Who is Naftali Bennett, the ultra-nationalist leader poised as Israel`s new PM- Details here
In 2013, he said Palestinian "terrorists should be killed, not released"
Naftali Bennett was on Sunday sworn in as Israel’s new Prime Minister, ousting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from power after an uninterrupted 12 years at the helm of affairs.
Bennett, the 49-year-old leader of the right-wing Yamina party, took oath of office after parliament voted on Sunday on the new government led by him. The new government has 27 ministers, nine of them women.
The new government – an unprecedented coalition of ideologically divergent political parties drawn from the Right, the Left and the Centre, along with an Arab party – has a razor-thin majority in a 120-member house.
He will be Israel’s first premier to lead an openly religious lifestyle, and the first to sport the kippa, the small skullcap worn by religious Jewish men.
Who is Naftali Bennett:
Naftali Bennett, 49, has served as minister of defence as well as of education and the economy in various governments under the leadership of Netanyahu. Born in the Israeli city of Haifa to immigrants from San Francisco, California, Bennett stormed into national politics in 2013 after renouncing his US citizenship.
Bennett, also a self-made tech millionaire, formed a start-up in 1999 and then moved to New York, eventually selling his anti-fraud software company, Cyota, to US security firm RSA for $145 million in 2005. He studied law at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.
Bennett lives with his wife Gilat and four children in the central city of Raanana. He entered politics after selling his tech start-up for $145 million in 2005, and the next year became chief of staff to Netanyahu, who was then in the opposition.
After leaving Netanyahu’s office, Bennett in 2010 became head of the Yesha Council, which lobbies for Jewish settlers in the West Bank. He took politics by storm in 2012, taking charge of the hard-right Jewish Home party, which was facing annihilation.
He increased its parliamentary presence fourfold, while making headlines with a series of incendiary comments about Palestinians.
In 2013, he said Palestinian “terrorists should be killed, not released”. He also argued that the West Bank was not under occupation because “there was never a Palestinian state here”, and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict could not be resolved but must be endured, like a piece of “shrapnel in the buttocks”.
Beyond holding the defence portfolio, Bennett served as Netanyahu’s economy minister and education minister.
He re-branded Jewish Home as the “New Right” party, before forging the Yamina (“Rightward”) bloc in 2018, and was part of Netanyahu’s coalition which collapsed the same year. But he was not asked to join a unity government in May 2020 — a move seen as an expression of Netanyahu’s personal contempt towards him.
(With Inputs From Agencies)