If Benjamin Netanyahu wins the next Israeli election, scheduled for April 9, he is likely to become the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history. For that, he seems prepared to make a deal with the devil.
Battered by scandals, hounded by corruption investigations and a possible indictment and facing a strong challenge from Benny Gantz, a former military chief of staff, Netanyahu apparently figures he can’t afford to lose any of the tiny right-wing parties vying for spots in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. So to make sure two of them clear the threshold for seats, he engineered their merger.
The problem is that one of the parties is everything Israel should condemn. The chance of its entering the Knesset has drawn rare public expressions of displeasure from some of Netanyahu’s strongest supporters in the United States.
That party, Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power, is led by followers of the extreme nationalist Meir Kahane, the Brooklyn-born rabbi whose Kach party was outlawed in Israel in the 1980s and placed on the U.S. list of terrorist groups in 1997. Among other things, Otzma Yehudit advocates annexing the occupied territories, expelling “enemies” — read that as Arabs — and seizing the Temple Mount, a move tantamount to declaring war on Islam. The merger brought it under the somewhat more acceptable roof of a party of religious Zionists known as the Jewish Home.
)
)
)
If the newly formed party wins seats in the Knesset, they would most likely be filled by co-founders of a group implicated in a 2014 arson attack on a school for Jewish and Arab children in Jerusalem. These legislators could be joined by an admirer of Baruch Goldstein, the Kahane follower who massacred 29 Palestinians in a mosque in Hebron in 1994, and by an avowed homophobe who favors a shoot-to-kill approach to Palestinian stone-throwers.
Netanyahu’s cynical political calculation is not entirely surprising, since he has often espoused far-right positions to maintain his right-wing base. This time, though, he appears to have gone too far.
In Israel, Rabbi Benny Lau of Jerusalem, a leading voice of religious Zionism, repeatedly assailed the merger, likening Kahanism to Nazism, and nearly 90 modern Orthodox rabbis and educators, including prominent names in the religious Zionist community, denounced the deal as giving “a black eye to Israel and its standing in the world as a moral and democratic state.”
Potentially more damaging to Israel, the pact between Netanyahu and the Kahanists was criticized in the United States not only by liberal Jewish organizations but also by some whose strong support of Israel rarely includes any public intervention in its boisterous politics.
The influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee — AIPAC — which almost never publicly criticizes Israel, endorsed a statement by the American Jewish Committee that called Otzma Yehudit’s views “reprehensible” and added that “they do not reflect the core values that are the very foundation of the state of Israel.”
That reaction reflected a growing frustration among Israel’s supporters over Netanyahu’s frequent embrace of nationalist and ultra-Orthodox policies at a time when the Jewish state is coming under growing criticism from the public and some members of Congress.
The prime minister, however, has found an unswerving political ally in President Donald Trump, which was underscored in a television interview Sunday when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declined to fault the deal with Otzma Yehudit, saying, “We’ll allow the Israeli people to sort this out.” And a day after its terse tweet endorsing the American Jewish Committee statement, AIPAC posted another one saying it was “honored to announce” that Netanyahu will address the organization’s large policy conference in late March in Washington, when he will also meet Trump.
Perhaps AIRPAC will use its gathering to let Netanyahu know that his pact with the Kahanists is unacceptable. And then it will be the Israeli people’s task to sort this out.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.