"Two weeks ago, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to allow “Danonism” − as in Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon − to take control of the coalition. Danon’s right-wing extremism on diplomatic issues may not have seized control of the coalition, but it is definitely conquering the ruling political party, slowly but surely. Danon was easily elected president of the Likud convention in a vote held late Tuesday. On Sunday, he is widely expected to be elected chairman of the party’s central committee as well. So Danny Danon is all over the place. Did you notice who’s missing? Who’s avoiding confrontation? Who forgot to come to work? It’s none other than party leader Netanyahu. Netanyahu now finds himself in the worst possible situation for a party chairman: He’s not a player. He doesn’t count. When his predecessor, Ariel Sharon, felt at the beginning of the last decade that his party was getting hostile, he decided to make lemonade from the lemons and turn the disadvantage into an advantage: He clashed with his party and its activists, with the screamers and the thugs. He fought and sometimes lost, but every loss within his hated party merely enhanced his position in the public’s eyes, until his inevitable split from Likud in the fall of 2005. On Monday, Netanyahu quietly withdrew from the race for convention president. He knew he would be defeated by the deputy defense minister. This is a rather incredible situation: A prime minister, in his second consecutive term and third in total, with more accumulated years in office than anyone besides David Ben-Gurion, fears to stand for election against a rank-and-file MK. Rather than banging on the table and telling Danon, “I’m the head of this party, I’m the prime minister, I want to manage the convention and I will draw conclusions from any rebellion against me,” he bowed before the inevitable, as if it were divinely ordained."
Posted on: Wed, 26 Jun 2013 10:54:31 +0000
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