The PM placed Itamar Ben Gvir and Yitzhak Goldknopf at the heart of his government, and has indulged their reckless activities for two years. They rewarded him with an act of spectacular ruthlessness, showing utter contempt for his health
Today,
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (center) interacts with National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir (right) in the Knesset on December 31, 2024. Netanyahu left the hospital less than two days after prostate surgery to vote on a budget law that Ben Gvir tried in vain to defeat. (Chaim Goldberg / Flash 90)
To be clear, this was not only a political hit — a bid to expedite the termination of Netanyahu’s career. No, it was also a callous act of actual life-endangerment, ruthlessly orchestrated by a pair of his own ostensible colleagues.
The prime minister is 75 years old. He has a chronic heart condition. Seventeen months ago, in July 2023, he told his then-defense minister Yoav Gallant, as they sat side by side in the Knesset plenum hours after Netanyahu had been discharged from Tel Aviv’s Sheba Medical Center with a newly fitted pacemaker, that he’d have died if he hadn’t got to the hospital within minutes after experiencing heart irregularities the week before.
On Sunday, Netanyahu underwent routine but major surgery at Jerusalem’s Hadassah Medical Center to have his prostate removed. He was kept there for observation on Sunday night and Monday night, and was expected to remain for at least another day or two, with several weeks of recovery at home after that. He didn’t even have his wife at his bedside.
But on Tuesday afternoon, Netanyahu left his recovery room — a reinforced area, on a basement floor of the hospital, where he had been placed to ensure he would be protected from further Houthi missile or Hezbollah drone attack — and had himself driven to the Knesset, personal physician in tow.
He made the journey, against the advice of the doctors, because his minister of national security, Itamar Ben Gvir, had joined forces with his minister of housing, Yitzhak Goldknopf, to try to block what is known as the “Trapped Profits” law — legislation that closes tax loopholes in the 2024 budget — and the pair thought they had the votes to do so. Still, Netanyahu’s cause was not entirely lost, and there was a chance that the prime minister’s own vote might prove crucial in rescuing the bill before its year-end deadline.
Goldknopf, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism Party, has for months been threatening Netanyahu and vowing to quit the coalition as he battles to enshrine in law the decades-long aberration by which the vast majority of ultra-Orthodox males do no military or other national service — a cardinal issue for their political leadership.
Even though the Supreme Court has ruled this institutionalized draft-dodging illegal, even though the IDF is desperately short of soldiers, even though vast numbers of reservists have spent hundreds of days fighting on multiple fronts since Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion and slaughter, and even though Netanyahu has been desperately trying to find a legislative means to appease Goldknopf and the coalition’s other ultra-Orthodox extortionists, the UTJ leader had instructed party MKs to vote against the Trapped Profits bill — to underline to Netanyahu that he could and would paralyze the government until he gets his way.
Ben Gvir’s pretext for voting against the coalition was neither cardinal nor particularly credible. He was purportedly digging in his heels because he claims to have been allocated insufficient funding for Israel’s police force, which he oversees at Netanyahu’s pleasure despite his multiple criminal indictments and convictions for racism and incitement to terrorism. But Ben Gvir has also of late threatened the coalition and voted against legislation in order to protest his exclusion from a key ministerial decision-making forum and to advance his demand for the sacking of the attorney general.
He wears a suit, runs a ministry, and has a personal (dangerous) driver. But he remains a hoodlum.
MK Itamar Ben Gvir brandishing a handgun during clashes in East Jerusalem on October 13, 2022. (Screen capture: Twitter; used in accordance with Clause 27a of the Copyright Law)
Much analysis of Tuesday’s proceedings at the Knesset has focused on Netanyahu’s indomitable fighting skills. He had apparently spent several hours before the vote making calls from his hospital bunker to try to defuse the revolt, with some success. But the political arithmetic was still not dependably in his favor.
