Naftali Bennett’s Attitude Towards Arabs

In a New York Times article, Ezra Klein interviewed former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. While he made some useful points, Olmert could not control his appetite for settling political scores. Most interestingly, when Klein asked him about Naftali Bennett, the leading contender to defeat Netanyahu in the next elections, Olmert called him “Ben-Gvir with a suit.” Because Ben-Gvir is widely thought to have Hitlerite political aspirations for Palestinians, clearing them from Gaza and much of the West Bank, Olmert is inferring Bennett is “Hitler lite.”

Olmert ignored discussing Bennett’s “Shrinking the Conflict” policies toward the West Bank during his recent tenure as prime minister. His government substantially increased work permits for Palestinians and eased onerous checkpoint practices. It facilitated an unprecedented construction of new Arab West Bank homes and restricted Jewish population increases to only approved settlements that would be part of any two-state solution.   

In another attempt to reduce conflict, the government considered allowing an “illegal” encampment of a small group of Jahalin Bedouins to remain on the E1 corridor despite the demands of the settlers’ community, which wants that area to be part of the large Ma’aleh Adumim settlement. The tribe had moved onto Israeli state-owned land in the 1970s, and in 2018, the courts ruled that they could be evicted. This accommodation is in sharp contrast to how the current Netanyahu government handled another post-1967 illegal Palestinian settlement in a military area; destruction there became the backdrop for the film, “No Other Land.”

Just as importantly, Bennett has been a leading proponent of government policies that have dramatically increased the educational and occupational improvement for Arab citizens, as well as their communities. Almost twenty years ago, Bennett jumpstarted government support for Tsofen, a nonprofit instrumental to the expansion of Arab citizens in the hi-tech field. Today more than 20 percent of Technion graduates are Arab citizens, and through government support, Nazareth has become a hi-tech hub. As education minister a decade ago, Bennett provided funding to Merchavim to increase the number of Arab teachers in Jewish schools. When its director informed Bennett that their numbers had more than doubled, she said his eyes teared up with joy. 

Bennett’s motivation has been the revisionist Zionist ideal: Israel may be the home of all Jewish people worldwide but it provides equal opportunity to its Arab citizens. Indeed, these Zionists spearheaded the first five year plan in 2016 that provided unprecedented targeted aid to Arab citizens and their communities. Its preamble included a 1926 statement by Zev Jabotinsky, the founder of rightwing Zionism:

After the formation of a Jewish majority, a considerable Arab population will always remain in Palestine. If things fare badly for this group of inhabitants, then things will fare badly for the entire country. The political, economic and cultural welfare of the Arabs will thus always remain one of the main conditions for the well-being of the Land of Israel. 

Bennett’s Change government was the first to include an Arab party as part of the ruling coalition.  Moreover, it quickly passed a second five-year plan much larger than the first. The leftwing nonprofit Sikkuy wrote,

In recent years, the implementation of the five-year plans for Arab society, though not without its problems and challenges, has made significant progress in narrowing the socio-economic gaps between Arab and Jewish citizens. For instance, it has resulted in an unprecedented increase in the employment rates of Arab women from 21% in 2010 to approximately 43% in 2022 and in the reduction of the poverty gap between Jewish and Arab families by approximately 19%.

Is this the behavior of a Ben Gvir lite?

We could ask ourselves why did Klein choose to interview Olmert? After all, he is sixteen years from office and no longer a relevant politician. More interestingly, the one thing that Olmert could discuss authoritatively was the two-state negotiations he had with the leader of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas. He could have articulated that the major stumbling block was the issue of the right-of-return for the millions of descendants of the original refugees.

It is clear that this issue is at the heart of the Palestinian agenda. In 2023, the UN Human Rights Commission demanded that the right-of-return should continue to be given priority. Political scientist Nour Cherif contends, “The romanticised memories of exile and life before the Nakba are transmitted to future generations, who, although they no longer recognize themselves in these testimonies, use them as a driving force to claim the right of return.”

There are close to one million Palestinians living Jordan — descendants of those that emigrated from Gaza and Kuwait — who are stateless. “Despite having lived in the country for decades — and even being born there — Jordan hasn’t granted them citizenship,” reported Shirin Jaafari. As a result, “Palestinians from Gaza are three times more likely to be living under the poverty line compared to other Palestinians in Jordan.”

Palestinian refugees suffer deprivations because of political priorities. Rula Alhroob, a former member of the Jordanian Parliament and chair of the human rights committee, said her advocacy for extending benefits to Palestinian refugees was met with fierce opposition within the government. When we talk about civil rights, political rights, and so on, they would say, “Well, we don’t want to help Israelis achieve their goals by giving those people access to all types of activities and normal living so that they could forget about their right of return.” 

I guess this wasn’t the conversation Klein wanted to facilitate.

Robert Cherry is an American Enterprise Institute affiliate and author of "The State of the Black Family: Sixty Years of Tragedies and Failures – and New Initiatives Offering Hope."