“If I had my way, we wouldn’t be negotiating with Hamas at all”

Photos: Flash 90

I

t’s the right-wing camp’s big moment, but the government it elected isn’t feeling it. The more the right’s ideology takes hold in the Israeli public, the further the governing coalition members drift apart.

Not even the hilltop youth of Yitzhar dreamed of such an outcome one year ago. Gaza is occupied, ground under the boots of Israeli troops; the Philadelphi Route has been paved with a new two-way road; and the sea of Gaza is a mikveh for dati-leumi soldiers stationed in the Strip.

In the north, IDF nomenclature no longer labels the summit of Mount Hermon as “the Syrian Hermon.” Its new Jewish name, adopted by the entire government, is Keter haHermon, “the crown of the Hermon.”

And those aren’t the only borders that have been redrawn. Opinion polls show that the Israeli public has shifted massively to the right since October 7, 2023. As with the Syrian Hermon, it’s hard to imagine a return to the past.

And on top of all that, Israel can look forward to Trump’s return to the Oval Office on January 20, 2025, leading a team whose right-wing credentials put the Likud to shame.

True, the war isn’t over. The drip-drip of ballistic missiles and the ever-growing list of Israel’s fallen are proof of that. But looking at the big picture, Israel’s regional and global standing has never been better under a narrow right-wing government.

But it’s precisely now that the right-wing government seems intent on tearing itself apart. While the draft issue is an inherently intractable problem, it hardly ends there. Justice Minister Yariv Levin is fighting to revive the judicial reform in wartime, slamming the door behind him as he leaves meetings with coalition heads after they refuse to cooperate.

National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir revolts and votes against the state budget, in what can only be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in the government. And that’s without even mentioning the threats of right-wing ministers to torpedo a hostage deal involving the release of terrorists. The more the public unites around the right, the more divided its representatives in the Knesset become.

The man of the new year in Israeli politics is Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who was able to pass a state budget filled with austerity measures in a time of war.

Despite leading the ultra-right-wing Religious Zionist Party, and despite the fact that his party is slipping below the electoral threshold in some opinion polls, Smotrich is taking a decidedly responsible and un-populist tone, in both the political and international arenas. Smotrich believes that voters will come to appreciate his unpopular decisions, but only time — and the electorate — will tell.

At a meeting of coalition heads, it was Smotrich, not the chareidim, who recommended against dismissing Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, warning overeager colleagues, especially the justice minister, that the move would fall in the High Court.

The finance minister also wants to delay the proposals to change the judicial selection process, and instead take the time to do it right. Today, Smotrich is perhaps the only minister in the government whose position on a wide range of issues is impossible to know in advance. Between Knesset votes in the plenum on the state budget, I sat down for a special interview with Bezalel Smotrich.

The Hostage Deal

Let’s start with the hostage deal taking shape. You’re serving under a prime minister who had your back during the passing of the state budget. Why don’t you have his back in the diplomatic arena? If Netanyahu is pushing for a deal now, with the incoming Trump administration vowing heavy retribution if Hamas doesn’t release the hostages, then he must have good reason to believe that it’s the right time for a deal. Give him some credit.

It’s not about credit. I give him plenty of credit, and I have a lot of respect for him. But we’re allowed to disagree, and my principled position is that our current approach to Hamas is a big mistake. Hamas is at its lowest point since the beginning of the war, as a result of the military and civilian pressure, the diplomatic isolation, and its fear of Trump, who will come in on January 20 and give us a lot of support.

You can’t wait for a new opportunity every time, and the number of surviving hostages is shrinking. It’s precisely now, between the two administrations, that we have to make a deal.

On the contrary. With Hamas on the verge of total collapse, now’s the time to force a surrender deal in which we get back all the hostages, not to extend Hamas a lifeline with a deal that stops the war in return for some of the hostages. Definitely not a deal in which we squander many of our military achievements, for which we paid a heavy price in blood. If I had my way, we wouldn’t be negotiating with Hamas at all. Our only contact with them would be through the sights of our brave soldiers’ tanks, planes, and artillery.

But we tried that already, and while we made significant achievements on both the northern and southern fronts, we’ve only been able to return a few of the hostages that way.

No. I say quite the opposite. We’ve been negotiating with Hamas the entire time, and that’s why we’ve been unable to bring back the hostages. If we said that there’s no negotiating and there’s no Hamas — that in our view, Hamas is an organization destined for destruction, not dialogue — then it’s very possible that Gazans holding the hostages would return them to us in return for financial rewards and safety guarantees for themselves and their families. We can’t expect to break their fear of Hamas even as we ourselves negotiate with it. The two are mutually exclusive.

