Israel’s new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, has won power in exchange for a huge ideological compromise, and nothing describes it as a phrase he uttered earlier this month. “Everyone is going to have to put off some of their dreams”; the words of a leader of an Israeli settler, religious and nationalist movement , now the visible head of a broad coalition that spans virtually the entire political spectrum, including Arab-Israeli representation.

Much of Bennett’s 15-year political life has been marked by one main ambition: to prevent at all costs the creation of a Palestinian state, even if it means “enduring the conflict like a piece of shrapnel in the butt”, as it came. to say the former Israeli command, and because of his relationship with his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, with whom he has broken years of political relationship and even personal friendship. In fact, his eldest son is named Yoni in honor of the brother of the now former prime minister, who died during the Israeli assault on a hijacked plane at the Ugandan Entebbe airport in 1976.

In Bennett many facets are combined: the religious, the political, the secular and the military ; one, the latter, which has given him quite a few headaches. His track record in the Sayeret Matkal and Maglan military commands has been a source of controversial public debate in Israel. In April 1996 he participated in an Israeli artillery attack on the Lebanese village of Qana. Some of the projectiles ended up hitting a UN compound, killing approximately 106 civilians.

A Channel 10 Israeli television journalist, Raviv Drucker, revealed that an Israeli investigator blamed much of what happened to the actions of “a young and hysterical Bennett” and claimed that “his stress contributed significantly to the terrible accident.” By contrast, Bennett’s actions were defended in 2015 by the head of the Northern Command, Amiram Levin, and by Bennett himself.

” I am responsible for my actions, both in politics and in military service , and I am not going to apologize for them because I was doing the right thing,” he said. “I remember well where I was that night in 1996. I was with my soldiers, deep in Lebanon, facing the enemy.”

In the shadow of Netanyahu

Already in the political arena, Bennett’s message was, in many respects, an extension of Netanyahu’s policies, although with a much more oriented look towards the defense of the Israeli colonial population , especially after the disagreement that they staged in 2008. , when Netanyahu removed him as chief of staff – for reasons not really well known, which some experts attribute to the influence of Netanyahu’s wife, Sara -, ending Bennett’s performance under the now former prime minister. minister, which also extended to several of his portfolios (Education and Economy).

A year after his break with Netanyahu, Bennett began to build his identity as a standard bearer for the Israeli settlers, beginning with his condemnation of Netanyahu’s decision to slow down settlement construction in occupied territory to re-launch peace talks with the Palestinians. in compliance with an initiative led by the then president of the United States, Barack Obama.

From there, Bennett further strengthened his ties to the Jewish settler movement by joining the Jewish Home party – he had previously been the head of the Jewish settler council in the West Bank, the Yesha – in 2013, and which he rescued. of the parliamentary extinction at the same time that he was radicalizing his speech. “Here was a Jewish state when you were still hanging from the trees,” he went on to say to the Arab deputy Ahmad Tibi.

Thus, Bennett is credited with rebuilding the party in the form that it is known today, the Yamina Movement, initially conceived as an alliance of colonialist parties that now stands almost on its own and has survived the string of elections. of the last two years that have blocked Israeli politics to become the gear that has made possible the conception of this broad coalition of Government.

A change of perspective

The reason why a party with only seven deputies in the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) in the last elections has achieved such influence has much to do with the hidden and deeply flexible character of a man who has long stood before the light. public as a defender of anti-Arabism and Jewish orthodoxy. ‘People think he’s a fanatic. It is not “, explains to ‘The New York Times’ the political adviser Ayelet Frish, to whom Bennett once told him that he had grown up in a house of” Woodstock parents “, surrounded by a secular culture.

Bennett, 49, is the son of parents who lived in the United States (San Francisco, specifically) and speaks fluent English with an American accent because he spent part of his childhood there. He worked in a deeply secular industry such as technology, where he built his own software company, Cyota, which he later sold to US security firm RSA for $ 145 million in 2005, in the immediate run-up to his entry into politics.

This character has facilitated the transformation of his political image that began to exhibit around the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the force majeure cause that has led him to emphasize some of his less conservative proposals – Bennett, for example, se proclaims as an advocate for equal rights for the LGTBQ community – and to put the political and economic restoration of Israel before any other issue.

“We have to control the pandemic, heal the economy and heal internal gaps,” he told Israeli Army Radio in November. On the economic front, however, he makes few concessions: he is an outspoken deregulator and nemesis of the unions “who are strangling the economy.”

However, this new pyramid of priorities has served him to reach an extraordinary agreement with the centrist Yesh Atid, of Yair Lapid – his successor expected in two years, within the rotating system that is part of his Government pact – and to receive the the reluctant approval of the rest of the parties of the new coalition, including, in an unprecedented gesture, the United Arab List, which seems to have heeded their message of “compromise.” “We will focus on what can be done, rather than arguing about what is impossible,” Bennett said.

“This will be a ‘status quo’ government,” Isaui Freij, an Arab-Israeli MP from the left-wing Meretz party, told Israel Army Radio last week. “I do not expect a Palestinian state to be created and we will all dance in the streets, but we will not go crazy with the settlements either,” he said.

Bennett is now the leader of a motley “coalition of change” and it remains to be seen how far this purpose of compromise will go – and how he deals with the settlers, the sector on whose shoulders he has risen to this point. Yet for the moment, Bennett is satisfied with ending the Netanyahu era. “Because there were two ways, either to re-convene elections, or to put an end to this madness once and for all,” he said.