Sour notes as Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu confronts the 'pickles' in parliament

By Noga Tarnopolsky

Oct. 23, 2017 5:40 PM PT

Reporting from Jerusalem — It was not the best of days for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Monday was the day the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, started its winter session. As is traditional, there were speeches by the prime minister, who is the head of government; the president, who is the head of state; and the head of the opposition.

But the sparks that flew, and the furious, jeering members of opposition parties who were ejected from the session, were anything but traditional.

Netanyahu launched the proceedings with a speech in which he mocked his opponents, including the news media and the judiciary, as “pickles” — which, in Hebrew slang, can mean a sourpuss, or sour grapes. He also taunted the police, who are investigating him as a suspect in several criminal cases.

Attacking both the media and his political opponents, Netanyahu complained: “When one side expresses their opinion, it’s freedom of speech, and when the other side does, it’s considered incitement. That’s the way it goes. I have no respect for the hypocrisy.”

He said that protesters who gather weekly outside the home of Atty. Gen. Avichai Mandelblit, pressing him to indict the prime minister, are willing to risk Israel’s democracy so long as he is forced from office. “They want to threaten the rule of law,” he said.

The prime minister touted Israel as a nation with thriving economy and technology sectors, safe for its citizens, and thanked President Trump for support.

“Israelis know it’s good to live here,” he said, describing a homeland “absent even a a drop of cynicism, a wonderful country.” His opponents, he said, “say there is a feeling of bitterness in the air; Netanyahu is walking around with a bitter look on his face.”

But he’s not the one who’s bitter, Netanyahu insisted — it’s his critics who are.

“When bitter ones talk, you hear conversations like, isn’t the situation here horrible and terrible? Isn’t everything falling apart? By the way, did you order tickets to London or Berlin?”

“They’re bitter, and off they fly!” Netanyahu jibed.

Reaction to the speech was immediate and visceral, with two opposition members of parliament escorted out for jeering the prime minister. Former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni expressed her disapproval by walking out in mid-speech.

President Reuven Rivlin, who holds a largely ceremonial post, has a reputation for speaking uncomfortable truths. On Monday, he used his speech to raise a red flag about Netanyahu without actually calling him out by name — in much the same way that Sen. John McCain and former President George W. Bush recently criticized Trump without naming him.

Alluding to a warning he issued three decades ago, when cautioning a former Supreme Court chief justice against the danger of the judicial branch “encroaching on the legislative branch,” he said that today the danger appears to be reversed. Without naming Netanyahu, he excoriated “the leadership” of the country, and populist tactics that are based on the idea that “majority rule is the only rule.”

He warned that the country was headed toward an “abyss.”

In the three years of his presidency, Rivlin has positioned himself as the guardian of Israel’s minorities, the rule of law, and its relationship with Jewish communities abroad. Netanyahu, meanwhile, has proposed increasingly controversial measures, including a bill demanding citizens declare loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state, and has reneged on an agreement with representatives of the Jewish diaspora regarding management of the Western Wall, Judaism’s holiest site.

The wall has been administered under the rules of Orthodox Judaism, which requires the separation of men and women and places limits on how women can pray. Reform and Conservative Jews, who make up the majority of Jews in the United States, want the government to upgrade a smaller prayer area at the southern end of the wall to allow for mixed worship in which women can lead services and read from the Torah.

Implicitly taking Netanyahu to task, a fiery Rivlin challenged a worldview in which “the media is political, the democratic institutions — everything from the professional [civil service] to the state comptroller — political. The Supreme Court is political, the security forces are political. And is even the IDF, our Israel Defense Forces, political? The entire land and its institutions are filled with politics?”

“Statesmanship has disappeared from the country and the floodgates will open,” he thundered.

“It’s a speech he wrote from the depths of his heart,” Rivlin’s spokesperson, Naomi Toledano-Kandel, said in an interview with The Times. “He believes statesmanship is the highest value, that the state comes before everything, and that if we harm the institutions of state and constantly blame these institutions for every ill, we’ll end up without the basic fundamental building blocks of our Jewish and democratic state.”

Rivlin, whose four-decade career in Netanyahu’s right-wing party has been characterized by an intense focus on domestic matters, feels a “sense of urgency” regarding relations between Israel and Jews in the rest of the world, Toledano-Kandel said. Rivlin will provide the keynote address next month at the annual plenary meeting of the Jewish Federations of America in Los Angeles.

In an indication of the growing rift between the Israeli government and American Jewry, Netanyahu, who with a single exception has addressed the group in every year of his prime ministership, will not attend this year’s meeting.

Toledano-Kandel said “the crisis with world Jewry” has opened the floodgates of pleas to the president’s office. “Since the Western Wall agreement was suspended and with the spike of anti-Semitic incidents around the world, you name it, everyone is asking him to take a stand.”

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Tarnopolsky is a special correspondent.