Analysis: Sa'ar resignation and the Likud shake up

Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s interior minister, twice winner of the Likud party primaries and the man most consistently rumoured to succeed Netanyahu as party leader and prime minister, stunned Israel on Wednesday by announcing he’s leaving politics - for a while. Sa’ar announced the decision at a festive event with some 1,000 party activists, including several ministers, gathered to raise a toast to the impending Jewish New Year. The general anticipation was that Sa’ar would formally announce he is challenging Netanyahu for the leadership. Instead, Sa’ar announced he was taking a “time out” from politics and from public life.

The announcement itself was brief and carefully crafted. Sa’ar said he will resign not only from his post as interior minister but also as a member of the Knesset. However, he emphasised he was most certainly not resigning from the Likud or from the political course of the party. The only explanation he gave was that his son, David, is about to take his first steps and that he “wanted to walk alongside him.” Over the next 48 hours, Sa’ar’s many friends and well-wishers in the media have elaborated on the narrative, praising him for resigning to support his wife, newscaster Geula Even, in the care for their son. Others, less sympathetic to the departing minister, dropped hints about an imminent release of a devastating journalistic investigation, the fallout of which Sa’ar’s surprise withdrawal was supposed to preempt; these rumours remained unconfirmed, and to date, no damaging revelations are known to be in the works relating to Sa’ar. 

Sceptics, like veteran commentator Nahum Barnea, ignored these rumours but pulled no punches on the spend-more-time-with-my-family adage. “Voters around the world love this kind of kitsch,” he wrote on Thursday morning, after sketching a portrait of Sa’ar as the consummate career politician - calculated, driven, intelligent and aggressive. “This sentimental confession suits him like a mink coat in high summer… this soap opera holds no water. One could easily guess what Sa’ar would have to say if another politician gave a similar explanation to this kind of manoeuvre.”

Manoeuvre does seem to be the most appropriate word to describe Sa’ar’s resignation: a temporary, strategic retreat, to gather thrust for his inevitable push forward. Not unlike Hillary Clinton, who is also taking a very public break from politics to distance herself from the incumbent administration she means to succeed, Sa’ar is facing a paradoxical stumbling block. His very popularity and power in the Likud, together with the consensus among commentators on Sa’ar being the man most likely to challenge the prime minister from within the party, mean that he risks being seen as a successor to Netanyahu rather than an alternative. This means, in turn, that in the event of a general elections, Sa’ar has very little to work with: he can’t attack the record of the incumbent leadership, because he is part of it; and he can’t highlight his own track record without inadvertently praising that of his opponent’s.

A retreat is therefore the most reasonable way to move forward. How and when the move will come is anyone’s guess. On the morning after the resignation, rumours were being put about that Sa’ar has recently met with Moshe Kahlon, a former communication minister and a rising Likud star who resigned in a similarly abrupt fashion ahead of the 2013 general elections. Kahlon has been busy in recent months putting together a technocratic list to run in the next general elections. The clean record of the relatively unknown figures on the list and Kahlon’s personal charisma already have pollsters projecting up to 13 seats for the party if elections were held tomorrow - but 13 seats out of 120 are not enough to seize premiership, especially as the majority of those are drawn from the steadily weakening centrist Yesh Atid party - not from the centre and far right, where the most committed and decisive constituents lie.

A union with Sa’ar could provide Kahlon with this extra boost, but there is much to be said against the move, if Sa’ar is seriously considering it. Sa’ar’s power base is in the Likud; he is a Likud creature, a lifelong activist who rose through the ranks and who enjoys a unique constellation of personal mastery of the party’s complex favour economy and of personal popularity among the rank and file. The Likud prides itself on loyalty and unity, having been led by a mere four chairmen since its foundation in the 1970s, as compared to the rival camp’s ten. It can abide, however grudgingly, with a leadership challenge. It won’t be as forgiving to an attempt to split the party. At the moment, especially considering Sa’ar’s emphasis on not leaving his home party, a challenge from within seems the most acceptable - although there’s every chance that Kahlon and Sa’ar will find themselves after the elections, as coalition partners.

None of this bodes well for Netanyahu, who must feel like a bystander at his own funeral. There are many good reasons for Netanyahu’s rapid decline from “King Bibi”, as he was crowned by TIME Magazine in May 2012, to a lame-duck prime minister headed for a fall. His talent for first cultivating gifted, ambitious allies and then turning them into committed opponents certainly is not helping; all of his challengers on the Right (there is no serious challenger to his left) are former aides and protégés: Gideon Sa’ar, Naftali Bennett, Moshe Kachlon and Avigdor Lieberman all worked closely with Netanyahu in the past, only to turn on him later. Compared to these Netanyahu circle alumni, his current supporters are a depressingly underwhelming bunch and, considering his own popularity is sinking steadily, a support team could have come in handy in the next elections.

The timing of these elections and how they will come about are rapidly becoming the two most important questions on the Israeli political agenda - a dynamic which can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Ironically, while Netanyahu’s popularity is sinking, it’s not sinking fast enough for him to be conclusively defeated if elections were called at once (or rather as soon as the law allows, which is 90 days), not least because all the opponents are even less popular than he is. 

Popularity, perhaps, is the wrong word to use in the Israeli context. Palatability might be more appropriate: no Israeli leader today is broadly, inspirationally popular; the competition is over how well they are tolerated by increasingly resigned constituents. At the moment, Netanyahu is the least unpopular politician. He still sits with the Israeli electorate like a bad habit; better-the-devil-they-know is the prevailing Israeli mood on anything political. It’s not unlikely that Netanayhu’s best chance is to strike now and reaffirm his mandate through general elections rather than wait for his coalition to crumble and be ousted in a reshuffle without general elections, or to wait for his gallery of opponents to organize and polish their campaigns.

But calling new elections less than two years after the last ones is hardly a display of strength, and, at any rate, would mean playing a wildcard. For better or worse, Netanyahu is the most risk-averse politician ever to rule Israel. He is the ultimate, obstinate survivor, a master of subversion and sabotage, better at splitting opposition than meeting it head-on. It has worked so far, and for the moment it looks like Netanyahu will pursue this course of action once again. But it requires time - and time is the one resource Netanyahu might soon find out of his control.