Helping Gaza

As finance minister, you know better than anyone that the humanitarian aid is Hamas’s financial lifeline. How is it possible that for more than a year, you’re continuing to funnel humanitarian aid that is effectively fuel and oxygen for Hamas?

For a long period, former defense minister Yoav Gallant and the upper echelons of the IDF torpedoed alternative proposals for distributing the aid. Current defense minister Yisrael Katz took office, and he believes in the path I proposed. Still, I have to say that I feel that the army is dragging its feet on this matter. It’s not okay, and it’s not acceptable.

So what you’re essentially saying here is that despite the fact that there’s a defense minister who’s demanding that the army carry out the government’s position, the IDF under Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi is conducting its own policy?

This is a very problematic gray area. It’s not that they’re refusing orders, but they’re absolutely dragging their feet. In my view, this should have been solved many months ago, but certainly over a month after the prime minister, the defense minister, and myself attended a meeting at Gaza Division headquarters. We dealt with the matter in detail, a clear directive was given, and sadly, the matter continues to drag on. The solution is around the corner, and I hope it will happen in the coming weeks.

You initially opposed the previous hostage deal, but at the end of the process, you went into the cabinet meeting and voted in favor. Should your opposition be taken with a grain of salt this time too?

You’re right, and I’m proud of my ability to change my opinion. Only a donkey never changes its mind. We went into the meeting — what was important to us then was to ensure that the war would continue. There was a pause of just seven days; the IDF didn’t leave the strip. We were satisfied with the answers we received, we got the commitment to continue the war into the government decision, so we voted in favor. I’m very happy to be a part of returning some of the hostages — each one of them is an entire world.

What’s so different about the current deal from the previous one that leads you to reject it up front?

Then, we didn’t release hundreds of murderers with blood on their hands who will go on to murder more Jews and rebuild Hamas’s leadership. Then, the IDF didn’t pull back from the Gaza Strip. Then, we didn’t squander massive achievements — the fact that northern Gaza is becoming a sterile area free of Hamas, finally allowing the emergence of alternative leadership, a pilot for the model we’ll extend to the rest of the strip.

The differences are enormous. I’ll support a deal that doesn’t project weakness and surrender because we all want to return the hostages, but the deal emerging now is not how it’s done.

Squandering Opportunities

You spoke at the meeting of the coalition heads of the need to act wisely and take advantage of the Trump administration for the big things and not petty fights. Do you expect Netanyahu to act to impose sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, an opportunity that was missed in the previous term?

First, I want to state very clearly, this is a historic opportunity. Ahead of us are two years of a right-wing government with a friendly president in the White House. It’s dramatic, it could fortify our security and our existence — b’ezrat Hashem, of course. It’s true with regard to Iran, it’s true with regard to Judea and Samaria. We must take the terrible folly and existential danger of a Palestinian state in the heart of Eretz Yisrael off the agenda.

And of course, we must develop the settlements and apply sovereignty. These are incredible opportunities. But for that, we first need a stable government. Woe to whoever acts irresponsibly and shakes the coalition because of all kinds of fabricated spins. We have to preserve this government. We can do historic things.

You’re speaking in generalities, but let’s get into the details. We’re all witness to the endless internal squabbles, especially the big feud between yourself and Itamar Ben-Gvir, your fellow national religious political leader, who ran with you in the last elections but is now going for your head, portraying you as having surrendered to the attorney general’s dictates.

It’s sad. There are those who are always in an election campaign, and there are those who came to work and deliver results. Look, we would all like to fire the attorney general. We have no confidence in her, and apparently, she has no confidence in us. She’s blocking our every move and she must be replaced — there’s no dispute about that, and this was agreed upon at the government meeting we all participated in.

I just don’t understand why Ben-Gvir felt the need to contaminate the process and make it political. After all, it’s clear that if we’d surrendered to his dictates, and tied the passing of the budget to the attorney general’s dismissal, the High Court would have struck it down that very moment.

Maybe Ben-Gvir, unlike you, feels the rope around his neck. After all, the attorney general plans to write an opinion regarding the High Court petition to remove him from office. And when it comes to this, I want to ask: If the High Court adopts such a position by the attorney general and rules that Ben Gvir is ineligible to serve as a minister, would you call on the prime minister and your fellow coalition leaders to not comply with the High Court’s instruction?

