Hardened by year-long campaign, Gantz marks final push with combative tenor
Blue and White’s Saturday night election rally was initially meant to mark the first anniversary of the establishment of the party.
Pushed off from earlier in the week due to the recent fighting in Gaza, however, the Tel Aviv event morphed from a celebration aimed at motivating volunteers ahead of the last week before the vote, into a last-ditch call to arms for the final hours of the hard-fought campaign.
As the party leadership made a final campaign plea to party activists before Monday’s vote, a video offered a short trip down memory lane of the party’s first year in existence, which ended up juxtaposing the Gantz of 2019, upbeat, hopeful and as green as his original party’s logo, with the more gravelly and combative version of the politician fighting for the premiership on Monday.
The first Gantz appeared in a video showing the political events and ostensible achievements of Blue and White over the past year — one of the few references to the anniversary all evening — starting with an event that actually took place a few weeks before the February 21, 2019 formation of Blue and White.
“I believe – like you – in hope. Together, I will make Israel a strong and united country of hope,” Gantz could be seen saying at the launch of his Israel Resilience Party on January 30 last year
Three weeks before his deal to run together with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party under the Blue and White banner, Gantz stepped onto Israel’s political stage with a speech that aimed to introduce him to the Israeli public as a politician focused on a positive message of “hope” and “change,” as well as one who would fight graft, in particular Netanyahu’s alleged corruption, tooth and nail.
It was that event, and that Gantz, the party apparently hoped to remind activists and the public of on Saturday. as he and the top 40 candidates on the party’s slate rallied some 1,000 supporters at the Hangar 11 hall in north Tel Aviv’s port entertainment complex.
A few kilometers away, in the working class Tel Aviv suburb of Holon, Netanyahu and the Likud were holding their own rally, with just two days to go until Israelis head to the polls on March 2.
While still centering on “hope,” there was a combative and biting undertone to everything that Gantz, hoarse from repeated campaign events, said during his speech Saturday night, perhaps his most animated and spirited delivery to date.
“Friends, within a year we did an amazing thing. We shattered and changed the face of politics in Israel. We instilled hope,” Gantz said to the cheers of activists, some of whom also attended his first speech in January 2019.
“In the face of the madness, in the face of the lies and the toxicity, in the face of the hatred, we carry hope,” he declared.
Almost managing to keep up the enthusiasm throughout the whole speech, he rattled off various hopes he said his party represented, from “hope for an inclusive, unified society, free of racism. to “hope for young parents, who will be able to work and support their families, buy homes and live with a sense of wellbeing.
In his first speech, last year, Gantz offered only vague platitudes about speific policy proposals, but launched an unmistakable attack on political corruption, clearly indicating that he did not intend to hold back over the graft cases in which the prime minister has since been charged in.
“The national government we will establish will show zero tolerance for corruption of any kind. The state’s money belongs to all its citizens and not to a small and privileged minority,” Gantz said then, reading carefully from a teleprompter. “This is not the personal example that we should provide to the young generation that is watching us. A moral government is an example to us – and to our children.”
Then, ruling out joining a Netanyahu-led government if the premier is hit with criminal charges, he added, “The very thought that a prime minister can serve in Israel with an indictment is ridiculous to me. This cannot happen,”
A year later, after Netanyahu failed to form a government twice and Gantz himself failed once, and Netanyahu was indicted for bribery, fraud and breach of trust, Gantz’s words were marked more by outrage than by lofty ideals.
“I want to ask you tonight. What would you say a few years ago if I told you we would have a prime minister with three indictments — for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust — that will drag the state into three election campaigns to escape trial. Would you believe it?” he goaded the crowd, working much more convincingly with the teleprompeter than a year ago.
“NO,” they responded on cue, as Gantz launched into a list of apparently unbelievable actions and misdemeanors by Netanyahu, interrupting his flow once with a request for the crowd to stop booing.
“If I told you all these things five years ago, you would tell me it sounded like a fiction script. ‘That there is no chance that this could ever happen in Israel. That’s Erdogan.’ But this is the State of Israel in 2020,” Gantz shouted, his voice becoming a rasp.
Gantz, now a seasoned campaigner, then turned his criticism into both a warning and a call for action.
“The Israeli government is headed by a man who acts like a mafioso.” he said, predicting that the prime minister’s actions so far were just a “promo” for what is yet to come.
“The day after the election, he will do anything to pass the ‘escape law’ that would cancel his sentence and then a ‘supercession law’ that would prevent the court from overturning the decision,” he said of reported potential efforts to interfere with Netanyahu’s trial, due to begin on March 17.
“I already warn you and I warn the public at home: [Netanyahu] is going to disrupt election day,” he said, repeating a charge he has made several times on the campaign trail in recent days, without providing details. “He has done it in the past, and will do so by more sophisticated means on this election day.”
Gantz was apparently referring to attempts by Likud to chill voter turnout in Arab communities by placing hidden cameras in voting booths, or pushing the Central Election Committee to place its own devices.
In those cases, Likud’s campaign was predicted on claims of voter fraud in Arab communities. Now it seemed, it was Gantz making the claims, perhaps taking a page out of Netanyahu’s own playbook: “We are preparing for every scenario and I urge you to be vigilant on the ground and to send back any suspicion of forgery and deception. It is important.”