From a November 28, 2015 report of Israpundit, we learn: “Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the terror wave as ‘catastrophic.’” And further:

Last month a Channel 2 News survey found that Liberman was best-equipped to fight Palestinian terrorism. According to the poll, 73 percent of Israelis are dissatisfied with Prime Minister Netanyahu’s response to the current wave of terrorism. He came only in third place behind Education Minister Naftali Bennett (Bayit Yehudi) in answers as to who would fight terrorism best and take care of security problems, with only 15% choosing Netanyahu.

Netanyahu now, and five years ago

Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. Photo: US Department of State (taken during his visit to the USA, during which Obama had him ushered out the back door of the White House while Obama dined privately with his family.)

Okay, that was yesterday. But five years ago, on November 23, 2010, I issued a report on Israel National Radio entitled, “Why Netanyahu is Not Qualified to be Israel’s Prime Minister.”

In that report I provided factual evidence to support my opinion of Netanyahu. After warning that “it’s irrelevant to say that any of his most likely successors are even less qualified,” I set forth strategic as well as ideological grave evidence that disqualifies Netanyahu as PM:

1. When he was a cabinet minister in the Sharon Government, he voted for the expulsion of 8,000 Jews from their homes in Gaza. Gaza, now called Hamastan, is a proxy of Iran. Armed by increasingly deadly weapons from Iran, Hamastan constitutes a strategic threat to Israel from the south.
2. Meanwhile, Hezbollah, another Iranian and well-armed proxy, threatens Israel from the north. This perilous state of affairs, for which Netanyahu is to no small extent responsible, should have prompted Israelis to relegate him to the political wilderness in the February 2009 national elections. Instead [but with less than a third of the electorate], the Likud Party received enough votes to make Netanyahu PM.
3. Four months later, on June 14, at Bar-Ilan University, Netanyahu endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, the cradle  of Jewish civilization. From what source did Netanyahu derive the authority to make this monumental decision? The truth is: the decision was made without public or Knesset debate!
4. While Netanyahu was a member of Sharon’s ethnic cleansing Government, he gave a speech at the prestigious Herzliya Conference. He there declared that “the Declaration of Independence depicts Israel as both Jewish and democratic.”

Jewish and democratic? Really?

Let’s examine this contention.

First of all, the word “democracy” does not appear in the Declaration of Independence.  Second, to say the Declaration “depicts Israel as both Jewish and democratic” is grossly misleading.  Not only does the Declaration proclaim Israel as a Jewish state, but that alone is Israel’s raison d’être.

It is simply false to place “Jewish” and “democratic” on the same level. To put it more clearly: The only justification for Israel’s re-establishment in 1948 is the Biblical heritage of the Jewish people; and it is an unmitigated falsehood to describe that heritage, and therefore the Sinai Covenant, as a charter for what amounts to a normless democracy, the type that dominates the Christian (now post-Christian) Europe, wallowing in nihilism.

But there is much more than Netanyahu’s diminutive and not very Jewish view of Israel, from which he has excluded Judea and Samaria via his “two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Here I will cite Caroline Glick’s November 19, 2010 article in The Jerusalem Post.

Facing our fears

She writes:

Netanyahu boasts that that he received three major payoffs from Obama in exchange for his agreement to ban Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria and discuss land surrenders with the Palestinian Authority, a consortium of terrorists.

(which is enough to disqualify Netanyahu as Prime Minister).

As for the three payoffs: “First, he claims Obama agreed not to renew his demand that Jews be denied their property rights. Second, he says the administration agreed to send Israel 20 more F-35s….” Glick counters:

The first payoff is nothing more than the foreign policy equivalent of buying the same dead horse twice. Obama led Netanyahu to believe he has set aside his demand that Jews be denied property rights last November, when Netanyahu announced the first construction freeze [in Judea and Samaria]. Yet Obama repeated his demands even before the last freeze ended. Obama has no credibility on this issue….

Glick continues:

The F-35 deal is simply bizarre. Israel needs the F-35 to defend against like Iran. Yet the administration claims that its agreement to send Israel the F-35s is contingent on Israel signing a peace deal with the Palestinians. In other words, the Obama administration is giving the PLO power to veto American military assistance by saying no to peace!

Finally, there is the administration’s pledge to support Israel at the UN for a year.  What this pledge actually means is that a year from now, the Obama administration will present the deal as an excuse to abandon what has been the policy of every US administration since Lyndon Johnson and stop blocking anti-Israel resolutions at the UN Security Council.

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This, according to Glick, is what Netanyahu fears most, because it would readily lead to a UN-endorsed Palestinian state in all of Judea and Samaria and in large parts of Jerusalem, and with the Palestinians still refusing to sign a peace treaty with Israel.

But Netanyahu has already agreed to a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria, which would include East Jerusalem and the Temple Mount; and any peace treaty following that betrayal of Israel and the Jewish people would not be worth the paper it’s written on.

Ms. Glick’s article was entitled “Facing our fears.” Since these fears remain, indeed, have been magnified enormously – and as the reader may infer from the above-mentioned opinion polls – this is enough reason to conclude that Benjamin Netanyahu is not qualified to be Israel’s Prime Minister.

A cause for profound concern

If there were no one better qualified than Netanyahu to be Israel’s Prime Minister, that should not be a cause for complacency, but of profound concern.

Had men of his caliber been the leaders of the Jewish people 2,000 years ago, the Jews would be as extinct as the Mesopotamians.

Of course, one might argue that people get the government they deserve. But this also reflects intellectual and moral complacency. This complacency in Israel prompted me to study the structure of the world’s eighty plus reputed democracies,

That exhaustive study encouraged me to draft a constitution for Israel that would overcome her present inept system of multiparty cabinet government, a system that has become a laughing stock among candid and serious political scientists.

These experts deem it inane or insane that Israel should field thirty and more political parties competing in Knesset elections. As a consequence, Israel has never had a majority party to lead the Government and offer the people a coherent and effective national strategy.

Small wonder that the vast majority of the people of Israel are not happy about the Netanyahu Government! This Government is entrenched in power primarily because the nation lacks geographic constituency elections, whereby the policy of an incumbent MK would be subject to criticism by a rival candidate for his seat in the Knesset.

Is it any wonder that no Government of “democratic” Israel has ever been toppled by a formal Knesset vote of no confidence?◙

Editor’s note: the names of the two rival political parties signify even more. The name Yisrael Beytenu means “Israel, Our Home.” Beyt Yehudi translates as “Jewish Home.”