Dangerous Despair By Ben-Dror Yemini Yedioth Ahronoth – June 1, 2021 This isn’t going to be easy. And until it happens, the entire country is going to be on edge. The temperature is rising and so is the incitement, which is peaking once again. We’ve seen this before. We know how it is liable to end. We can only hope that that doesn’t happen this time. Just one thing is perfectly clear: the fraud campaign that was mounted by Netanyahu’s machine to shift blame away from Bezalel Smotrich and onto Naftali Bennett. The truth is the other way around. Smotrich, and no one else, prevented a right-wing government with the United Arab List from being formed. Everything was in place. Naftali Bennett and Yamina were prepared to join. But Smotrich vetoed the idea. The center and left ought to send him a bouquet of flowers. And now, he of all people, is repeatedly telling the bald-faced lie that “Bennett prevented a right-wing government from being formed.” That lie deserves to be in the Guinness Book of World Records. All the talk about “right” and “left” is a fallacy. The elections were never about the settlements, annexation or a Palestinian state. They weren’t about the justice system or a boxing match between Second Israel and First Israel either [a reference to Avishai Ben Haim’s reductive theory that explains every political development in Israel through the lens of a battle between first a secular, aloof and Ashkenazi “First Israel,” and the traditionally- observant, authentic and Sephardi “Second Israel” and its champion, Netanyahu]. These elections were about just one thing only: Bibi—yes or no. The public spoke, and the pro-Netanyahu bloc failed to win a majority. This was the fourth consecutive time that Netanyahu failed to win a majority. But he has refused to take the hint, which was thicker than an elephant’s leg. He wants to drag us into another election. That would be bad for Israel, but Netanyahu wants to gamble on all of us. That isn’t the way a person who presumes to be the representative of the national camp ought to act. Doing so is tantamount to kicking aside Israel’s national interests. He has no qualms about wasting billions of shekels, and then wasting billions more, to send the roulette wheel spinning round again and again in hope that he might finally win. It was rather ludicrous to hear Netanyahu accuse Bennett of breaking his promises. Is there anyone who has broken more promises than Netanyahu? He said that he wouldn’t agree to another alternating premiership arrangement, but yesterday he offered a three-way alternating premiership arrangement in an act of sheer desperation. He made a promise to Gantz only to trample it underfoot. He accused Bennett of forming a “dangerous left-wing government,” even as he is prepared to offer nearly every party in that government the world over. He knows that a right-wing government could be formed if he would only step aside and allow a different candidate to lead. But he doesn’t want a right-wing government. He wants a Netanyahu government. Netanyahu is going to make the most of every single hour out of the numerous hours left to try to set a fire. Every hour that passes only makes him more desperate, more inciting and more dangerous. That is sad, especially since he is one of Israel’s most talented statesmen. But lurking behind that statesman is a dangerous man. His speech, a speech that brimmed with incitement and manipulations, made it patently clear that Israel needs a different leadership. It needs a responsible leadership, a nationally-minded leadership and a leadership that unites. The current-day Netanyahu is the opposite of all those. Wednesday’s presidential race is a microcosm of Israeli Jews’ deeper divides By HAVIV RETTIG GUR @ TOI Israel’s Knesset is set to meet Wednesday to choose between two candidates for president, Miriam Peretz and Isaac Herzog, a pairing that represents almost exactly the stereotypical two halves of Israel’s Mizrahi- Ashkenazi divide. Peretz, 67, is the incarnation of the warm, long-suffering Moroccan Jewish mother. Born in Casablanca, Morocco, raised in the ma’abara encampments that housed so many immigrant Jewish families who fled the Arab world in the 1950s and 1960s, she was a teacher and a mother of six. Two of her sons, Uriel and Eliraz, fell in battle — Uriel in Lebanon in 1998 and Eliraz in Gaza in 2010. 