Look who’s warming up on the sidelines. Assuming Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid’s grotesque performance doesn’t take off, Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog’s farce doesn’t last long, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually leaves office one day, Gideon Sa’ar is waiting. This Likudnik is still in his warm-up suit, hardly able to keep off the field. But he occasionally lets loose a statement to remind everyone of his existence.

That was the case Thursday: “If Israel is to win the current battle,” it must “change the rules of the game and make the Palestinians feel that they are losing,” he said. Good thing there’s an alternative; good thing we have somebody who knows what to do.

Sa’ar knows the Palestinians; after all, he frequently visits their cities (but he’s probably never met a Palestinian, not even a supermarket deliveryman). He has no idea what their lives are like and doesn’t care. But he knows that they’re a society programmed for murder. How does he know? He knows. He knows that the way to the top of government passes through incitement.

He also knows that you have to make them feel like they’re losing. They’ve been losing for 100 years – and they don’t give up.

But Sa’ar will burn it into their consciousness. His deep historical knowledge has taught him that nations that fight for their freedom break in the end – the Jews, for example. It has taught him that surrender agreements hold.

Original thinking, alongside a measure of humanity. As the founder of the Holot detention center, he’ll show those Palestinians. He thinks the illegals aren’t being hunted down enough; those instigators should be deported.

But don’t think of Sa’ar as some sort of Avigdor Lieberman. He’s a sweetheart compared to the Yisrael Beiteinu chief. He’s eloquent, au courant, and walks his dog wearing shorts. His Facebook picture shows him riding a bike with his son David.

Open gallery view TV anchorwoman Geula Even Credit: Yossi Mimouni PR

Yes, he’s an exemplary (second) family man. He celebrates International Women’s Day with his second wife Geula (“you’re one of a kind, Wonder Woman”), licks ice cream with David (“it’s hot out, time for ice cream”), and has a picture of them in ski caps (“ready for the storm! Wishing everybody a warm Shabbat”).

He’s so cool. He mourned the death of David Bowie and had his picture taken with retired soccer great Zinedine Zidane, now the Real Madrid manager. With former friends like Zionist Union MK Shelly Yacimovich and a wife as impressive as TV anchorwoman Geula Even, he surely must be a feminist, getting up at night with David, taking out the garbage and doing the dishes.

He’s the epitome of the new parenting, the latest thing in couplehood, a wonderful example of the modern family. And he’s even “growing stronger” in religious observance.

Sa’ar is so enlightened in so many ways – and that’s why it’s so hard to believe that such enlightenment could shatter so suddenly; how his care and love for David, whom he said he left politics to raise, goes with his callousness toward Palestinian children during the children’s intifada.

How can the father of the year be indifferent to or even support the killing of children or the detention of toddlers around David’s age? How can it be that their fate not only does not move him, it doesn’t even occur to him to compare them to David? How can he see the execution of girls only brandishing scissors and not think of his two daughters?

That’s why he’s so dangerous. Sa’ar is the next right wing. He’s doesn’t speak harshly, but he runs deep. While Lieberman barks and Naftali Bennett agitates, Sa’ar talks softly. He’s no less a racist than they are, but gently so. In Or Yehuda he already has a town square named after him. One day he might be prime minister.

He’s made of the right stuff. Afterward he’ll be Ehud Olmert, not in terms of corruption, but in terms of a left turn. A moment before or after he retires he’ll also see the light, but too late. Until then he’ll keep on cynically fanning the flames to reach his goal. Nothing will stand in his way.