Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was noticeably late when he arrived at the Likud Knesset faction’s weekly meeting on Dec. 17. The Knesset was packed with journalists and Likud activists, who started to suspect that something big was happening behind the scenes. Some of them raised the possibility that Netanyahu was planning to issue a statement attacking the ministers who participated in the right-wing demonstration against the government a day earlier.
All the leaders of the settler movement attended the demonstration, which took place outside the Knesset. It was organized in response to the recent wave of terror attacks in the West Bank that left two soldiers and a four-day-old baby dead. It should have irked Netanyahu that nine coalition ministers from the Likud, HaBayit HaYehudi and Kulanu, including Ze’ev Elkin, Yariv Levin, Naftali Bennett, Ayelet Shaked and Yoav Galant, participated. No matter how one looks at it, these ministers were demonstrating against the defense policies of the very government in which they serve, and in which Netanyahu is also the defense minister.
