With every passing day since Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s impressive election victory on March 17, the extent of the blackmail attempts from within his own party, of all places, appears to grow. Just this week, Netanyahu managed to resolve the Gilad Erdan crisis (related to the ministerial portfolio allocated to Erdan) by appointing him to the government on May 25, all the while being blackmailed by Minister of Immigrant Absorption Zeev Elkin and having to hand him the Jerusalem Affairs portfolio. And now another storm is brewing on the home front. That’s the way things are with a government of 61 Knesset seats (out of 120) and zero room for maneuver, under daily threat by each and every coalition member.
At stake now is an initiative to hand back to members of the Likud central committee the power to pick the party’s Knesset members. The committee is scheduled to convene in about two weeks to discuss and vote in a secret ballot on a proposal spearheaded by Knesset member David Amsalem — a proposal that for Netanyahu is nothing short of a nightmare. Netanyahu believes the Likud central committee is a form of electoral terror, and in light of his intention to compete once again in the next party elections over the head of the Likud position, he has started shoring up his defenses in recent days.
The Likud central committee was for years a symbol of corruption and political decay, and was one of the causes for the party’s 2006 downfall. But since 2006, with a mixture of guile and tricks, Netanyahu has managed to convince the committee members to agree to primary elections in which all party members vote.
At the time, with the Likud on the verge of collapse after the breakaway of the Kadima Party in 2005 and polls giving it only 10 Knesset seats, Netanyahu showed them polls indicating the Likud could get back four or more seats if its Knesset members were chosen in primaries. Since then, every so often, he is forced to physically stop the wheel from being turned back. But now, just when he is supposedly at his political zenith, Netanyahu has had to launch a campaign entreating members of the central committee to head off the move by Knesset member Amsalem.
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