1 Her fame is a function of her character. Thrust into the public limelight by a long string of tragedies — her husband Eliezer passed away in 2003 from illness — she embraced the persona of the weeping mother, a kind of biblical Rachel who used her unique place in the Israeli public consciousness to advocate for solidarity and reconciliation across the battlements of the country’s sometimes bitter culture wars. A book about her hardscrabble life became a runaway bestseller. She has won numerous awards for teaching, lit a memorial torch at the national Memorial Day ceremony on Mount Herzl in 2014, and was awarded the Israel Prize in 2018. But her legacy, at least in the public imagination, may be her easy smile, evident at every public appearance and every public talk, a sign of her insistence on soldiering on after the loss of her husband and two sons, a national symbol of grit, solidarity and triumph over life’s many tribulations. Herzog, 60, is the left-wing Ashkenazi elite personified. There are no ramshackle ma’abarot in his past. A well-heeled attorney by profession at one of the country’s top firms (which was founded by his father), his family story is as close as one comes to Israeli royalty. He is the grandson of Israel’s first Ashkenazi chief rabbi, Isaac Herzog, for whom he is named, and the son of former IDF major general and then president Chaim Herzog. His brother Michael is a retired IDF brigadier general. His aunt Suzy was the wife of former foreign minister Abba Eban. And on and on it goes. Herzog now serves as chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. Herzog, too, is a respected figure in the Israeli public imagination, though a less colorful or emotive one. In his 15 years in the Knesset, he became known as a soft-spoken and mild-mannered manager. He ran respectful campaigns and declined to take part in the kind of angry political feuding that have since come to define the country’s fractious politics. As minister of welfare from 2007 to 2011 and as opposition leader from 2013 to 2018, he cut a striking contrast to politicians like Benjamin Netanyahu. An open race The two figures thus mark a stark choice between two opposite and deeply familiar Israeli personas, between longsuffering Moroccan Jewish motherhood and soft-spoken Ashkenazi gentility. That divide seems to favor Peretz. As does the public: A Knesset Channel poll on Tuesday found a 43 percent plurality for Peretz, with just 27% for Herzog and 30% undecided. Peretz is personally right-leaning, like the majority of Mizrahi Jews of her generation. That fact is reflected in the poll. Among right-wing Israelis, Peretz is favored 55% to 21%. On the left, Herzog wins, but only just: 38% to 34%. But it is Israel’s 120 MKs, not the public, who elects a president. And what politician wouldn’t favor motherhood over gentility? In a right-leaning Knesset, does left-wing leader Herzog have a chance? The simple answer is an emphatic yes. The Knesset elects the president by secret ballot. Once behind the voting parition, an MK is free to choose whoever they wish without personal consequences. That’s why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has refused to endorse Peretz over Herzog, repeatedly saying Israel was blessed with “two worthy candidates.” It’s not that he doesn’t have a preference. But he doesn’t know which way the race will go and doesn’t want to be seen backing the losing horse. He knows, too, that his public backing for one candidate may push his opponents to unite behind the other. At the same time, the race has brought to the fore the odd way that Israeli identity politics play out on the ground. Peretz has found surprising support on the left, and Herzog on the right. One left-wing intellectual who backed Peretz explained that while the liberal Herzog would be a better face for Israel to the world, the greatest danger to the country in the coming months and years isn’t criticism from outside, but the social and ethnic rifts within. A call for calm from the Moroccan mother Peretz, he reasoned, would do far more to quell Arab-Jewish tensions the next time they spike than a similar call from Herzog. Meanwhile, a series of right-wing politicians, including at least one MK from far-right Religious Zionism, have backed Herzog. 2 Herzog has played up his family’s religious background and framed his yichus — his pedigree – as anchoring his commitments to the country as a whole. Meanwhile, Peretz has talked of her commitment, “in every fiber of my being, to each and every citizen of Israel,” as well as to Israel’s diplomatic standing, where her personal touch would be an advantage. In an op-ed published Tuesday, she wrote, “I have seen in the eyes of world leaders how much tremendous blessing the human and personal connection between individuals can bring to the world.” The presidential race between two symbols of one of Israel’s underlying cultural divides has become a race to unify, to reach across the aisle, to assure Jews and Arabs alike, left-wingers and right-wingers and everyone in between, that they will be heard and respected.