Photo Credit: Chaim Goldberg/Flash90
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, October 15, 2024.

I will spend the next 500 words or so describing the content and context of Tuesday night’s television lynching not so much because it was great television – it really was – but because it was so obviously orchestrated. For 15 minutes, Channel 14 looked like all the mainstream Israeli channels’ political panel shows, where the peasants wield their pitchforks and torches around the witch they’re burning at the stake.

It was a cheap thrill TV that looked like it had been ordered from high up.

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So, let’s start.

Yinon Magal’s “The Patriots” on Channel 14 (Man of the Year 5783: Yinon Magal Who Crushed Israel’s Left-Wing Media’s Monopoly) is by far the most right-wing friendly popular TV show in Israel, and usually a safe and supportive arena for Otzma Yehudit Chairman and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.

Not on Tuesday night this week. Instead of a loving home, Ben Gvir faced the host Magal’s opening smack:

“What you did today was a disgrace, a disgrace, I tell you personally – I think you should be ashamed of this behavior, that’s not how a Jew behaves. That’s not how you take a Jew out of a Shiva home, or two days after he comes out of an operating room. It’s not my job to educate you, but I’m telling you from the bottom of my heart – you should be ashamed.”

On Tuesday, Ben-Gvir and most of the MKs in his party voted against the Retained Earnings Law, which is expected to bring about 10 billion shekels ($2.75 billion) into the state coffers in 2025 to help cut the state budget deficit.

To guarantee the passing of the bill, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu disobeyed his doctors at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem where he was recovering from a prostatectomy, and rushed to the Knesset to vote. Another coalition member, Likud MK Boaz Bismuth, left the shiva for his departed mother and also rushed to the Knesset, looking disheveled and distraught, to vote.

For the record, Ben Gvir messed up big time, and few on the right were able to stomach the images of Netanyahu and Bismuth suffering––physically and emotionally––to save the vote. I’m not sure Ben Gvir’s DNA includes the gene for apologizing, but if he is biologically capable of clapping Al Chet on his chest, right now would be a very good time to do it.

Here’s the video – 15 minutes of an orchestrated gang ambush of Ben Gvir, with the Minister often unable to respond to the raging attacks on him from the entire panel:

Incidentally, for the few among you who don’t know (which included myself until I looked it up), retained earnings are the cumulative net earnings or profits of a company after accounting for dividend payments. The word “retained” captures the fact that because those earnings were not paid out to shareholders as dividends, they were instead retained by the company.

The bill passed in second and third readings at the plenum by a vote of 60 to 58. The eight missing coalition votes would have been cast by Otzma and the Haredi United Torah Judaism.

The law will require companies to pay a 2% tax on their undistributed profits each year. However, an option has been added whereby companies may distribute 6% of their profits as dividends, and this way get rid of the tax altogether.

Victory!

This was at least the third time Ben Gvir voted against the coalition of which he is a senior member. His reasoning has been that finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, with whom he ran for the Knesset in November 2022 and won 14 seats, was not living up to his promises to deliver some NIS 30 billion ($8.24 billion) to Ben Gvir’s major interests: the police, the border guard, and the prison service. Instead, Ben Gvir says he only received NIS 25 billion ($6.86 billion), which he claims impairs his ability to hire a thousand new police officers.

“They took 850 million shekels from me,” Ben Gvir told the Patriots panel. “They took the second and third installments of the budget from me. I too didn’t like seeing the prime minister and Boaz Bismuth arrive, but there is something more important – I was elected for principles.”

Magal responded angrily: “I know from the coalition leaders that you are bluffing. You don’t know how to conduct yourself in a coalition, the AG is trying to overthrow the right-wing government, she is not succeeding – but you will overthrow the right-wing government. You only care about yourself with your political manipulations.”

Throughout his appearance, Ben Gvir was referring to the Nov. 2022 electoral victory as if running on a list with Smotrich was somehow a concession on Ben Gvir’s part. The truth is that it was Ben Gvir who kept missing the threshold vote in three consecutive elections and only after Netanyahu had pushed for the union with Religious Zionism did they score so high.

At the present, Smotrich and Ben Gvir are not on speaking terms and the magnificent dream of a rising historic NRP (Mafdal) has turned into a nightmare. Perhaps what Ben Gvir needed to save him from disappearing into an electoral neverland yet again was a friendly lynching.


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David writes news at JewishPress.com.