Benny Ganz smells election.
Like many others, he does not believe the coalition will last long.
Now he has decided to pose another challenge to her: next week the Blue and White faction will raise the Equality Act for a vote in the Ministerial Committee for Legislation.
Ganz knows this is a problematic move, he understands it is leading to another coalition crisis.
This does not bother him, because at the moment, more than the integrity of the coalition is important to him, it is important for him to survive the next election.
From the moment he decided to run for prime minister, Gantz positioned himself as the leader and representative of the Israeli center: not too left-wing, not too right-wing, a former machinist, closest to Rabin. The leader that suits every audience. One evening at a wedding in the Elysee palace halls and the next evening in the kibbutz dining room.
And it worked. Ganz led Blue and White to impressive achievements, and at one point even received from the president the mandate to form a government. But then the story got complicated.
The terribly central character?
She became a sub-character in the big story, called Benjamin Netanyahu.
And despite the terrible disappointment he inflicted on his constituents, Ganz was not wiped out in the last election, and even received eight seats.
Many saw him as a victim of Netanyahu, the good guy who tried to prevent Bibi from doing bad things to his body, who fell on his sword for the sake of cleaning his hands and saving the country.
But then something happened that no one expected to happen: Naftali Bennett became prime minister.
The one who managed to oust Netanyahu is not the tall, blue-eyed center-right man who was supposed to suit everyone, but rather a distinctly right-wing man, wearing a kippah, who never claimed to represent the center and ran for a party called the "right."
And whoever praised Ganz for the sacrifice and entry under the stretcher to balance Netanyahu, can not fail to appreciate Bennett who chose, consciously, not only to abandon his base and the original terminology, but to do a brave, groundbreaking and inconceivable act - to sit in one coalition with Mansour Abbas .
In the next election, Ganz will no longer be able to be portrayed as having sacrificed himself for the integrity of the people and the state.
It will be Bennett who can claim, and rightly so, that in his concessions he saved the State of Israel from another Netanyahu term, thus preventing further elections and a civil war;
Who is the one who managed to put under one roof Lieberman, Michaeli, Shaked and the southern faction of the Islamic movement, and for that to happen he is willing to pay a personal and political price.
Not by name, Naftali Bennett has become the most successful representative of the Israeli central bloc.
Benny Ganz understands the process that takes place before his eyes.
He knows that what he was in the past will not be enough for him in the next election.
He can no longer claim to have been deceived, even if he has not given up, since Bennett has given up much more.
And without these two he has no campaign, no reason to vote blue and white.
Were we wrong?
Fixed!
If you found an error in the article, we'll be happy for you to share it with us