Moshe Feiglin, Israel’s election surprise, decries Israeli deep state

Ex-Likud MK declares that there is no practical difference between the right and left, and his party’s task in any government will be to get rid of the “deep state.”

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

Moshe Feiglin, leader of the Zehut (or, “Identity”) party, told some 2,000 supporters in Tel Aviv Tuesday night not to trust those who say he’s made a deal with either of the front-running parties, as it is all “fake news.”

“Zehut isn’t in anyone’s pocket,” he told the conference attendees. “Here too there is a lot of fake news. Don’t listen to anyone, and don’t believe anyone. Out of the two big parties [Likud and Blue and White], both sides are leaking that we’ve already closed a deal with them,” but although they’re talking to both sides, it’s simply not true, he said.

Zehut has been steadily rising in the polls over the last month, with Israel’s Channel 13 reporting on Tuesday that Feiglin would garner six seats in next week’s elections. With 56 seats in the right-religious camp v. 58 for the center-left-Arab opposition, this could give the neophyte party the power to crown either Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Blue and White party head Benny Gantz as the next leader of Israel.

The ex-Likud MK said his party has only “closed” with those not lucky enough to be “part of the circles of ‘connections’ and corruption and nepotism” who are ensconced in the corridors of power.

These included “the people of Israel, the young couples, and the youth in general,” he said, and he promised to get rid of “70 years of the big unions, the cartels and monopolies” so that this majority could prosper.

Feiglin decried this “deep state,” as he called it, which he said existed no matter who was in power. And he repeated his oft-mentioned theory that there was also no difference between the main blocs in the country on a political level.

“Everyone has been saying the same thing for 70 years already,” he said. “It doesn’t make a difference if you’re right or left… you want to divide the land, the two-state solution,” Feiglin said, referring to the plan to carve a Palestinian state out of Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip, which he opposes.

Zehut is the only party that offers something different, he said. “The voter should have two choices, not just one,” he said, and presented his main party platform in six words: “Free state, and One State Solution.”

The single state Feiglin envisions is one that has a Jewish majority due to the fact that there is now a greater Jewish than Arab birth rate, and that polls have shown that many Arabs would leave willingly for other countries if they would be given certain economic incentives to do so.

Feiglin pointed to his mostly young and mixed secular and religious audience as representing the “new” Israel, who are now “blind to the … walls of fear-mongering, of hatred of one to the other” that have falsely divided the people. This new kind of voter, he says, will usher in a different political reality on April 9.