Ya'alon Taken to the Woodshed

Israel's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs Moshe Ya'alon, a former Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces, has been called on the carpet by Binyamin Netanyahu after some highly controversial remarks in a highly controversial setting. It's the latest of several incidents that suggest that Netanyahu is having more trouble keeping the right wing of his own Likud in line than he is dealing with his curious coalition partners in Labor.

Ya'alon, who's been pretty outspoken since taking off his uniform, managed to say, among other things, that 1) he wasn't afraid of the Americans (perhaps implicitly suggesting Netanyahu was?); that 2) the "elites" and the Peace Now Movement were "a virus," that 3) when he had been in the Army he had said that "the politicians brought the dove of peace and the Army had to clean up after it," and, to round it all out, he said this 4) to a rightwing Likud faction led by Moshe Feiglin, a far right Likudnik and head of the Jewish Leadership Movement faction of Likud. Netanyahu is no fan of Feiglin's (supposedly having called him a "cancer" in the Likud), and finding his Deputy Premier talking to Feiglin's people and insulting "elites," Peace Now, the Americans, and arguably Netanyahu himself was a bit much. Oh, and 5) he apparently said something negative about the Supreme Court as well.

Oh, and to add insult to injury,

In the brutal heat of August, when most of his colleagues, including the prime minister, were on vacation or keeping a low profile, Ya'alon this week gamboled across the hills of Judea and Samaria between illegal settler outposts, and declared when standing among the ruins of the evacuated settlement of Homesh that it should be rebuilt.

That's from this article in Ha'aretz, admittedly no fan of Netanyahu or Ya'alon.

Some additional background from the left-leaning Ha'aretz on Ya'alon's "subpar unerstanding of the media," on Ya'alon and Feiglin, and on Netanyahu's reaction to all this.

Obviously Ha'aretz has its own biases, but it's interesting to see that the more right-leaning Jerusalem Post writes the lede to the called-on-the carpet story thus:

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu did not fire Vice Premier Moshe Ya'alon on Thursday for controversial comments he made on Sunday in a speech to the Likud's Manhigut Yehudit forum of Netanyahu's nemesis, Moshe Feiglin.

Ya'alon participated in a high-level consultation with Netanyahu and other top officials after the meeting, indicating that Ya'alon had not been fired from the full cabinet, the security cabinet or the prestigious six-member inner cabinet.

So the best anyone seems able to say is, he wasn't fired.

I'm no great fan of Bibi Netanyahu's but I find myself almost feeling empathy for him: his Foreign Minister, who is by no stretch of the imagination diplomatic, is being investigated and may have to step down; his Deputy Premier has just been taken to the woodshed for seeming to side with an enemy of Netanyahu's within the Likud. All his troubles are coming from the right.

An odd aside I noted in one of the stories: the meeting with Ya'alon, the calling on the carpet, took place at the Defense compound at Hakirya in Tel Aviv. Now the Minister of Strategic Affairs may keep his office there (it's a recently invented portfolio — invented, oddly enough, for Avigdor Lieberman in Ehud Olmert's day — and I don't know where it's based), but that's normally the Defense Minister's turf, and the Defense Minister is Ehud Barak, of Labor.

Anyway, the Israeli right seems to be in disarray at the moment.