Veteran Likud member must raise integrity banner against Netanyahu’s rule

As of now, the 20th Knesset will not go down as Likud Knesset member Benny Begin’s greatest hour. At age 76, he will not be looking to serve another term in the next Knesset either. He arrived in the current Knesset on the shoulders of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who reserved the 11th slot in the party list for him so Begin could avoid the ordeal by fire that is the party primary system. When Netanyahu formed the current government, he appointed Begin as minister without portfolio, a position Begin held for 17 days. Then, suddenly, he was forced to resign so that Gilad Erdan could join the Cabinet.

Benny Begin served in the larger-than-life shadow of his father, the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Benny Begin filled various minor ministerial positions and was liked by all, though he did not particularly stick out among his peers. He combined an extremist ideology, which rejected any partition of the land no matter what the cost, with a liberal attitude, which opposed any discrimination against minorities, and which respected human rights.

During his political career, Begin sometimes found himself in absurd circumstances. That is what happened in 1999, when he was part of the hard-line National Union list with Minister Rehavam Ze’evi, who advocated for the transfer of the Arab population. Begin even ran a failed campaign for prime minister. On the other hand, Begin was admired throughout his long political career for his honesty and integrity. He was never afraid to speak his truth, even if doing so put his political standing at risk. It was because of this that he came to be considered the “conscience of the Likud.” He opposed the Regularization Law, which allowed the retroactive confiscation of privately held Arab lands to build West Bank settlements (he called it the Robbery Law), and the Nationality Law in its current iteration and proposed his own version of it. While his version was completely unnecessary, it would not have caused as much harm to Israel’s non-Jewish minorities. Begin was the only voice in the Likud who spoke out against the various populist and criminal tendencies in his party, and he continued to do so even after he was removed from the Knesset’s Internal Affairs Committee just so that he would not vote against the Likud’s positions.

With just three months to the election, this should be Begin’s big moment. It’s up to him to make sure that he’s heard loud and clear about what is happening in Israel right now. He must speak up against a prime minister, who refuses to resign, even though the police have called for his indictment for three separate cases of bribery, and who is using the official tools at his disposal to try to prevent the inevitable.