In his first two months as defense minister, Israel Katz epitomized the ruling party’s loss of touch with the public’s expectations, needs, and wrath.
He thinks we are idiots.
With everyone waiting for his long-awaited conscription bill, Defense Minister Israel Katz presented no bill, only “guidelines” for a bill that added up to a collection of vague promises that have one word written all over them: surrender.
Katz’s declaration Tuesday in the Knesset that his bill, once written, will conscript half of 18-old ultra-Orthodox men, and only over seven years, means that ultra-Orthodox draft dodging will continue in earnest. In fact, it will be not just state-sponsored but also etched in legal stone.
The same goes for Katz’s vow that individuals who won’t enlist will be sanctioned, and yeshivas that won’t send their boys to the army will lose budgets. Presenting no numbers, and failing to show an actual bill, means Likud remains addicted to the deal that underpinned its political hegemony.
It also means that Katz – Likud’s longtime party boss – is now tasked with delivering the draft-dodging that Likud’s allies demand.
The problem runs deeper. Judging by his first two months as defense minister, Katz’s other task is to shift blame for the October 7 fiasco from the politicians to the generals.
Katz's plain aim
KATZ MADE this aim plain in two phases. The conscription bill farce was the second. Before it came the hazing of the IDF’s commander and his spokesman.
To Lt.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, Katz said – in an offensive communique to the media – that he instructs the chief of General Staff “to fully cooperate” with the State Comptroller’s inquiries of October 7’s events.
The insinuations were as transparent as they were rude. The first insinuation was that the army was not cooperating with its civilian investigation. That’s a libel.
But Katz was not trying to serve the truth. He was out to serve the Likud, to create the impression that the comptroller’s probe is a substitute for the establishment of a judicial commission of inquiry, which the ruling party dreads and will do anything to prevent.
Worse, Halevi’s humiliation was designed to divert any probe’s fire from the government to the army. That’s why Katz’s canting statement said: “It is inconceivable that the IDF will seem as if it is afraid of criticism in the face of the severity of the October 7 events.”
Yes, it’s inconceivable, but the IDF is not afraid to be probed. Katz is, and so are the rest of the politicians who invested in Hamas, from Benjamin Netanyahu down, and now refuse to launch a judicial commission of inquiry.
Expectedly, the IDF responded to Katz’s offense with a communique of its own, saying it was cooperating fully with the State Comptroller’s investigators, and that disagreements between the military and the defense ministry should be settled in a dialogue between the minister and the chief of staff, “not through the media.”
At that point, rather than end the bickering, Katz stooped even lower, slinging mud at the spokesman, Brig.-Gen. Daniel Hagari, accusing him of “breaching authority” and warning him that “an apology won’t suffice.”
Katz’s aim is clear: war. War not with our enemies, but with our generals, even a second-tier officer like Hagari, a naval commando who has been doing an impressive job throughout an excruciating war.
Evidently, Katz was installed in the defense ministry not to serve the national interest, as all his predecessors from David Ben-Gurion down tried their best to do. Katz is there to serve his party.
Whatever its length and damage, his term as defense minister will fittingly cap a 45-year public career that reflected a political hegemony’s emergence, corruption, and decay.
TURNING 70 next autumn, the burly Katz completed his military service as a lieutenant in the Paratroopers Brigade just after Likud’s rise to power in 1977. Then, as a Hebrew University undergraduate, Katz joined Likud’s campus cell, which later made him the student union’s leader.
It was the beginning of a remarkable political career that soon led to a job as an aide to Ariel Sharon when he was the industry minister, and then proceeded to the Knesset, where Katz would be a lawmaker for nearly three decades, and to the government, which he first joined 22 years ago as agriculture minister.
Most crucially, for the past 20 years Katz has been chairman of Likud’s secretariat, a position in which he directs the party’s apparatus and oversees much of the spoils system on which its hacks feed.
The scope and length of Katz’s political career are thus exceptional, but the variety of the ministries he has headed is even more impressive. Only three other Israelis – Shimon Peres, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Avigdor Liberman – served as ministers of defense, finance, and foreign affairs.
This prominence followed a decade in which Katz served as transportation minister, a position in which he was actually effective, displaying an ability to make a bureaucracy work and get massive public works projects launched and done.
It showed he could execute. It did not show he could be a national leader, much less a statesman. That inability was soon laid bare when, as foreign minister, Katz proved woefully unequipped to lead, or even just join, Israel’s image war.
As defense minister, however, Katz emerges even worse – a political slave who, like his party, has lost the ability to feel the public’s expectations, needs, and wrath; the expectation that the defense minister will treat with respect the generals who, unlike him, have just fought Israel’s longest war; the need in a defense minister who will help a wounded IDF recover, not add to its wounds; and the wrath of the Israelis whose nausea with the dirty deal he is laboring to preserve will ultimately kill his party’s hegemony, and bury his own career.
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The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.