the Defence portfolio, Bennett has served as Netanyahu’s minister for Economy and also Education.
Most importantly, Naftali Bennett is Israel’s first Prime Minister to identify as religious, rather than secular, and is also the first to have lived in one of the Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank; which are illegal under international law. It is perhaps then, this love for the land he has physically colonised and lived on which fuels the fire within and has led him to issue statements such as this, which he did in an interview in February : “As long as I have any power and control, I won’t hand over one centimetre of land of the Land of Israel. Period.”
Bennett has also taken a hard line on dealing with the threat from armed Palestinian groups, for whom he has said he supports the death penalty. This has never been applied in Israel apart from in the case of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi architect of the Holocaust who was convicted in Jerusalem in 1961 and hanged the following year. And while the world may not be ready for an ultra-nationalist, religious Zionist — it’s what they’re getting with Bennett. How will the US, Israel’s biggest supporter, then, deal with this migraine of a man who does not even entertain the thought of a two-state solution? Only time will tell.
Naftali Bennett is exactly the kind of man that word politics does not need. With Al Jazeera journalist, Givara Budeiri, having just been attacked by the Israeli military, we see the true face of Israeli terrorism gaining brazen momentum. Thus, with Bennett at the helm, the world can be assured of an end to even the pretence of striving for human rights and security in a region where bloodshed and cruelty have already become the norm.
The writer is a lawyer and teacher based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. She writes for the Sri Lanka-based “The Morning” newspaper and tweets @writergirl_11