Diplomatic Negotiations Cost Netanyahu His Likud Base
While negotiations with the Palestinians are underway, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces growing distrust and lack of support within his own Likud party.
On Monday [Sept. 23], in the late-night hours, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office published a firm response to the shooting in Hebron, in which IDF Givati brigade fighter Staff Sgt. Gal Kobi was killed.
In the announcement, the various media outlets were informed that the prime minister “instructed tonight to take immediate action to allow the Jews to move into Hebron’s Machpelah House.” Later on, Netanyahu was quoted as threatening that “Those who try to uproot us from the city of our fathers will achieve the opposite effect,” and promised that “with one hand we will fight terror and with the other we'll strengthen settlement."
The target audience of this militant notice was Netanyahu’s electorate in the ideological right wing. This is the group that, since renewal of the dialogue with the Palestinians, suspects that Netanyahu has “crossed the Rubicon” on his way to waive parts of the homeland. This group is the hard kernel of Netanyahu’s political base, the core of electors in the far right. In Netanyahu’s belief, this is the group that brought him to lead the government three times, and once to defeat, when he lost to former Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 1999.
In the periods when Netanyahu worked with the American strategic adviser Arthur Finkelstein, the latter always warned him not to relinquish his “base on the right.” Netanyahu adopted this suggestion and treated it, in recent years, as a holy principle. A truism. Even when the political center made overtures to him, as happened after the release of abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, Netanyahu always returned to the right, in this case via the merger with the former Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman.
