If you have not yet seen Defense Minister Israel Katz’s “boom, boom, boom” primaries video, you should.
You are in for a treat – and also a revealing glimpse into just how pitiable Israeli party politics can become, and what even the most senior officials, including those who are supposed to spend their days making decisions of life and death, feel compelled to do.
The video is embarrassing, but the story behind it is even more telling.
Until this week, Katz was preparing to run in the Likud primaries, scheduled for next week. The video included the message that Katz is the first real right-wing defense minister in the country’s history.
Then Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked the party’s governing body to approve a special exemption that would guarantee the defense minister a place on the Likud list without having to compete in the primary.
The justification was that Katz is too busy dealing with Israel’s security challenges to spend his time campaigning.
On its face, the idea sounded reasonable. Israel is still fighting threats on multiple fronts, the IDF is stretched, and the defense establishment is grappling with manpower shortages, procurement needs, and the lessons of nearly three years of war.
A defense minister should probably have better things to do than shake hands with Likud activists.
The problem is that Katz has somehow found plenty of time for exactly that.
PM’s request that Katz be exempt from competing in Likud primaries is ironic
He has developed a reputation over the last two years of attending countless bar mitzvahs, weddings, and assorted celebrations of Likud activists and political power brokers, even when they come at the expense of important national security meetings.
One striking example was last week when Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto held an engagement party for his son. Katz reportedly skipped a security cabinet meeting to attend.
Other political and security figures – two additional ministers and the former Mossad chief David Barnea – were there as well.
There are two problems with this.
The first is the obvious one: Why would the defense minister, the man responsible for overseeing the IDF, miss a security cabinet meeting for an engagement party?
The second is a question of ethics. Pinto is not merely a prominent rabbi with political connections; he is a convicted criminal who served time in prison after pleading guilty to attempting to bribe a senior police officer.
Why do senior Israeli ministers feel the need to attend his family celebrations?
The answer says something uncomfortable about the state of Israeli politics. If you want to get ahead, it means that doing your job is not enough.
You need to shake the right hands, attend the right celebrations, and rub shoulders with the right political operators – even when some of them have criminal records. The objective is to remain, as Ariel Sharon once put it, on the political wheel.
We can also be fairly confident that Netanyahu is not rescuing Katz from the primaries simply out of concern that his defense minister is overworked. Katz also does not really have any electoral value. Very few people are going to vote for Likud because of him.
Within parts of the defense establishment, many of his decisions are viewed as deeply political, sometimes seemingly designed as much for the Likud base as for Israel’s security needs.
So why give him a guaranteed slot?
One possible explanation is simple political expediency.
Netanyahu needs Katz happy. The last thing a prime minister heading into an election wants is a disgruntled defense minister turning against him, particularly one who has spent the last two years inside the rooms where some of Israel’s most consequential military decisions were made.
A safe place on the Likud list gives Katz every incentive to remain loyal.
Defense minister is kept happy to keep Netanyahu happy
But this phenomenon is not limited to Likud.
On the other side of the political map, Naftali Bennett is confronting a very different problem. He is experiencing something that usually happens to him much later in an election campaign: his support is falling.
Bennett has a history of beginning campaigns with impressive polling numbers only to finish considerably lower. A few months ago, he appeared to be Netanyahu’s most formidable challenger, polling above 20 seats and at times approaching 25.
Today, he is hovering closer to the low teens.
That is a dangerous place for him to be, particularly since many of those voters are also being courted by other opposition parties.
As his numbers have declined, Bennett has returned to the campaign style that has characterized him in the past: moving aggressively from issue to issue, searching for the subject that might reconnect him with voters.
One day it is the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) draft; another it is Qatar, which Bennett has said he will declare an enemy state. Then there was a video he made pointing at the holes in the security fence along the Jordanian border.
There is also the cost of living and the monopolies, which he says he will break up.
More recently, he has begun holding what might best be described as political living-room conversations in Likud strongholds, sitting with longtime Netanyahu supporters and trying to explain why they should consider voting for him.
One video from this week was particularly revealing.
Bennett is sitting near the beach in Ashdod speaking with a man who describes himself as a longtime Netanyahu supporter.
The man explains that he cannot support Bennett because he broke his promise before the 2021 election not to form a government with Yair Lapid or with an Arab party, and then did exactly that when he created the so-called change government.
Bennett does not really dispute the accusation. Instead, he adds a part of the story the man apparently does not know.
Before Bennett formed his government, he said, Netanyahu had repeatedly courted Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, in an effort to build a coalition of his own. Netanyahu met Abbas multiple times and even asked Bennett to meet with him.
When it seemed that Netanyahu might succeed in getting Abbas to sit with him, some of Netanyahu’s most loyal media supporters suddenly began speaking about the Arab politician in positive terms.
People who today portray cooperation with an Arab party as almost an act of treason were, at the time, enthusiastic about the possibility.
Only after Netanyahu failed to form a government did Bennett move forward with Lapid, Abbas, and the coalition that eventually replaced him.
What makes the video interesting is not that Bennett is trying to persuade the man sitting across from him. He probably will not. The real target for Bennett is center-right voters who dislike Netanyahu but remain suspicious of Bennett.
The story behind Abbas-Netanyahu fall through
They need to hear that the story they have been told about 2021 is incomplete. Netanyahu did not reject Abbas on principle. He tried to work with him and failed because of a veto by Bezalel Smotrich, who refused to sit with Abbas.
Bennett tried afterward and succeeded.
This is not just political history. It could become one of the most important questions Israel faces after the October 27 election.
Based on current polling, there is a real possibility that neither political camp will be able to form a government on its own. Netanyahu may not have enough seats with his current right-wing and ultra-Orthodox partners.
The opposition parties – led by figures such as Eisenkot and Bennett – may also fall short with their natural partners.
If that happens, Israel will once again confront the question it has spent years trying not to answer honestly: Is cooperation with an Arab party legitimate?
There are arguments on both sides, and much will depend on which Arab parties are elected, what they stand for, and what kind of coalition they are prepared to support.
But voters deserve to have that debate based on facts.
And that is what connects Bennett’s video to Katz’s “boom, boom, boom” video.
They are very different politicians facing different political challenges, but both stories expose the same problem: Israeli politics has become an arena in which almost everything is filtered through personal survival, partisan loyalty, and carefully constructed narratives.
Even facts.
Netanyahu’s supporters can condemn Bennett for relying on Abbas while ignoring Netanyahu’s own attempt to do so. Bennett can reinvent himself around a different issue every week, hoping that one of them will stop his slide in the polls.
Katz can be too busy with national security to compete in a primary while apparently still finding time for political celebrations.
And everyone carries on as if these contradictions do not exist. This is what Israelis should be thinking about as they prepare to vote.
The election should not just be about who can produce the best video, who can frighten voters most effectively, or who can mobilize the most loyal political base.
It should be about what these politicians actually intend to do with power.
Those questions matter far more than “boom, boom.”
The writer is a co-founder of the MEAD Forum, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, and former editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post. His latest book (with Amir Bohbot), While Israel Slept, is a bestseller in the United States.