Likud’s last temptation – calling early elections after High Court ruling

MIDDLE ISRAEL: Miki Zohar is threatening that if Blue and White won’t back legislation that would let the Knesset override High Court rulings, the Likud will impose an early election.

By AMOTZ ASA-EL
IN RULING the Judea and Samaria Settlement Regulation Law unconstitutional, the court sided not only with leftists who derided its writers’ annexationist motivation, and not only with centrists who lamented its damage to Arab-Jewish relations, but also with big-time conservatives, like Menachem Begi (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
IN RULING the Judea and Samaria Settlement Regulation Law unconstitutional, the court sided not only with leftists who derided its writers’ annexationist motivation, and not only with centrists who lamented its damage to Arab-Jewish relations, but also with big-time conservatives, like Menachem Begi
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
"There are judges in Jerusalem,” Menachem Begin’s famous salute to Israel’s judiciary, echoed again this week, as the High Court of Justice nullified the Judea and Samaria Settlement Regulation Law.
The annulled law says residents of West Bank houses built on land whose ownership was challenged after their inhabitation would not be removed. Instead, the original owners would be offered a choice between alternative land and monetary compensation.
In ruling this law unconstitutional, the court sided not only with leftists who derided its writers’ annexationist motivation, and not only with centrists who lamented its damage to Arab-Jewish relations, but also with big-time conservatives, like Begin’s son, Bennie, who decried this law’s immorality.
Now, buoyed by polls suggesting the Likud is resurging, coalition chairman Miki Zohar is threatening that if Blue and White won’t back legislation that would let the Knesset override High Court rulings, the Likud will impose an early election.
It would be a grave mistake.
BACK WHEN Menachem Begin launched it, he insisted the West Bank settlement drive be done so that no Palestinian is dispossessed. This formula was no ploy. It was the way to reconcile a true legalist’s spiritual conflict between the nationalism and liberalism in which he believed with equal zeal.
That is why Begin had a senior Justice Ministry official (Plia Albeck, 1937-2005) crisscross the West Bank by helicopter and jeep, and on foot, in search of non-private, undeveloped lands. By the time he departed, even Begin’s enemies conceded that on the whole he planted his settlements on non-private lands.
Then again, there were exceptions, reflecting two eras: one, in the spirit of Begin’s legacy, embraced law and morality; the other abandoned them.
During the first era, some lands were claimed by Palestinians only after Israelis had inhabited them. This could happen because according to an Ottoman law that remained valid, continuously cultivated land became its cultivator’s property, even if it was never registered.
When deedless claimants proved continuous cultivation, Israeli planners adjusted development plans so property rights will be respected. Exceptions stemmed from occasional mapping mistakes – for instance, in Ma’aleh Adumim, as the government conceded in 2007.
That is how things worked for about 15 years. Then, since the mid-1990s, activists eager to derail the Oslo Accords began stretching veteran settlements, in total disregard of legal demands and planning procedures. That is how the so-called outposts were born, and that is how maximalist Zionism became a tale of two schools: the law-abiding, and the anarchic.
Now, rocket-fueled by Benjamin Netanyahu’s attacks on the prosecution, judiciary and police, the anarchic school thinks the time is ripe for an all-out attack on everything Menachem Begin held dear.
That is what Knesset Speaker Yariv Levin meant when he said this week that “the High Court trampled Israeli democracy,” and that is the meaning of Health Minister Yuli Edelstein’s statement that “the High Court has lost it,” and that the justices’ acting as “the legislative, executive and judiciary branches all at once... must be brought to an end.”
Such grandstanding may be useful for candidates in Likud primaries. The rest of Israel, however, will doubtfully be as impressed with these bravados, as the Likud’s leaders might learn should they be tempted to call yet another early election.
THE LIKUD’S temptation is driven by polls suggesting its 36 Knesset seats can now grow to 40, and let it assemble a solid right-wing coalition of some 65 lawmakers.
Underpinning this optimism is the conceit of a ruling party that has seen its main rival, Blue and White, split in half, and its historic archrival, the Labor Party, reduced to an anecdote, while the Likud’s own leader retains the premiership despite multiple indictments.
Well, this overconfidence ignores Netanyahu’s abuse of his own historic allies, and the coronavirus pandemic’s political impact and economic results.
The opposition now includes representatives of two constituencies that are crucial for the Likud’s prospective resurgence. The first is Avigdor Liberman’s Russian-speaking electorate, and the second is Naftali Bennett’s Modern Orthodox voters.
Yes, many of this duo’s original voters no longer want to vote for a sectarian party. Even so, both men are now wounded and marginalized, and Bennett has also been humiliated. Capable, young, charismatic and eloquent, he now also has the time needed to methodically roam the country and woo the observant electorate Netanyahu has for years taken for granted and patronized.
Netanyahu has evidently become smug, so much so that he has readily shed his most natural allies. That is why the rest of the Likud’s leaders would do well to recall how Labor’s downfall in 1977 began, when Yitzhak Rabin sent Modern Orthodoxy’s National Religious Party to the opposition, and thus turned Labor’s most loyal ally into the sworn enemy that soon cuddled in Menachem Begin’s bosom.
Bennett is now similarly cornered. Moreover, there is personal warmth between him and opposition leader Yair Lapid, whose grievances toward ultra-Orthodoxy Bennett mostly shares.
The social combination of Lapid’s upper-middle-class liberals, Bennett’s middle-class conservatives, and Gantz’s middle-class pragmatists now stands to be joined by Liberman’s lower-middle-class nationalists.
Add to all this one million newly jobless Israelis, and you get a rainbow coalition – and an electoral powder keg – of voters who either are unimpressed by the Likud’s territorial bravados and judicial swaggers, or do not care about them at all, or are enraged by them.
In The Last Temptation of Christ, which infuriated the Vatican by portraying Jesus struggling with sexual desire, director Martin Scorsese added a disclaimer that the movie is “not based on the Gospels, but upon the fictional exploration of the eternal spiritual conflict.”
The Likud’s last temptation is different. Yes, it is also based on no gospel, but the ruling party’s disposal of its founder’s spiritual conflicts and moral quests is anything but fictional.
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The writer’s best-selling Mitz’ad Ha’ivelet Hayehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sfarim, 2019) is a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s leadership from antiquity to modernity.