How Israel’s Prime Minister got burnt by bread

For nearly ten months now, ever since his surprising elevation to the Israeli prime minister’s office, Naftali Bennett has been focused mainly on one thing. He has been trying to prove to Israelis that he can be every bit the master statesman his predecessor, the eternal Benjamin Netanyahu was. And by all accounts that has worked well.

He’s had two successful meetings with Joe Biden and met twice with Vladimir Putin as well, the second of those meetings, a surprising flight to Moscow after the invasion of Ukraine began, was made in the hope of brokering a ceasefire between the two countries. He charmed world leaders with ‘green tech’ ideas at the environment summit in Glasgow and went on historic visits, the first official ones by an Israeli prime minister, to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. But the rarified summit caused him to forget that back home in Jerusalem, he’s still the leader of Yamina, a small and crumbling right-wing party, whose members are finding it difficult to get used to life in a coalition together with left-wingers and Islamists.

By joining the coalition and providing it with the necessary votes to finally oust Netanyahu, Bennett won the jet-setting job and with it all the trappings of power, including an isolating cocoon of security.