That is absolutely my view. With all due respect, we have a democracy. You don’t oust a prime minister through legal proceedings, and you don’t oust a minister because of a petition or an attorney general’s opinion. It’s absurd. This is something that’s flagrantly illegal, and none of us will defend such a decision, neither by the attorney general nor by the High Court. If that’s the position the attorney general presents, we’ll of course demand private representation and make the opposing case.

And yes, I think we also have to tell the High Court: We won’t uphold this. With all due respect, we have a democracy, and in the last election, the right-wing government was elected to lead, not the High Court.

The Budget Battle

Let’s talk about the budget. You managed to get it through the plenum, but it’s fared less well in the court of public opinion. Of course the war has to be funded, but the public sees the wave of price increases, sees the spending cuts, and feels that this is coming at its expense.

The cost of living has been the biggest challenge in the State of Israel for years. It’s not new. If we want to analyze it — it’s mainly because we have a very small, monopolistic, and uncompetitive market. Over the years, there have been a lot of regulations ostensibly designed to protect the public, but which in reality protect all kinds of stakeholders and big monopolies that control the market. And there are no magic solutions other than competition, competition, competition.

But meanwhile, the only competition the average citizen sees is between chains racing to raise prices higher. What’s being done about that?

We’ve passed the “what’s good for Europe is good for Israel” reform [aimed at aligning Israel’s import standards with Europe’s, thereby cutting down on red tape], and it will take time for that to trickle down. We’ve prohibited brands from merging so that monopolies don’t emerge, and we’ve passed a series of measures.

We’re seeing now how analysts are surprised by how well the Israeli economy is performing, after over a year of war on several fronts. All of Am Yisrael has had to stretch, but we tried to make the wartime austerity measures we had to take as reasonable and balanced as possible, and distribute the pain across different segments of the population in a progressive structure — the higher your tax bracket, the more you contribute. There are areas where we increased spending, such as welfare payments to vulnerable populations. I think that under the circumstances, it’s definitely a balanced and reasonable approach.

Lowering the Flames

Before the war, you could have been described as the leader of the national-religious movement, which is the closest thing to the chareidi Torah world. Today, we all hear the voices from within the national religious community. The pain is real and sharp, with the discourse driven by mothers who can’t sleep at night and family members who have accompanied relatives to their final resting place. But a big part of it is about politics, an attempt to drive a wedge between the two sectors. How do you, as chair of Religious Zionism, ensure that the political alliance between the chareidi sector and the national-religious sector continues after the war? Or do you think that here too, we’ll end up saying, “The experiment failed”?

Of course the connection will continue. And it’s not just political, but a human connection. It’s true that we have hashkafic and ideological disagreements, but the draft issue is of vital and existential importance to Am Yisrael. And you’re right, there are cynical actors — the high-tech protest movement, the Kaplanists [the Tel Aviv Motzaei Shabbos protestors], Bennett, and others — who are trying to drive in a wedge and use the draft issue to topple the government, and we can’t be stupid and play into their hands.

But you’re right, a lot of the outcry comes from a place of genuine pain, both from the burden and from the heavy price. I lost a dear cousin in the war, and precisely because we’re all Torah learners, it hurts us. And again, these are hashkafic differences, and the Torah is full of disagreements. I’m not trying to convince you that I’m right, and that’s why we’re currently advancing a legislative proposal, along with the prime minister, the new defense minister, and chareidi representatives, that will change the reality and be done through consensus. I think we all understand the need and importance, and I believe we’ll be able to find the right legislative model.

Your words come from the heart, but that’s the exception and not the rule. We see the tiny number of chareidim reporting to the draft office and we can understand that this just won’t happen with divisive discourse, full of hatred and contempt for Torah learners. How does one lower the flames between the sectors?

Here I want to appeal to everyone — to my sector, which is hurting, and to the chareidi sector, which I’m sure is also hurting and feels attacked, and to the yeshivah bochurim who are truly the jewel in the crown and are being turned into criminals without legal status. We’re all hurting, but let’s take a deep breath and work from our heads. Pain isn’t actionable, and anger and distress aren’t a plan. Here, it’s our job as public representatives to be able to take a deep breath and search for reasoned solutions that are both the best for us as a nation and will keep the national camp together. As I said, we have two years of an historic opportunity ahead of us, and it’s incumbent on us to display responsibility.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1943)