Naftali Bennett, Israel’s probable next PM, is an independent tech mogul who fantasies about annexing a large portion of the occupied West Bank.
Bennett has said that formation of a Palestinian state would be self destruction for Israel, referring to security reasons.
Yet, the leading figure of Israel’s religious right and big fan of Jewish settlements said on Sunday he was uniting with his political adversaries to save the country from political calamity.
The son of American settlers, Bennett, 49, is an age more youthful than 71-year-old Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader.
A former commando, Bennett named his oldest child after Netanyahu’s sibling, Yoni, who was murdered in an Israeli strike to free seized travelers at Uganda’s Entebbe air terminal in 1976.
Bennett has had a long and regularly rough relationship with Netanyahu, working somewhere in the range of 2006 and 2008 as a senior assistant to the then-resistance leader before leaving on revealed bad terms.
Bennett burst into national politics in 2013, redoing a pro-settler party and filling in as minister of defense just as of education and the economy in different Netanyahu governments.
A former head of Yesha, the main settler movement in the West Bank, Bennett made annexation of parts of the domain that Israel caught in a 1967 conflict a significant component of his political stage.
However, as head of a supposed administration of “progress” that will incorporate left-wing and moderate groups, while depending on help in parliament from Arab legislators, carrying out annexation would be politically unworkable.
Bennett said on Sunday both the privilege right and left would need to settle on such philosophical issue.
Brought into the world in the Israeli city of Haifa to migrants from San Francisco, Bennett is an advanced Conventional religious Jew. He lives with his better half, Gilat, a desert chef, and their four kids in the prosperous Tel Aviv suburb of Raanana.
Like Netanyahu, Bennett talks familiar American-highlighted English and spent a portion of his adolescence in North America, where his folks were on holiday.
While working in the high tech sector, Bennett studied law at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University. In 1999, he formed a start-up and afterward moved to New York, ultimately selling his anti-fraud software company, Cyota, to U.S. security firm RSA for $145 million in 2005.
Strategy
A year ago, as Netanyahu’s administration tried to press ahead with West Bank annexation and settlement working in the last few months of the Trump administration, Bennett, at that point defense boss, said: “The gathering momentum in the nation should not be halted, not even, briefly.”
The annexation plan was in the end rejected when Israel formalized ties with the United Arab Emirates. Analysts see minimal possibility of it being restored under Donald Trump’s Majority rule replacement, President Joe Biden, if at any point.
In any case, Palestinians are probably going to view Bennett’s rise as a hit to any desires for an arranged harmony and a free express, the long-standing conciliatory equation that Biden favors.
After Israel in March held its fourth election in two years Bennett, who drives the extreme right Yamina party, said a fifth vote would be a public disaster and entered talks with the centre- left bloc that forms the major resistance to Netanyahu.
A backer of liberalizing the economy, Bennett has voiced support for cutting government formalities and charges.
In contrast to a portion of his previous partners on the religious right, Bennett is nearly liberal on issues, for example, gay rights and the connection among religion and state in a country where Orthodox rabbis wield strong influence.
