New blood wanted: Israeli politics needs an infusion of unpolluted leaders - opinion

I am partial to the argument that, specifically at this time of heightened strategic risk, Israel needs to elect or reelect leaders with significant security and diplomatic experience.

But I am convinced that Israel also needs to elect a new, younger generation of bright and believing, unsullied, and notionally more honest politicians – even if they are “green.”

I am certain that there is a capable and courageous next generation of Israeli leaders to take the reins of state – many of them the fearless heroes of Israel’s recent wars.

In the meantime, when I vote this fall, I am going to seek a synthesis between the two competing wrenches that tug at my conscience: experience vs innovation, resilience vs virtue.

This approach does not present easy choices. But to begin with, it means ruling out the most cynical and mercenary political candidates, those whose career has been based on violent and divisive rhetoric and endless acrobatics – always on the attack and flip-flopping from one position to another.

Liberman is a cross between the deceased French extremist Jean-Marie Le Pen, a populist rabble-rouser, and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who excels at accruing power and asserting his relevance despite inherent weaknesses.

Alas, Liberman’s contribution to Israeli politics runs from negligible to detrimental. He has no record to speak of, aside from incitement and vindictiveness.

I cannot think of a single positive contribution to Israeli society, economy, defense, and foreign policy made by Liberman and his dictatorially hand-picked Knesset faction members over the past 40 years (quite a few of whom have ended up in jail).

Does anybody remember Liberman’s tenures as minister of infrastructure, transport, strategic affairs, finance, foreign affairs, and defense? Is there a single concrete achievement or worthwhile doctrine that emerged from his tenure in these senior posts?

What I do remember well are Liberman’s many grandiloquent and violent eruptions on sensitive issues that require statesmanship and nuance – two qualities he lacks exceedingly – and his pouting resignations each time he did not get his way.

Yvette the autocrat called for the bombing of the Aswan Dam in response to Egypt’s support of Yasser Arafat. He wanted to transfer Arabs of the Galilean triangle to Palestinian control, and to expel Arab citizens who refuse to pledge loyalty to the Jewish state.

On the other hand, he has played fast and loose with the idea of Palestinian statehood, sometimes fiercely against and other times smarmily and suggestively in favor.

When, as foreign minister, he was seeking to ingratiate himself in Washington, he declared that he would be willing to evacuate his home in Nokdim (a Gush Etzion settlement) in exchange for peace. What that really meant was that Liberman would readily sell his mother and sister to advance his political fortunes.

In 2019, Liberman nauseatingly pushed the country into another utterly unnecessary election campaign; a campaign that meant months more of deadlock in government policymaking and tons of hateful election bombast – supposedly over the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) army draft issue. And he threatens to do so again now.

But of course, Liberman doesn’t have a sliver of an idea on how to coax ultra-Orthodox Jews into the army. His going to the barricades on this issue to the point of forcing repeat elections was and is nothing more than pompous posturing; a cockfight meant to sadistically draw Netanyahu’s blood.

Deri's ruinous record in politics is without peer. He is an acute expression of pugnacious haredi power; a super-self-confident politician who bulldozes over all legal, civic, and moral boundaries to “bolster” (read: enfeeble) his haredi voting public. His brand of blithely sectorial, brusquely cynical politics has been catastrophic.

He is the central father-figure of the haredi world of dependency, of living off the dole; to the creation of the all-encompassing government-support system for those studying in yeshiva, a system so comprehensive that it simply does not pay for a kollel student to step out into the working world.

He has never spoken positively about higher education and professional training programs for ultra-Orthodox men and women that have opened in recent years, and he opposes the new haredi elementary and high school stream that teaches the basic core curriculum of math, science, and English.

Deri also is directly culpable for turning away Rabbi Ovadia Yosef from his earlier path of religious and political moderation. He whispered wicked things into the ears of Rav Ovadia, as needed, about religious Zionist, Russian, and Reform Jews, and secular politicians.

The fact that Deri has been caught in criminal violations more than once and gone to jail has not stopped him. He brushes this off by presenting himself as a persecuted Dreyfus and wronged John Demjanjuk rolled into one, and as a holy man whose concern for the poor will bring salvation to the downtrodden of Israel.

He seditiously plays the ethnic card, with him being discriminated against as a “franck” (a poor, marginalized Sephardi Jew). He has no problem cynically inflaming ethnic tensions in this way, even though it is of course ridiculous for Deri to claim marginalization.

If anybody has been in the privileged political driver’s seat for the past 35 years, as opposed to being victimized, it is Aryeh Deri.

Deri also holds the bag for the disasters that befell the haredi community in Meron on Lag Ba’omer in 2021 and during the coronavirus epidemic (when he led the haredi community’s separatist and defiant response to the government’s lockdown restrictions).

And of course, Deri has been a key figure in the ongoing haredi effort to legislate a permanent exemption of haredi men from military or national service – all the while outrageously sitting in the internal security cabinet that made the critical decisions about sending (non-haredi) Israeli soldiers into battle.

Golan is both a disappointment and a danger. Disappointment, because I remember him as a nationalist and appropriately aggressive military general who proudly paraded his Jewish-traditional roots. He was a good colleague at one of my conservative-leaning think tanks.

But then he sensed a vacuum at the far left of the political spectrum with the disintegration of the Meretz and Labor parties, and he jumped into politics and revved up the most extreme political positions to benefit from the void.

Golan has grandiloquently attacked religious Zionists and settlers, nationalists and soldiers, defended insurrection in the army, and accused Israel of genocide and other war crimes – to the point where his charges regularly feature in anti-Israel lawsuits around the world.

Golan and the rabble he is rallying also are a danger.

This is accompanied by threats to “crush and close” any and all institutions that don’t align with the party’s “democratic” (sic.) worldview (such as pre-military religious colleges and hesder yeshivas), and to violently roll back (“destroy”) settlements while repeating the Oslo-era mistakes of territorial withdrawals.

Golan’s hypocrisy, hyperbole, and fanaticism light up every warning signal in my book.

Oh, how Israel truly needs a different breed of upright, principled, and temperate leaders!