The Yamina faction continued to lose senior aides on Sunday, as Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked said goodbye to her chief of staff Alon Dvir, and Deputy Minister of Religious Service Matan Kahana was abandoned by his chief of staff Moshe Basos. Back in May, the Yamina faction lost its spokesman Oved Pearl, and then Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was deserted by his spokesman of four years Matan Sidi, his chief of staff Tal Gan Zvi, his political advisor Shimrit Meir, and his office manager Naomi Sasson.
Also, Prime Minister Bennett and his key faction member MK Nir Orbach met Sunday morning at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem for a second time, after Orbach had announced that he would allow the PM a few days to change the composition of the coalition or its character, and if not – he would resign. Meanwhile, No. 5 in Ra’am, Alaa a-Din Jabarin, was forced by party chairman Mansour Abbas to remove his name from the party slate ahead of the resignation of MK Mazen Ghanaim from the Knesset. Jabrin is a pro-Hamas Islamist, presumably what Orbach had meant when he demanded a change in the coalition’s character.
Minister Shaked posted on Facebook Sunday morning: “My talented chief of staff is finally setting up the start-up he has been dreaming of for years. In a few more years, after he creates hundreds of jobs and pays a lot of taxes, I hope he returns to the public sector, he has a lot more to contribute.”
OK, the lady has style. But the fact remains that, as she herself put it, “Alon was responsible for outlining my policy toward the management avenues in the government units under my responsibility, including the Interior Ministry, the Population and Immigration Authority, the National Planning Headquarters, and the Planning Directorate. Alon ran this entire operation with the highest level of professionalism.”
Shaked also said that her former senior aide had been responsible for her substantial victories as Justice Minister, when her office interjected several conservative judges into Israel’s court system, including three key appointments to the Supreme Court.
Moshe Basos, who is leaving Deputy Minister Kahana (who is really the minister but couldn’t get the needed votes and was humiliated by the opposition), is also delivering a blow to Bennett, seeing as Kahana is the last remaining Yamina MK the PM counts on completely.
Basos worked with Kahana on the kashrut services revolution and other dramatic changes in the country’s religious services, which makes his loss painful enough. But wait, there’s even more pain in store for the national-religious politician Matan Kahana who dared challenge the rabbinic status quo: because Kahana is no longer the minister, only the deputy, he lacks the administrative power to replace Basos and will have to operate without a key manager and senior deal-maker.
So, you think all those top political professionals know something about the future of the Yamina party, or should we go with Naftali Bennett’s curt response to reporters who were harassing him about that point exactly: “We have an excellent staff.”
Perhaps at Nagisasushi, the Ra’anana top-quality sushi takeaway restaurant favored by the Bennett family. Otherwise, it’s mostly crickets.
