New Right politician and well-known journalist Caroline Glick pitched the importance of voting for her party at a campaign event in the city of Beit Shemesh on Monday evening.
By David Isaac, World Israel News
“Time is of the essence. We have to bury Oslo. We have to apply Israeli law to Area C. We have to reform the judicial system in Israel. We have to defeat our enemies,” said Caroline Glick at a campaign event in the city of Beit Shemesh on Monday evening.
Glick, a well-known figure to pro-Israel, English-speaking audiences thanks to her years of hard-hitting pieces as a columnist for The Jerusalem Post, is running on the New Right ticket together with Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked and Education Minister Naftali Bennett.
Glick is number six on the list. According to the latest poll published by Israel’s Channel 12, the New Right is expected to gain five seats in the upcoming Knesset for which elections will be held in April.
Explaining the reasons she jumped into politics after a successful career as a journalist, Glick said that one of them is that “things are really at a crunch period here.”
If Israel doesn’t form the right government, it will waste what she calls “the Trump opportunity.” Glick listed a number of positive steps Trump has taken on behalf of Israel, from moving the U.S. Embassy to recognizing Israeli control over the Golan.
“We don’t know what will come afterward. Nobody knows how the 2020 election is going to turn out,” she said, noting that the Democrats are moving away from pro-Israel sentiment. She described as a “watershed event” the Democrats’ failure to pass a resolution condemning anti-Semitism.
Right-wing coalition
Glick urged the audience to vote for the New Right. She argued that the nature of the governing coalition is what counts in Israel where coalitions are built of a large party and smaller parties that join it to meet the 61-seat minimum majority in the Knesset.
“Netanyahu will be prime minister,” Glick said. “The question is who will he make a government with.”
She said that when Netanyahu formed a 2013 government with left-wing coalition partners, Israel froze Jewish property rights in Judea and Samaria and released terrorists. But when Netanyahu formed a government in 2015 with right-wing partners, things changed for the better.
“That shows you that the composition of the coalition is the most important thing for governing,” Glick said.
Glick argued that the New Right is best positioned to ensure a right-wing government, pointing to Bennett and Shaked’s track records in their short “six years in politics together.”
Bennett was the “only one to stand up to the military fraternity,” Glick said, pointing to Bennett’s successful effort to force the IDF General Staff to face the threat from terror attack tunnels in the Gaza Strip. And Shaked as justice minister pushed through reforms under politically difficult circumstances, Glick noted.
With Justice Minister Shaked and Defense Minister Naftali Bennett sitting beside Netanyahu, “you have a seriously robust right-wing government that’s actually going to be governing from the Right,” Glick said.
In a question from World Israel News as to what issues she plans to focus on if she succeeds in entering the 21st Knesset, Glick said she would concentrate on those matters she’s been dealing with for years, from “legal reform to relations with American Jewry and with the United States government.”
“Our intention is to ensure that I’m in the committees that are relevant to what I’m doing. But the number of ministries and deputy ministries is all contingent on the number of seats we get,” Glick said.
Glick’s background
Glick also talked about her personal background at the event. A precocious child, she described how her parents let her stay up to watch a local political TV commentator in Chicago where she grew up. She decided already by the age of 12 during a family trip to Israel to make aliyah.
Glick did immigrate to Israel at 21, serving for five-and-a-half years as a lone soldier.
Remarkably, given her political opposition to the Oslo Accords, she found herself serving on Israel’s negotiating team to the agreement.
“When I was at Columbia [University], I had taken a bunch of international law seminars and I was very familiar with how to read international law documents,” Glick said. “I’m reading this agreement and thinking ‘This is just professional malpractice. There’s not one Israeli interest here that’s protected. Who wrote this?'”
“In a minute, I turned from this starry-eyed young woman who just trusted everybody — all the generals because they’re generals, right? … and all the leaders, Rabin and Peres … and suddenly I realized, ‘Houston, we have a problem,'” Glick said.
Facing a crisis about whether to continue in her role, say decided to do her best to point out the agreement’s flaws to her commanders, writing reports analyzing Palestinian breaches of the agreement. “In certain things I know I limited concessions” by the Israelis, she said.
It was during this period of writing reports that she developed her analytical writing style that has served her so well as a journalist, she said.
Glick hopes the next government will put an end to Oslo for good. Israel lost 1,400 “who would still be alive today” if not for the Oslo agreement, she said, in addition to 10,000 wounded.
To those people who say Israel can’t live by the sword, Glick said, “We should want to live on our sword. That should be our aspiration, to be responsible for ourselves. It’s a privilege. It’s a gift to not be at the mercy of other people.”