A last stand and a milestone for the future. There was a bit of both, expressed with great verbal violence and confusion, during the rally of supporters of Benjamin Netanyahu in Habima Square in Tel Aviv on Tuesday evening, November 2. Two days before the vote of a budget in Parliament, which permanently fixes their camp in the opposition, they gathered in the big coastal city, where their champion is not popular, among a sparse crowd.
At 9 p.m., some two thousand people had gathered: families, traditional voters of Likud, the great right-wing party, determined to defend “Israel, the Jewish and democratic state”. But it is above all the word “Jewish” that counts this evening. This is due to the organizers of the event, who include street agitators, who slam under the windows of criticism of Mr. Netanyahu, and who disseminate inflammatory messages on social networks, which the Israeli press wonders. they are confined to the call for murder.
Supremacists and Likud Members
This is due to certain speakers: the Jewish supremacists Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir. This is due, finally, to the speeches of the members of Likud, the deputies Amir Ohana or Miri Regev, who do not stand out frankly from these extremists. One by one, they name the “Traitors” : Naftali Bennett, this “Megalomaniac”, and the other former collaborators of Mr. Netanyahu – many – who have joined his government. The loudest boos go to Gideon Saar, a former Likud ambitious man.
At the justice ministry, Mr. Saar is defending a bill that could prohibit Mr. Netanyahu from forming a government, as long as he remains prosecuted for corruption. But the demonstrators denounce above all the Islamo-conservative party, the United Arab List, which the coalition dares to keep in power. In the crowd, a young mother holds up a sign with two bloody hands next to a portrait of the leader of this movement, Mansour Abbas, and another of the leader of Hamas in Gaza, Yahya Sinouar.
Such posters have swarmed in recent days on the sides of the roads. Likud assimilates the two men, claiming that the first risks transferring state subsidies to the second. So goes the “Netanyahu country”, one hundred and forty-five days after its fall: to the extreme right, all of it. It is about defending the one who remains the leader of the first party of Israel, to whom a poll of Channel 13 grant, the 1er November, thirty-six seats out of one hundred and twenty in Parliament, in the event of an election.
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