Following a week during which chairman Naftali Bennett and fellow New Right candidates attacked Zehut chairman Moshe Feiglin, ridiculing his lack of political experience and depicting him as an aloof “professor,” the candidate occupying Zehut’s second slot for the Knesset, Rabbi Haim Amsalem, on Thursday night finally hit back.
Attacking Bennett, Amsalem said: “You and Shaked betrayed the home that raised you, Habayit Hayehudi, that gave you the opportunity, that supported you, that he gave up many of its own values for you.”
In recent days, New Right leaders Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, as well as candidate Matan Kahane, attacked Feiglin brutally, and admitted that he has been “siphoning” their votes. Kahane posted a video clip that received more than 100,000 views, angrily warning right-wingers against voting for Feiglin:
“I heard you’re going to vote for Zehut and it annoys me,” Kahane says, dressed in a v-neck T-shirt and yelling at the camera like the proverbial enraged dad dragging his kid to the woodshed. “When we ran on the hilltops, he was writing a book. He is a junk politician. These elections are about serious things. it’s dangerous.”
For the record, Feiglin served as a major in the IDF engineering corps, and organized the most effective civil disobedience demonstrations against the Oslo accords that brought traffic to a halt throughout Israel. He also challenged Benjamin Netanyahu for the Likud leadership, forcing the Likud chairman to target him and his 10,000 followers until Feiglin was finally forced out.
Kahana, who in 2018 ended his military career in the rank of a colonel in the air force, is yet to leave his imprint on Israeli society.
Rabbi Amsalem told Shaked and Bennett: “You left a wounded and bleeding party, confused and helpless, some say with huge debts. You dumped [former MK] Yinon Magal when you feared the loss of ratings because of accusations [of sexual misconduct] against him that turned out to be false. And we won’t forget how you dumped [soccer star and proposed Knesset candidate] Eli Ohana, when you realized that he was not the token Sephardi you were looking for.”
Amsalem also accused Bennett and Shaked of reneging on their deal with him, under the influence of his own Haredi enemies, and blamed them for feeding the flame of hate between left and right and religious and secular in Israel.
For the record, Habayit Hayehudi has recovered nicely from the unexpected Bennett/Shaked departure and in most polls has recaptured its former strength, to the point where it shows ahead of the New Right. Also, Bennett’s and Shaked’s strategy of splitting from Habayit Hayehudi to capture secular votes that would not otherwise go to a religious-Zionist party also worked out, and the two parties hover between 12 and 15 seats in most polls.
Finally, after the dust settles, Feiglin, Bennett/Shaked and Habayit Hayehudi’s Bezalel Smotrich will likely function very well together in Netanyahu’s next coalition government, since on most security issues and on Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria there is no daylight between them at all.
And future MK Matan Kahane should probably put on a proper shirt for the swearing in ceremony.