Avigdor Lieberman owes a great deal to Bibi. But he has also suffered the humiliations of a prolonged junior partnership under an egotistical patron.
The collapse of Bibi Netanyahu’s plans for a governing coalition is not something he saw coming. This in itself marks a rare failure in what has long been an unparalleled political intelligence. Netanyahu will now be forced to refight a battle he thought he had won, this time on more treacherous terrain.
Ostensibly, the coalition was lost because former Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman refused to allow his five-member faction to join. He claimed he was violating his pledge out of principle. The ultra-orthodox coalition members oppose a law making a small number of yeshiva students eligible for military service. Lieberman wants the law. The army doesn’t need or want these kids, as he well knows. The issue, he says, is “symbolic”, a protest against the growing influence of rabbinical parties.
It is a genuine concern, but I doubt it was foremost in Lieberman’s thinking. Lieberman, after all, has been doing business with the rabbinical parties for many years. Shas leader Aryeh Deri seemed shocked by his new concern about the ultra-orthodox political agenda. “He’s always been friendly to our communities,” he says.
No, this is personal. Lieberman and Netanyahu have been frenemies since 1988, when Bibi hired the former barroom bouncer as an assistant. In those days, Netanyahu sometimes referred to Lieberman as his “zhlub”, a Yiddish word meaning muscle-head.
This stung. Lieberman may look like the villain in a Soviet spy drama, and his Russian accent is easily mocked, but he is smart, astute and more sensitive than he appears. In his day-after press conference, Lieberman reminded the media he was once an aspiring poet.
Read the article by Zev Chafetz in the Australian Financial Review (from The Washington Post).