Legitimization of racist party sullies Israel’s reputation
Israel’s reputation has been sullied by the courting of Itamar Ben-Gvir, a disciple of the racist Rabbi Meir Kahane, by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and United Right leader Ayelet Shaked in the run-up to Knesset elections in September.
The United States is reeling from the massacre of 31 innocent people in mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, in recent days. Twenty-nine, the initial body count in the US attacks, was also the number of Muslim worshippers slain by the Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein in a Hebron mosque over the Cave of the Patriarchs on Purim in 1994. Today in Israel, Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit), the party of Goldstein admirers, is running in the Sept. 17 Knesset election. Not only that, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his henchmen worked tirelessly to ensure that the attorney Itamar Ben-Gvir, Jewish Power’s leader and a disciple of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, would deign to join the United Right alliance. In the April 9 election, for the 21st Knesset, Ben-Gvir had occupied the seventh slot on the United Right's list of candidate.
According to the latest polling, there is little risk of Jewish Power polluting the benches of the Israeli parliament, given its eventual decision to run alone in the September election. Netanyahu and his ruling Likud’s courtship of Ben-Gvir, however, has already sullied the reputation of the State of Israel.
The Likud was not particularly troubled when former Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked tried in recent days to entice Ben-Gvir to join the United Right alliance that she now heads by offering him the position of deputy Knesset speaker along with deputy ministerial government positions and the chair of a Knesset committee for his friends.
Likud Knesset member David Bitan, who excels at reciting the talking points compiled for Netanyahu associates, explained in an Aug. 1 radio interview that the Likud had missed embracing Ben-Gvir, that is, adding his party to Likud’s Knesset list, because Likud had finalized its list in primaries earlier in the year. Bitan and his masters are unperturbed by the moral stands of the man who hung a photo of Baruch Goldstein in his living room. They were also unfazed by the March 2019 statement by Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit to the Supreme Court that Ben-Gvir had come “dangerously close to the forbidden line” that would have disqualified him for an election run.
