Comeback Kid

Photos: Flash90

With reporting by Omri Nahmias

It was a glorious Mediterranean afternoon at the Herzliya Conference, a high-level policy confab, in July 2019. Under azure skies and to the sound of private planes taking off from a nearby airstrip, hundreds of people walked around peering at each other’s lanyards, sizing up whether they’d met someone worth knowing. Senior American think-tankers rubbed shoulders with former Israeli police chiefs; diplomats spoke with journalists; there was even a Greek admiral sparkling in his dress whites and gold braid.

As the afternoon wore on, A-list ministers like Likud’s Yisrael Katz arrived with security details; left-wing politicians such as former foreign minister Tzipi Livni were greeted with a media scrum; and Mossad boss Yossi Cohen made the rounds like a superstar.

Then came Naftali Bennett. Billed as a “former education minister”, the entrance of the right-wing leader, whose meteoric rise had marked him as future prime ministerial material, was a study in humility.

He made his way quickly to the podium through the hall unaccompanied. Chastened-sounding, he acknowledged his resounding political failure, having bolted his old Bayit Yehudi party and failed to enter the Knesset on a new slate. To hear him casting around for a cause was nothing short of painful. That afternoon, the phrase that most aptly captured Bennett’s fall from grace was Dovid HaMelech’s lament for Shaul: “Eich naflu giborim.”