Ordinarily, it would be difficult to mistake Naftali Bennett, the hawkish leader of Israel’s Jewish Home party, for a peacenik.
Just last month he wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed essay that Israel “cannot allow for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank,” and should abandon the peace process and unilaterally annex much of the territory it has occupied since 1967.
And his YouTube channel is filled with clips of Mr. Bennett scolding foreign journalists and offering a combative and full-throated defense of Israel’s right to defend itself.
But for a satirical campaign ad posted on YouTube this week under the title “Stop Apologizing,” Mr. Bennett disguised himself in a fake beard and a flannel shirt to mockingly portray the kind of Tel Aviv hipster he blames for undermining Israel’s security by continuing to pursue the two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians he dismisses as a pipe dream.
In the sketch, which has been viewed more than 170,000 times in three days, Mr. Bennett plays a pug-owning liberal reader of the liberal daily Haaretz who bumbles through life constantly apologizing to others who have wronged him.
Just before he pulls off his costume to make an appeal to viewers to stand up for an unapologetic version of Zionism by joining his party, Mr. Bennett’s character nods in agreement with a Hebrew translation of a 2011 New York Times editorial calling for Israel to apologize for killing Turkish activists in a raid on a ship that challenged the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip in 2010.
As David Remnick explained in The New Yorker last year, while Mr. Bennett, a former director general of the Yesha Council, the main political body of the settler movement, is clearly “a man of the far right,” he is also “eager to advertise his cosmopolitan bona fides,” including a cutting-edge sense of humor. A former resident of Manhattan’s Upper East Side who made his fortune in high tech, Mr. Bennett “is as quick to make reference to an episode of ‘Seinfeld’ as he is to the Torah portion of the week,” Mr. Remnick noted.
Writing about the ad in The Jewish Daily Forward this week, Shayna Weiss suggested that Mr. Bennett “is using his well-honed sense of humor to make a deadly serious point.” If elected to lead the nation, Mr. Bennett — who is also a major in Israel’s Army reserves — seems to promise that he “will save Israel from the middle-class sissies of Tel Aviv, who apologize for their very existence.”
“These losers,” according to Ms. Weiss’s reading of the ad, “are exactly what Zionism worked so hard to transform — taking weak, pale Diaspora Jews and turning them in strapping muscular Zionist Sabras. But since the peace process of the 1990s, Bennett feels that Israel has lost its way. Without his guidance, the State (and especially the State of Tel Aviv) has become the ‘friyer’ who apologizes all the time, thus leading to every Israelis’ worst nightmare — being taken for a sucker.”