Assessment: Prime Minister Naftali Bennett never held any real executive office, and he never had to implement his plans for beating the pandemic, applying sovereignty, or defeating Hamas …
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett held a primetime press conference about his COVID-19 policies Monday evening. It went poorly for him.
Channel 12 News reporter Ofer Hadad spoke for many Israelis when he said, “Mr. Prime Minister, on the one hand, you’re signaling urgency and fear, and on the other hand, confusion.
“You decide to require a Green Pass for entry into shopping malls, and then you do an about face. You call for children to get vaccinated and then we discover that the education minister is – at best – refusing to mobilize the school system to this end. You ask the citizens of Israel not to travel abroad. And then your family flies off to the Maldives. You’re confusing us.”
“A ruler who lacks understanding is a great oppressor, But he who hates covetousness will prolong his days.” Proverbs 28:6
Bennett’s confused and contradictory policies on COVID-19 are of a piece with his confusing and failed policies in every other major policy sphere. From his dealing with the Biden administration, the Palestinians, Iran, Diaspora Jewry, the economy and beyond, Bennett’s policies are a muddle of self-defeating contradictions.
Consider the situation with the Biden administration. Bennett said that by forming a radical ruling coalition dominated by the Left and the Islamist Ra’am Party, he would vastly improve Israel’s relations with the administration. Bennett and his partner, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, insisted that then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had brought Israel-US relations to a crisis through his close relations with then-President Donald Trump and the Republican party. Bennett and Lapid claimed that once they took charge, ties with the Biden administration would vastly improve.
But the opposite has occurred. On Tuesday, Channel 13 News reported that for the past three weeks, President Joe Biden has refused to speak with Bennett. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken refuses to engage in any serious discussion of the administration’s Iran policies.
In a phone call with Bennett three weeks ago, Blinken reportedly refused to seriously discuss Iran’s nuclear program and the nuclear talks in Vienna. Instead, he focused obsessively on Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and Jewish neighborhoods in northern, eastern and southern Jerusalem, to which the administration passionately objects.
Blinken escalated the administration’s demands that Israel stop construction for Jews in Jerusalem’s northern Atarot neighborhood.
Read More @ Israel Hayom HERE
