Why Do Senior Likud Officials Receive Protection for 'Primary Insanity'?

Israel is a place where everything happens 'after': after the war, after the elections, after the holidays, and now it turns out there is also 'after the Likud primaries'. Perhaps then, for example, the Minister of Defense will not feel the need to cut off the head of a serving general because of a few foaming-at-the-mouth panelists and their nervous audience in the television studio. If so, there is nothing left but to announce to everyone concerned with national security, that is, everyone, including soldiers and their parents who have forgotten how to sleep at night: 'Common sense has gone on a primary break and is expected to return immediately after. Hang in there and try to stay alive, there isn't much time left'.

The Likud primaries, then, have become a kind of seasonal flu: there is not much to do except stock up on many boxes of tissues, clear chicken soup, and a bad series on Netflix. You will come out of it like new. But like other madnesses that have taken root in a country that dreams of being a 'light unto the nations' and is deteriorating into a banana republic with an air force, looking at the disgraceful conduct of Israel Katz through the lens of the primaries flattens the enormous damage that people like him cause before, after, and during the internal elections in Likud.

Remarks in the style of 'the primaries must end already for the sake of the state's security' are not a joke but a surrender to a deranged phenomenon: if Israel Katz is willing to sell out the Central Command chief and, in fact, what remains of the statehood in the IDF just so someone from Channel 14 stops shouting in his ear, it is completely irrelevant what his political circumstances are — this is a weak and reckless person who should not even be dealing with the coffee preference document of the General Staff Forum, let alone handing out instructions there (most of which are not in his authority, but that's how it is when the ego is the size of an F-35 squadron).

And if the power centers in Likud choose to use the primaries to drag the party even deeper into the realms of Kahanism, then this is the face of the party no less and no more than the way the progressive wing reflects the face of the Democratic Party in the USA, for example. If the majority of the public in Israel demands that the mainstream in right-wing and especially left-wing parties in the world disavow the fringes and enforce their authority over them, why do senior Likud officials receive the protection of 'insanity due to primaries'? How does criminal conduct due to political and media pressure (Channel 14 is no slouch in realizing its owners' agenda) not become a red flag, and even among officials directly related to the state's security?

Turning 'primary considerations' into the facade of all the injustices and incitement of senior Likud officials is an insult to intelligence: perhaps Israel Katz, like the voters he is winking at, really believes that everything must be done to make things easier for a guy accused of tying a zip tie on a Palestinian's penis? Perhaps in his opinion, it is very important to allow Jewish terror in the West Bank to flourish without fear of administrative orders? Why decide for him that he is acting out of utilitarian consideration only and not out of an ideology that matches his support base? After all, if the claim is that Katz is merely acting as a 'populist right-winger', then one of two options is true: either there is more than enough audience for the rotten goods he is offering, or this audience is not that large but loud and strong enough to bend a Minister of Defense. Both cases should arouse in the camp and the party absolute disgust alongside an irresistible urge to disavow both the person and the audience. The fact is that this is the eternal expectation of the right from the left, and certainly from the Arab parties. But in Likud? Nonsense: we'll talk after the primaries.