What Arutz Sheva Didn’t Ask Netanyahu
Five days before the election, the prime minister sat for a long interview about Iran, Gaza, Trump, and the small parties of the right. The map he showed on Oct. 18, the army the PA is training abroad, and the armored vehicles approved on his watch never came up.......
On Thursday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu gave Arutz Sheva an exclusive interview five days before Israel votes. He warned against complacency and against small right-wing parties that may not cross the threshold. He said the Iranian threat is far from over and that the IDF will have to “finish” Hamas and Hezbollah. On Judea and Samaria he spoke of building “at a record rate” and promised: “As long as I’m prime minister of Israel, there won’t be a Palestinian state.”
Here are five questions he was not asked. Each one rests on facts already on the public record, most of them from his own words and his own government. Three concern what his government has done in Judea and Samaria, one concerns what he will not promise, and the last concerns the issue that keeps the other four off the table. Interviews like this one rarely ask such questions, for reasons I come to below, so voters will have to ask them, and get the answers in writing before Oct. 27.
1. Why does your own map give Judea and Samaria to the PA?
“There won’t be a Palestinian state,” he told the interviewers. Four days earlier, on Oct. 18, he presented his national security doctrine in front of a map that labels Judea and Samaria “Palestinian Authority (West Bank)”, on a slide titled “Principal threats: arenas.” Nothing on the slide corrected the label. The report on the doctrine in Arutz Sheva did not mention the map, and the interview did not ask about it.
2. Who lets the PA’s officers out to train?
On Oct. 13 he said Israel was “prepared for every scenario, including a turning of the barrels”, the scenario in which PA forces turn their guns on Israelis. Two days before the interview, HaKol HaYehudi reported that PA officers are training in armored warfare at the Chinese army’s academy in Beijing, after earlier courses in Pakistan and Russia. The Defense Ministry, COGAT and the IDF sent the reporter’s questions to one another, and the Prime Minister’s Office did not answer. Palestinian Authority Arabs in Judea and Samaria leave, as a rule, through a gate Israel controls. Who stamped their exit? The interview did not mention the PA’s forces at all.
3. Who approved the armored vehicles the PA received in 2019?
If the left and the Arab parties win, he warned, “we’re going to have the Oslo disaster on steroids.” In May 2019 I reported for Arutz Sheva that the PA had received ten armored vehicles that entered through Allenby “with Israel’s approval,” and an Israeli source said the transfer had been approved more than nine months earlier, at the Americans’ request, by Avigdor Liberman, then defense minister, and by the prime minister. The prime minister was Binyamin Netanyahu.
4. Will you put sovereignty in writing before Oct. 27?
Asked whether sovereignty over Judea and Samaria is the next step, he said it “was discussed with the president” and that he would “rather do rather than announce.” That is a promise to act later on a policy he will not state now. It is exactly the vote I have argued no one should give away: no signature, no vote. If he means to do it, a signed commitment costs him nothing.
5. Iran is a real enemy. Why should it crowd out every other question?
In the same interview the prime minister described an enemy in bad shape. Iran’s regime, he said, is “crippled” and “on their knees.” Asked whether Iran can produce a nuclear weapon today, he said it still has “problems with weaponization.” In the Hebrew version he went further: of the campaign against Iran, “90% of the job is done”, and 10 percent remains.
Yet he also asked voters to treat the election as a choice about Iran above everything else. In the Hebrew version he called the interview “a rescue call,” not an interview. In English he said: “Either we destroy them, or they destroy us. That’s what the voters have to decide on now.” The same day, Arutz Sheva carried The New York Times‘ report that the United States and Israel are preparing new strikes on Iran that could begin after the Nov. 3 American midterm elections.
None of this makes the threat imaginary. Israel has been in a war with Iran since February, and no one who has run to a shelter this year needs to be told that Iran means to harm us. But the threat has also been the frame of every campaign for a generation. In 1992, Netanyahu told the Knesset that Iran was three to five years away from the bomb, and he has warned of an imminent bomb ever since. I traced that history in “Three to Five Years, Forever”.
A government can fight Iran and still answer for the map, for sovereignty, for the PA’s foreign-trained army and for the armored vehicles of 2019. A danger that is always about to arrive leaves no room to ask about anything else, and that is the problem.
Every stage magician knows the trick: keep the audience watching the right hand, and the left hand can do what it likes. The saw in the magician’s box is real; that is why everyone watches it. For a generation, Iran has been the right hand. While the country watches Tehran, a map with Judea and Samaria marked “Palestinian Authority” goes up on the prime minister’s screen, and PA officers fly home from a tank course in Beijing.
Fighting Iran is a reason to vote with your eyes open, not a reason to stop asking.
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