Naftali Bennett: Son of Berkeley 'left-wingers' set to be Israel PM

Free subscriber-exclusive audiobook!“No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention”Get it now on Libro.fm using the button below.Israel's longest-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, could soon be out of office after an unlikely coalition of eight opposition parties successfully reached a deal to form a new government.If the coalition is ratified in Israel's Knesset on Sunday afternoon, Netanyahu will be replaced as prime minister by his former Chief of Staff and the head of the right-wing Yamina party— Naftali Bennett.Bennett, an ultra-nationalist multimillionaire, would serve as prime minister for two years before handing over to the Yesh Atid chairman Yair Lapid.With Bennett poised to take the reigns imminently, many are wondering who the prime minister-in-waiting actually is.Read more: 'Netanyahu owes his career to Hamas' — 'The Human Factor' director Dror Moreh talks about the rise and fall of the Israel and Palestine peace processBennett was born in the port city Haifa in 1972. But 13 shells struck the UN compound, killing 106 civilians in what is now called the "Qana Massacre."In the lead-up to the 2015 Israeli elections, Israeli journalist Ravid Drucker cited an anonymous "senior army figure" report that said Bennett's radio call for support was "hysterical" and showed poor judgment, The Times of Israel reported.Bennett called Drucker's charges a "vanity of vanities, nonsense, a pile of bulls--t." Other officers familiar with the incident dismissed the charges and said that Bennett displayed "level-headedness," according to The Jerusalem Post.Bennett would go on to boast: "I already killed lots of Arabs in my life, and there is absolutely no problem with that," he said, according to The Washington Post. They launched workshops to teach participants how to rewrite Wikipedia articles to make them more pro-Israel, The Guardian reported in 2010.In 2012, Bennett left Likud — the party currently chaired by Netanyahu — and joined the Orthodox Jewish, pro-settlement Jewish Home party.In 2013, he became the party leader with 67 percent of the vote and later won 12 seats in Israel's Knesset. He renounced his American citizenship to join the Knesset, The Jerusalem Post reported.He was appointed Minister of the Economy, Minister of Religious Services, and, later, the Minister of Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs, serving under prime minister Netanyahu.While acting as a minister in these roles, Bennett sold Soluto for $130 million in 2013, according to Haaretz. "I will do everything in my power to make sure they never get a state," he told The New Yorker in 2013.But Bennett has said that, as part of his coalition agreement, he will not agree to the annexation of any West Bank territory or the building of new settlements, The Times of Israel reported.Bennett would be Israel's first religiously observant, Orthodox Jewish prime minister and the first to always wear a kippah (skullcap) — a marker of religious observance.Furious ultra-Orthodox politicians have questioned whether his religiosity is merely for show.