Less than a year after the Knesset elections, in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu retained his seat as Israel’s Prime minister for a 3rd term, yet bruised and belittled by his new popular partners Lapid and Bennett, Mr. Netanayhu has now regained his status as King Bibi.
in a poll conducted for Haaretz this week by the Dialog Institute, Lapid is rated as the most disappointing politician, by a large margin over other party leaders − whether in the coalition or the opposition. Meanwhile, after he was eulogized, in these pages as well, Benjamin Netanyahu is − according to this week’s Haaretz-Dialog poll − returning to where he was a year ago, at the start of the election campaign: unrivaled when it comes to the question of suitability to be prime minister. We wrote at the time that Netanyahu was being outmaneuvered by the political rookie Lapid, but now it is clear that the premier was the one doing the maneuvering. Lapid is up to his neck in painful budget cuts, while Netanyahu is floating about in the lofty realms of global statesmanship.
According to senior party officials, Netanyahu is now considering moving the Likud leadership primaries to early 2014, preparing the political ground for concessions to the Palestinians, Mazal Mualem reports.
According to senior Likud officials, Netanyahu would like to hold the primaries in early 2014, preferably January or February. The reason for the move is to establish his status as chairman of the movement and to free himself from the burden of internal party politics, which could weigh him down throughout his tenure as prime minister.
If Netanyahu does move up the primaries, it would be the third time he’s employed such a move since 2007, when he surprised rival Silvan Shalom (the current minister for regional development) and announced a flash primary election. Shalom withdrew his candidacy as a result and claimed that Netanyahu was running the Likud like the Baath party in Syria. The second time was in December 2011, right after the deal over abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, when public support for Netanyahu was at its peak. This ensured him an easy victory with a huge margin over now-Knesset member Moshe Feiglin.
Apparently, the prime minister is encouraged by recent polls indicating the collapse of his rival claimant to the crown, Finance Minister Yair Lapid, and the relatively high marks the public is giving Netanyahu. He must feel that this is the time to be re-elected head of the Likud and to establish his status as leader of the party in the general elections for the 20th Knesset.
By advancing the Likud elections, the prime minister would declare that even after his third term in office, he has no plans to go anywhere. It would also send a clear message to anyone who considers himself a potential candidate for the party leadership, such as Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, Interior Minister Gideon Saar or the chair of Yisrael Beiteinu, Avigdor Liberman, to forget about his plans.
“Netanyahu fell in love with the flash-primaries model,” one Likud minister told Al-Monitor. “He simply got used to strange elections for the head of the Likud the last few times, when he ran against Moshe Feiglin. Feiglin has since been elected to the Knesset, so now it is not even sure that he will want to run against Netanyahu. What that means is that Netanyahu could find himself running against himself. That has never happened to us before.”
(Jacob Kornbluh – YWN)
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‘Economics Minister Naftali Bennett, who heads the religious-Zionist Bayit Yehudi party, accused the Israeli court system Monday of straying from its proper role and interfering in matters that are not under its purview.
“We need to strengthen the trust in the court system, to make it balanced, and to select the judges in a more proper way,” he said, at a conference in Tel Aviv.
“In any proper country,” he said, “the government governs and the judges judge. Once the court begins to govern – it’s a problem.”
Bennett’s party, together with Coalition Chairman MK Yariv Levin (Likud), are currently advancing a bill that would make it easier for the Knesset to re-legislate a law that had been struck down as “unconstitutional” by the courts. Israel’s High Court has voided a number of laws passed by the legislature as “unconstitutional,” even though Israel does not have a constitution.
In presenting the legislative initiative to limit the courts’ ability to interfere with the work of the other government branches, MK Ayelet Shaked of Bayit Yehudi declared, “The Knesset, as the sovereign power in a democracy, has the right to the final word regarding matters of value and principle.”
“Over the last 20 years there has been a constitutional revolution that has weakened the power of the executive and legislative branches, and has given preference to the judicial branch. We are interested in fixing that,” she added.
The proposal Shaked and Levin put forth, with backing from Bennett, includes the following:
– Putting the Knesset in charge of electing the Supreme Court President.
– Placing limitations on the Supreme Court’s power to overturn laws passed by Knesset.
– Giving the Knesset new powers to vote a second time for laws that the Supreme Court has overturned. The Knesset would be allowed to vote in overturned laws with a majority of at least 61 votes, for a period of no more than four years.
– The committee to select judges would be changed to give just one seat, instead of three, to representatives from the Supreme Court.’
Great ,but of course the same the charedim have been vilified for saying for almost two decades