At the weekly Oct. 18 Cabinet meeting, held in the shadow of the Palestinian terrorism wave that refuses to let up, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threw out an idea — the establishment of a special court for security affairs to deal with terrorism related offenses. Netanyahu had heard the idea the previous week during one of the many consultations he conducted with senior security officials, probably from the Shin Bet agency, whom he asked to present measures to counter what seemed at the time to be loss of control in the face of a campaign of popular terrorism. As far as one can tell, there has not been a follow-up discussion of the troubling initiative since then.
The prime minister raised the idea of a “court for security affairs” a day after a poll, which was of special concern to him, was aired on Channel 2’s “Meet the Press.” According to the survey, 29% of the public believe that his bitter rival Avigdor Liberman, the former foreign minister in his two previous governments, is the person most suited to tackle the current terrorism wave, compared with only 17% who regard Netanyahu as the right man for the job. For Netanyahu, this is a worrying trend, given that a similar poll conducted the week before also showed that Liberman, who is the head of the Yisrael Beitenu party, was the public’s preferred choice to handle terrorism. These are difficult results for “Mr. Security,” and he came to the simple conclusion: He is losing ground on the right to Liberman. This forced him to launch a blocking maneuver. Therefore, when Netanyahu pulled out the idea of a “special security affairs court” the next day, he did so in order to appease public opinion on the right and to prove that he is creative and wholly target oriented when it comes to combatting terrorism.
