Racing Headlong into New Elections By Ben Caspit @ Ma'ariv – December 16, 2020 If the poll that was reported last night by Hahadashot doesn’t stop the mad race to a new election, nothing is going to be able to stop it. That poll ought to be enough to keep Binyamin Netanyahu—not to mention Benny Gantz—unable to sleep at night. Both of them are liable to become history if the trend currently reflected by the recent polls proves to be real. But that mad race to elections has continued, nevertheless. The two leaders, who have kept their foot pressed down on the accelerator, are racing into what appears to be a head-on collision between them, after which both are likely to be defined as being “total losses,” and will be towed away to the political junkyard. Netanyahu never heads into a new election without first sewing up his future coalition government. This is going to the first time in the current era in which he might find himself doing just that. Gantz, at the pace of the current polls, isn’t going to run in the next election. If the alternate prime minister only knew how many of his ministers were negotiating behind his back their own political asylum in other parties, he would realize that his magazine is as empty of bullets as his column of seats in the polls. Despite all of that, the miscalculation is well underway. Both sides have sworn that they are not holding any talks with one another; the gaps between them appear to be unbridgeable; and new elections appear to be the most likely outcome. Having said all that, my working assessment is that Netanyahu and Gantz know how to communicate with one another without leaving even the slightest trace. The question as to which one of them is going to back down is moot. Gantz has nowhere to back down to. The only person who can still blink and save all of us from new elections is Netanyahu. He isn’t afraid of the alternating premiership arrangement anymore, on the assumption that he can lengthen his own term in office to two years. The one person who has truly gotten under his skin is Avi Nissenkorn, which proves that the justice minister is doing his job well. Gantz can’t remove Nissenkorn from the Justice Ministry. He knows that. The only solution is to reach an agreement about a work plan for the Justice Ministry and to reach understandings about the appointment of civil servants, creating a reality that both sides will be able to live with. It may be true that this reality was created by the last coalition agreement, an agreement that Netanyahu began to violate substantively from day-one when it became evident (to anyone still unfamiliar with his ways) that he had no intention of honoring the alternating premiership arrangement. But the conditions have changed since then. The changes on the right wing have made the alternating premiership arrangement the less bad option for Netanyahu. Then again, there is always the other possibility that the prime minister knows something that we don’t. That Netanyahu is hiding another ace somewhere deep up his sleeve, an unanticipated trump card of the kind that Netanyahu has played so many times in the past. A card that might explain his self- confidence ahead of the next election and his certainty that he will be better off after the election, and not worse off. Meanwhile, Gideon Saar has been executing a plan that he prepared long ago. Yifat Shasha-Biton was brought on board at the precise right moment in time. Now all that’s left is Gadi Eisenkot. But the former chief of staff appears to be determined not to decide. He isn’t in any rush, and he is right to feel that way. Saar and Eisenkot are in close contact with one another and speak with one another on a daily basis and sometimes more frequently than that. Eisenkot hasn’t demanded the second slot on the list. To the contrary, he believes the list should alternate between male and female candidates, at least in the top ten slots. I couldn’t say whether Saar agrees with him. Eisenkot has two guiding principles: he doesn’t want to top the list, and he doesn’t want to join the list on his own. He will have a problem being the lone dissenting voice in a decisively right-wing list. It is my impression that Eisenkot is put off by the exclusively right-wing nature of Saar’s list—at least in its current composition. Saar is going to have to show extraordinary acrobatic skills to keep his parking lot [a pervasively used metaphor by Israeli political commentators to describe disappointed centrist voters temporarily supporting a right-wing candidate as “parking” their support in that candidate’s “lot”], which replaced Naftali Bennett’s lot, where they had been parked up until this week. The voters are parked in Saar’s lot, but none of them have pulled on the emergency brake and turned off the ignition yet. Saar is situated well to the right of Eisenkot, and Saar’s list currently does not have the correct balance that is going to be needed if he wants to hold the stick at both ends. I have the feeling that Saar would be prepared to give his right kidney to get Ron Huldai, for instance, to join his party. To announce that he will serve as interior minister or education minister in his cabinet, the first appointment that will be locked down in 1 any coalition negotiations, an unbreakable campaign promise. Doing that would make the list far more centrist and would also increase the chances of Eisenkot joining it. Meanwhile, only one thing is certain beyond any doubt: Israel is a country that has gone off the rails. As I’ve written in my columns countless times the pro-Bibi/anti-Bibi energy is currently the most powerful natural force on Planet Earth. It is so powerful that it has overcome every other force out there. There isn’t a right wing and a left wing anymore; there isn’t any ideology, any agenda or anything else anymore. There is only half the public that is convinced that Netanyahu is the anointed messiah, and the other half that is convinced that he is a menace that puts Israel’s very existence at risk. Only that could have had the power to make Gideon Saar—a talented and staunchly ideological right-wing politician—the ultimate anti-Bibi candidate. Multitudes of Israelis have been desperately moving from one option to the next, motivated by just a single solitary criterion: who might be able to defeat Bibi. That candidate currently is Gideon Saar. As opposed to all his predecessors, he intends to do that from the right. That is something that no one has tried to do before. Gulf normalization isn’t about fearing Iran, it’s about embracing Israel By HAVIV RETTIG GUR TOI “You think you have chutzpah? We have chutzpah.” It was an unexpected line from a senior Emirati official, delivered recently in an off-the-record video conference call between current and former Israeli and Emirati officials. The conversation had turned to business ties, innovation and the cultural differences between the two countries. The official wanted to explain something important about the new Israeli-Arab normalization agreements that Abu Dhabi had helped start: not only why they are happening, but why they seem so inexplicably warm and genuine. The United Arab Emirates is most visible in this regard, but it isn’t the only one. Bahrain, too, is investing in a warm peace. And Sudan, while agonizing over the step itself — a breach of decades of ideological commitments vis-à-vis the Palestinians — has shown signs of wanting the normalization to reap more benefits than mere diplomatic contact or its removal from the US terror sponsors list. There is no shortage of benefits that have accrued to the countries that normalized relations with Israel in the waning days of the Trump administration. The Emiratis asked for F-35s, the Moroccans recognition of their claim over Western Sahara, the Sudanese an end to their 27-year stay on the terror list and protection from lawsuits linked to the previous regime. These benefits all explain why each government might agree to establish full diplomatic ties with Israel. But they don’t explain, for example, the Emirati government’s order that hotels offer kosher food in time for the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, or the eagerness of the UAE and Bahrain for direct flights to Tel Aviv, or the decision by one sheikh to buy into Jerusalem’s controversial Beitar soccer club. They don’t explain Morocco’s move in recent weeks to introduce a curriculum about the history and culture of the country’s Jews into state school. There are costs to that warmth. The Palestinians are furious not only at the opening of diplomatic relations — Egypt and Jordan already broke that taboo — but at what they see as a gratuitous embrace of Israel and Israelis. Iran, Muslim Brotherhood-linked regimes in Turkey and Qatar, and the opinions of many Arabs and Muslims from Morocco to Malaysia are against the move. If Israel had the population or economy of, say, Germany, the economic factor might be sufficient explanation for the embrace. But it doesn’t. Israel’s population is roughly that of Honduras, its GDP roughly that of Ireland.