Repeatedly contrasting his own outlook with Netanyahu’s, the Blue and White chief succeeds in painting a picture of two different leaders and two different Israels
Over the last two election campaigns and throughout the coalition building periods that followed, including while he himself held the mandate to form a government for the last 28 days, political neophyte Benny Gantz has often failed at setting the political agenda, allowing his rival Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take the lead while he was left to respond.
On Wednesday night, announcing that he had failed to form a government, and paving the way to a third round of elections in under a year, Gantz made his most forceful attempt at forging the public discourse and framing the ongoing political deadlock on his own terms.
With a fiery, fast-paced speech that Gantz’s noted calm demeanor sometimes struggled to keep up with, the Blue and White head laid into Netanyahu with perhaps the most ferocity we have ever seen from the stoic former army chief.
As expected, the Blue and White chair blamed the failure on Netanyahu, saying that while he, Gantz, had “turned over every stone” to form a government, the prime minister had blocked his way at every step on the graveled path.
“I asked of the prime minister, who lost in the election, to hold direct negotiations. And in response I received insults, slander and childish videos,” said Gantz with his first shot to the bow suggesting that Netanyahu lacked legitimacy to stand in his way.
But with the carefully crafted text, which he read attentively from the two teleprompters in front of him, Gantz described Netanyahu’s obstruction not just as a simple political act of defiance but as a morally deficit act of desperation to block the will of the people and steal the elections, all in order to save himself from prosecution.
“Faced with the stones that I have overturned to achieve unity and reconciliation, a ‘bloc’ was created that insisted on seeing the personal good of one person before the good of the patients lying in the corridors. Faced with the grains of sand that I have sifted, a ‘wall of losers’ has insisted on preventing the citizens of Israel from forming a government led by those who won and move forward into an era of sanity and political stability,” Gantz said of the bloc of 55 right-wing and religious lawmakers who have insisted on backing Netanyahu and only negotiating as a unit.
“This is a dangerous move, the first of its kind in the history of the country, to prevent Israeli citizens for more than a year from establishing the government that voted for it by a clear and absolute vote, and to barricade itself in a transitional government for over a year,” he said.
Despite his Blue and White party having barely edged out Likud by a single seat in the September vote, Gantz insisted that “the people chose me and my colleagues in Blue and White to lead Israel. No one has the right to prevent the people from their choice.”
Then, delivering the gut-punch, Gantz, in what felt like a well-rehearsed move, looked at the cameras lining the back of the small hall of Tel Aviv’s convention center, addressed the prime minister himself.
“Netanyahu! The state is not yours,” he insisted. “The country is not mine either. The state belongs to its citizens. Release the state from its strangulation, and enter into direct negotiations now. You are leading us to a dangerous collision that will end up with a heavy price that you and only you will be responsible for.”
He repeatedly contrasted his own earnest outlook with descriptions of a corrupted and decaying sense of public service, attempting to paint a picture of two different Israels and of two different leaders.
“The people of Israel need leadership with a vision and not leadership with immunity. Leadership that paves roads for the benefit of the people, and not a detour bypassing investigations for itself. Leadership with a social vision to work for the people. Leadership that is not immersed in its own legal mud, but immersed entirely in the interests of the people,” he said.
With Gantz’s failure, the political arena now moves to the Knesset, which has 21 days to nominate a lawmaker, including Netanyahu or Gantz, to be given the mandate. Should that fail as well, as it is widely expected to, the Knesset will dissolve and a new round of elections will be called, likely to take place in early March.
Gantz promised to “remain available for direct, substantive and fast negotiations,” and he told President Reuven Rivlin that he would continue to trying to form a unity government, but his words made clear that he has no real hope for reconciliation with Netanyahu.
Taken together, the speech sounded less like an earnest bid for unity and more like the start of a campaign, something the political rookie is already well versed in.
As reported by The Times of Israel