First mission of Bennett-Lapid government to mobilize US support
One of the first tasks of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid is to find a way to work with the administration of US President Joe Biden.
Naftali Bennett, then Israel's economy minister, was a guest of the annual Brookings Institution’s Saban Forum in Washington on Dec. 7, 2014. He was interviewed by former Ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk, one of the foremost experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict who was instrumental over the years in US efforts to reach an accommodation between the sides.
At the end of their stormy conversation, Indyk looked as though he had been put through the wringer. He had obviously never met anyone like Bennett — an Israeli bucking all conventions and dismissing all pervasive assumptions regarding the two-state solution. Bennett was unapologetic throughout, delivering his various theses in fluent Netanyahu-style English (his Jewish American parents moved to Israel from San Francisco in 1967). Indyk had been given a peek at the future of Israeli politics.
Since then, Bennett’s views, which deviated from the consensus of 2014, have become almost mainstream in Israel. The Palestinian issue has been relegated to the margins, there are no negotiations between the sides and no aggressive US peace-making. Both sides accuse the other of recalcitrance and both are right. The Palestinians are deeply split between Hamas and Fatah, while Israel is ruled by the political right that has abandoned the two-state idea, of which it was never convinced. Bennett has won largely because of Netanyahu.
Is Bennett of 2021 the same maverick interviewee Indyk met in 2014? Not quite. Israeli prime ministers often explain changes in their positions using an expression taken from a popular Israeli song that was famously used by the late Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to explain his decision on Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza. “What you see from here, you do not see from there.”