His arrival in the Knesset plenum, however, made all the difference. He was greeted by his loyalists like a political messiah risen from beneath the surgeon’s knife. One after another, they approached to inquire about his health. So determined were they to offer their good wishes that they delayed him when, in between innumerable procedural votes, he tried to leave the chamber, visibly discomfited, for some medically ordered rest.
Three hours after he had returned, his political resurrection was completed — you really couldn’t make this up — with the legislation passing by 59 votes to 58: The prime minister had persuaded one of Ben Gvir’s MKs to vote for the law, and two of Goldknopf’s to abstain, but it was Netanyahu’s own vote that proved decisive.
The prime minister, even laid low by urgent surgery, had not merely outsmarted the younger, ultra-energetic Ben Gvir, but had weakened Ben Gvir and Goldknopf’s grip on their own parties and potentially deterred future such political ploys.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (center) enters the Knesset plenum on December 31, 2024, for a budgetary vote. His doctor Tzvi Berkovitz is at right. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)
What has been less remarked upon is the sheer heartlessness of Ben Gvir and Goldknopf’s failed insurrection. They challenged the prime minister who gave them their jobs, contemptuously pressuring and stressing him when what he needed most was rest and recuperation.
Despicably, they would not even allow him a minor grace that would have done their cause no harm: They could have agreed to spare him the wearying schlep from the hospital by offsetting his vote against that of one of their MKs — a routine political act when an MK is unavoidably indisposed, that does not affect the final voting tally. They displayed similar viciousness to Likud MK Boaz Bismuth, by also refusing to offset Bismuth’s vote, thus compelling the bereaved legislator to leave the shiva (mourning) for his own mother.
Likud MK Boaz Bismuth, center, greets other lawmakers after arriving at the Knesset from sitting shiva following the death of his mother, on December 31, 2024. His shirt is torn in line with Jewish mourning customs. (Knesset spokesperson)
Israel has a habit of considering its prime ministers to be somehow invincible, exempt from the laws of mortality — a misconception frequently promulgated by the prime ministers themselves.
In 1995, at the height of the bitter national divide over the Oslo Accords with the PLO, Yitzhak Rabin brushed off the notion that somebody would try to harm him; somebody did, fatally.
Ariel Sharon suffered from obesity, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. He had a minor stroke in mid-December 2005, and defied doctors’ warnings by returning to work soon afterward, amid a kind of national nonchalant admiration; plainly, Sharon was built of special material. He was not. Barely two weeks later, he suffered a major stroke and fell into a coma from which he never emerged. He died in January 2014.
Prime minister Ariel Sharon greets the public on being released from Hadassah Medical Center after his first, minor stroke, on December 20, 2005. Alongside him is then hospital director Shlomo Mor-Yosef. (Nati Shohat/Flash90)
Benjamin Netanyahu is an extraordinary figure — Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, invariably five steps ahead of his political rivals, repeatedly hauling himself back from the political abyss, currently retaining power even after presiding over the worst disaster in modern Israeli history, and entirely capable of defying all polling predictions that show he has no chance of winning the next elections, whenever they may be.
But he is, nonetheless, whisper it, human. And what Ben Gvir and Goldknopf put him through on Tuesday was reckless, dangerous and unforgivable.
Housing Minister Yitzhak Goldknopf (left) and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir speak in the Knesset on May 23, 2023 (Gil Cohen-Magen / AFP)
The irony is that Netanyahu indulges both of these political “leaders” — and still, after Tuesday’s antics, apparently dare not fire them — even as they recklessly endanger Israel every single day: Goldknopf, by insisting on the inequitable, anti-Zionist, nationally divisive, economically destructive, un-Jewish and unpatriotic exemption from national service of the ultra-Orthodox community. And Ben Gvir, by attempting to whip up anti-Israel hostility across the Muslim world with his hyped prayer visits to the Temple Mount, his enthusiastic partnership in the coalition’s abiding effort to neuter the judiciary and destroy the law enforcement bodies, and especially his ongoing attempt to transform the national police force into a violent, repressive militia.
It was Netanyahu, of course, who hired these national hitmen. This week, they came gunning for him.
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