Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appointed Naftali Bennett to the lofty position of defense minister last November, and on Feb. 10, in a moment of candor at a campaign event in the Jordan Valley, he revealed the reason for the appointment: to prevent Bennett from joining a government led by Blue and White Chairman Benny Gantz. “The Blue and White party almost had a government,” Netanyahu said. “I made the move at the very last minute and appointed him defense minister. That’s the truth.”

In the last few rounds of Israeli elections, Bennett had committed almost every mistake possible, making the Defense Ministry portfolio the springboard he needed to resuscitate his political standing. On more than one occasion, he has made surprising, populist decisions aimed at appeasing his right-wing base that have ultimately caused problems for Israel’s security if not put it at risk altogether. Examples include his decision to build a new Jewish neighborhood in Hebron, to collect the bodies of Palestinians killed launching attacks along the Gaza-Israel border for use as bargaining chips and to release from administrative detention a member of the Hilltop Youth who threw rocks at a car and injured the Palestinian driving it. “Bennett gives back to extremist right-wing activists and weakens security system in the field,” complained an unnamed senior member of the Shin Bet according to a Feb.12 news report.

Since the novel coronavirus outbreak, however, Bennett has proved that when he puts his political agenda aside and stops trying to accumulate “likes” on social media, he can be creative, determined and effective in using the military’s human and technological capabilities to achieve important national objectives. As defense minister, Bennett is in charge of the largest organizational machine in all of Israel. As an organization, the Israel Defense Forces rarely suffers from budget shortages. Within this context, Bennett has been shrewd enough to take advantage of the fact that over the years, successive government have disgracefully abandoned the Ministry of Health.

A report by the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel released last July revealed the number of hospital beds in Israel to be extremely low compared to that in other OECD member states. Israel has 2.2 general care hospital beds per 1,000 residents while other members have 3.6. The nations of Europe have 4.1 beds per thousand. This is just one example of how the Israeli health care system has been neglected. It also suffers from a constant shortage of medical equipment and staff. When it emerged that Israel was unprepared to conduct sufficient numbers of coronavirus tests, and it looked like the right hand had no idea what the left hand was doing, the minister of defense climbed to the top of the hill and yelled as loud as he could that the number of tests should be increased dramatically to stem the spread of the virus.