Israel President Isaac Herzog on Friday wrapped up consultations with the lawmakers comprising the 25th Knesset, 64 of whom recommended Benjamin Netanyahu for prime minister. With that firm majority in hand, Herzog is expected next week to officially tap Netanyahu to head the next government.
All of that was as expected.
But there were a few surprises and uncomfortable moments during the consultation talks at the President’s Residence.
During his meeting with the heads of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party on Wednesday, Herzog was accidentally recorded urging the religious lawmakers to be wary of their right-wing nationalist partner, Itamar Ben-Gvir.
The consultation meetings are broadcast on public television. But Herzog believed the cameras and microphones had been shut off when he told the Shas representatives:
“There is one issue I didn’t bring up [during the televised part of the meeting] – you will have a problem with the Temple Mount, and it’s a critical issue. You have a partner [Ben-Gvir] that the whole world is anxious about. I also told him that. This isn’t for publication. I don’t want to cause trouble. It’s really not for publication.”
Among the “controversial” policies Ben-Gvir and his Religious Zionism party want to promote is finally allowing Jews the right to worship at Judaism’s holiest site–the Temple Mount.
The rest of the world opposes this for fear of an eruption of Muslim violence. Many in Israel also take this line, though surveys show that a majority of Israeli voters agree with Ben-Gvir on this issue, and want to see Israeli sovereignty and full freedom of religion at the Temple Mount.
Herzog calls out Arab MK’s hypocrisy
During Friday’s consultations at the President’s Residence, Herzog met with members of the majority-Arab party Hadash, which is effectively a communist faction.
The party’s number two, MK Aida Touma-Suleiman, repeated claims that a Netanyahu government in which Ben-Gvir is a senior minister will be overtly racist and bring suffering upon the Arabs:
“People who in the past supported terrorist organizations and were convicted of crimes in that regard will sit in the next government. This poses a great danger to democracy in general, and to the Arab population in particular.”
She was referring to Ben-Gvir’s affiliation with the late Rabbi Meir Kahana, whose political faction Kach was eventually outlawed for promoting the expulsion of disloyal Arab citizens. Kach was subsequently designated as a terrorist organization by the US State Department.
But Herzog quickly noted the hypocrisy in Touma-Suleiman’s accusations:
“Before the elections, you supported terrorists when you lamented as martyrs the fallen members of the Lions’ Den. This is unacceptable. Murder is murder – terrorism is terrorism. There was a terrible wave of terrorism this year. Perhaps everyone needs to look in the mirror and realize they don’t understand the pain of the other side.”
Israel has been waging an escalating war against Palestinian terror groups following a series of deadly terrorist attacks earlier in the year.
Recently, those efforts resulted in the decimation of the new and popular Palestinian group known as the “Lions’ Den,” which was behind many of the earlier attacks. Touma-Suleiman sparked outrage when she, along with other Israeli Arab lawmakers, called the fallen Lions’ Den terrorists “shahids” (Islamic martyrs) and condemned Israel’s anti-terror operations.
