The Likud Party held a Nov. 17 “emergency session” designed to forestall the formation of a minority government led by Blue and White leader Benny Gantz with the support of Arab parties. Addressing the assembled party members, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “Such a government is an existential threat to the State of Israel. If a minority government like this is formed, they will celebrate in Tehran, Ramallah and Gaza the way they celebrate after every terror attack. This would be a historic national terror attack on the State of Israel.” A day earlier, he tweeted that any government dependent on the support of the Arab parties “is an immediate existential threat to Israel’s security.”

It's unbelievable that Netanyahu chose to label a government that would have ended his rule by fair democratic means and led to his ouster from the prime minister's residence a “historic national terror attack” and “an immediate existential threat to Israel’s security.” He has waxed poetic before about the sentiments he and his family harbor for the house, telling residents of the illegal West Bank outpost of Amona on the eve of their court-ordered eviction in 2016, “I understand what it means to lose a home.” Recounting his travails after losing the 1999 election to Labor leader Ehud Barak, Netanyahu added, “We were kicked out of the official residence and forced to move into the Sheraton Plaza.” 

With heartfelt sympathy for the Netanyahu family’s attachment to Balfour Street, is the prime minister’s unbridled attack on the Joint List the solution to his plight? Is that how a man who presumes to be the prime minister of all the country’s citizens is supposed to behave? Has no lesson been learned from the days preceding the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin? Then, too, there were those who claimed that the minority government led by Rabin with the support of the Arab parties (after the ultra-Orthodox Shas party quit his government) was illegitimate.

“He is trying to conduct a targeted political assassination,” Knesset member Ahmad Tibi of the Joint List told Al-Monitor. “He has crossed the line by linking us with what he calls ‘terrorism and terror organizations.’ After each video clip or tweet he issues, I and my colleagues receive tons of threats.”