As more and more Likud ministers and lawmakers have begun sensing Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s political demise, a group of party members have begun scheming to oust him from his role as head of their party.
The rebels, closely associated with former ambassador to the United Nations Danny Danon, are accusing Netanyahu of abandoning the Likud’s traditional nationalist agenda in order to deal with his personal legal challenges.
The group has laid out two options for themselves, either successfully ousting Netanyahu or establishing a new nationalist party to run in Israel’s next elections on the Likud’s original platform.
They further declared it necessary to return the Likud back to its true path.
Since United States President George H.W. Bush succeeded in orchestrating the removal of Prime Minister Yitzḥak Shamir from office, the Likud has consistently disappointed its nationalist base.
In every national election since the mid 1990s, voters have been seduced by small cosmetic changes to the party, a rotating chairmanship between Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon, and a host of ambitious lawmakers seeking to advance their careers by promising to lead the party “back to its true path.”
The Likud’s “true path” was forged by leaders like Shamir and Menaḥem Begin, both of whom possessed a deep Jewish national consciousness scarce in today’s Likud.
Begin and Shamir lost their families in the Holocaust. Both fought in the underground to free Palestine from British rule yet both were unsuccessful in their attempts to prevent Israel from falling under US control.
Danon’s group made clear that all they’re offering is shallow nationalism in one of their attacks on Netanyahu, when they said that despite the “green light” he received from the White House, the prime minister has chosen not to apply Israeli sovereignty over the disputed Judea and Samaria regions.
Like all good Likudnikim, the rebels want Israel to solidify its control over the West Bank. But the fact that they view US permission as necessary or even relevant reveals that their ideological paradigm suffers from a classic Revisionist Zionist need to obtain Jewish national goals through the benevolence of imperial powers.
This paradigm is especially dangerous given the fact that it has been consistent US foreign policy since the 1967 Six-Day War to force Israel to withdraw from the territories won in that war. Even Donald Trump, which Netanyahu and others on the right have praised as the most pro-Israel US president in history, has demanded that Israel relinquish 70% of the West Bank.
Trump’s former envoy to the region, Jason Greenblatt, told Galei Tzahal today that any Israeli application of sovereignty over parts of Judea and Samaria must to be linked to “a commitment to set aside a certain area of land for the eventual, potential Palestinian state.”
Ambitious Likud members might see Netanyahu’s current troubles as an opportunity to advance themselves to the head of their party but shallow nationalist rhetoric becomes meaningless once a politician makes it to the premiership and is confronted with US pressure to freeze Jewish construction, destroy entire communities and surrender portions of Eretz Yisrael.
To gain support from those of us who possess a deep Jewish national consciousness, empty populist statements about the homeland’s territorial integrity won’t be sufficient if not coupled with an acknowledgement of Israel’s subjugation to Washington and a concrete program to attain true independence.
The LICKud Party is not a true right wing party. They are right of Labor which is not much. Netanyahu has turned the party into a full leftist one especially when he decided to make his coalition with the leftist Gantz instead of the right wing parties and he got them to stab Otzma in the back. If the LICKup want to be the Likud again , they need to clean house starting with Netanyahu the pathological liar and apply sovereignty to Yehuda and Shomron not to a small sliver of land. They also need to stop the destruction of Jewish homes that has been going under Netanyahu and compensate the victims o such anti Jewish atrocities.