Education Minister and HaBayit HaYehudi Chair Naftali Bennett was in high spirits as he wandered the halls of the Knesset on Feb. 27. In fact, the members of his party noted that he seemed unusually pleased with himself. Just one day before the release of the state comptroller's report on the performance of the Security Cabinet and the military leadership during the 2014 Operation Protective Edge in Gaza (with much of the report’s content leaked to the press), Bennett could claim an enormous victory. Indeed, the report describes him as the only minister who demanded that Israel take action against the threat posed by Hamas’ tunnels.

An old rabbinic adage says, "He who works hard before the Sabbath will have what to eat on the Sabbath." It could easily refer to Bennett, who was a member of the Security Cabinet during the operation. Even as the fighting was underway, he made a point of branding himself as the campaign's political victor. He was the young minister who challenged the prime minister, the defense minister and the chief of staff, all of whom failed in their management of the fighting in Gaza.

Bennett showed an unprecedented level of sophistication by shifting the public discourse about the operation to the threat posed by the Hamas attack tunnels. As the report shows, not only did he convince the public, he even managed to convince the state comptroller himself that the most important way to assess Operation Protective Edge should be through that prism. Bennett operated like a well-oiled PR machine in the month preceding the report's release. Military and political pundits and senior media figures alike all received personal briefings from him. This prepared Bennett for the inevitable political fighting both preceding and following the report's Feb. 28 release.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Moshe Ya'alon, who was defense minister at the time of the fighting, and then-Chief of Staff Benny Gantz waged a media campaign of their own in an effort to undermine the state comptroller's findings, which were very critical of them. Meanwhile, Bennett made some last-minute adjustments to his own efforts. In the days before the report’s release, he briefed the members of his faction about its findings and recruited them to continue with his political and media campaign — a campaign designed to intensify as the report would be published. In closed-door party meetings, Bennett could finally show his Knesset colleagues that he was "providing them with the goods," as the head of a party with eyes on the prime minister's office. On the night before the report was published, Bennett shared his version of events again, this time at a meeting with party activists.