CNN :
After the 2019 elections, Naftali Bennett’s right-wing party failed to cross the electoral threshold and had no seats in Israel’s parliament.
Two years later, he’s on the verge of becoming the country’s next prime minister.
A former chief of staff to then-opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu, Bennett could now unseat his former boss, bringing an end to Netanyahu’s run as the country’s longest serving prime minister.
Bennett has signed onto a historic coalition agreement with centrist leader Yair Lapid who brought together a wide swath of political parties as part of a change coalition to oust Netanyahu, including a far left party and even for the first time in Israeli history, an Arab-Israeli party. If Israel’s parliament signs off on the deal in the coming days, Bennett will take the top job for the first two years of a four-year term, followed by Lapid.
He will sit alongside politicians with completely opposing ideologies to his own.
Bennett lies to the right even of Netanyahu in several crucial areas. He would carry into office a history of incendiary remarks about Palestinians and a well-documented ambition to annex part of the occupied West Bank.
Few Israelis voted for Bennett’s Yamina party in March elections, picking up just 7 seats compared to Netanyahu’s 30. But Bennett found himself the kingmaker, wooed by both Netanyahu and Lapid who needed his party’s support in order to form a majority.
How much of his agenda Bennett can achieve while constrained in an awkwardly assembled coalition remains to be seen. But if the deal stands, the Yamina leader-for so long a supporting character in Israel’s high-stakes political spectacle-could become a major player on the world scene.
Born in Haifa to immigrants from San Francisco, Bennett served in an elite unit of the Israel Defense Forces, before studying law at Hebrew University. He then became an entrepreneur, launching a tech start-up in 1999 which he later sold for $145 million.
He entered Israeli politics under Netanyahu’s wing years later, though the two fell out after he was dismissed as chief of staff in 2008. Bennett made his own name nationally in 2013 as the leader of the pro-settler party Jewish Home, making his desire to prevent the formation of a Palestinian state a central plank of his pitch to voters. After a merger with another party, he rebranded the party “Yamina” in 2019.
Over the coming years Bennett held several posts in Netanyahu’s various governments, including as minister of Defense, while continuing to outflank Netanyahu on issues relating to the Palestinian territories.
“The old models of peace between Israel and the Palestinians are no longer relevant. The time has come to rethink the two-state solution,” he wrote in a 2014 op-ed in the New York Times.
“The era of these negotiations is over,” he told CNN the same year. “The approach that we’ve been trying for twenty years now clearly has reached its end.”
He has consistently held firm to his opposition to a two-state resolution since then, citing security and ideological concerns as his reasoning.
In 2018, he said that if he were defense minister, he would enact a “shoot to kill” policy on the border with Gaza. Asked if that would apply to children breaching the barrier, the Times of Israel reported that he replied: “They are not children-they are terrorists. We are fooling ourselves.”
During the most recent conflict between Israel and Hamas-led militants in Gaza, Bennett said the Palestinians could have turned Gaza “into a paradise.”
