Here’s a word that has fallen out of fashion and, in Israeli government circles, out of practice too. “Competence.” In Hebrew, it has more of a songlike ring — “יכולת” (yecholet) — but that still doesn’t make the word a vote-winner. It should. Because competence is what Israel desperately needs right now, after four years of utter incompetence (choser yecholet, in case you’re interested) — of catastrophic failures, criminal irresponsibility and deep incompetence in almost every government department — have brought the country to a precipice. Naftali Bennett’s party, B’Yachad, announced this week a line-up of truly impressive people, bursting with yecholet. It was a rare moment of hope in these dark days.

Some of them were familiar from four years of Parliamentary heroism on the Opposition benches. Israel’s system gives almost no power to the opposition when it is facing a united government with a majority — yet across these four terrible years, the Opposition, led by Yesh Atid have, remarkably, managed to block almost all of the anti-democratic measures Netanyahu wanted to steamroll through. There were Merav Ben-Ari and Meirav Cohen arguing thousands of points against the government’s authoritarian bills; Vladimir Beliak bringing his formidable financial knowledge to relentlessly nail government representatives on shoddy, or politics-first, economics — and all of them arguing and filibustering and working the system however the system allowed them to work, deep into the night, most nights. And now these highly capable people, with all of their experience, are part of B’Yachad, where they have been joined by other highly capable people. The kind of people you’d want running a country, and especially this one with all its challenges. Israel cannot afford to be run by incompetents.

Number three in B’yachad, behind Bennett and Yair Lapid, is Keren Terner, the extremely-highly-regarded former Director-General of both the Ministry of Finance and of the Ministry of Transportation. She is widely respected across the Knesset as one of the most competent and consequential........

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