Rainbow coalition cobbled together to oust Netanyahu
There has been a small political earthquake in Israel, likely to reverberate for weeks. On Wednesday night, local time, Yair Lapid of the centrist Yesh Atid party informed President Reuven Rivlin that he could form a coalition government which could win a majority in the Knesset, the parliament.
If this succeeds, it will be the end of the 12-year run of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister; he also held the post for three years previously in the 1990s. No one is likely to match this record. But lately Israeli politics had become all about him and his bid to hang on to power. Four elections in just over two years had proved inconclusive. It was the possibility that Israel could be plunged into a fifth election that helped the coalition of eight parties led by Yair Lapid to come together.
At first glance they are an odd, even contradictory, bunch. They run from pro-settler anti-Palestinian groups such as Yamina, led by the powerful and charismatic Naftali Bennett (likely to become the new prime minister) and the Israel Homeland party, Yisrael Beiteineu, of the outspoken pro-settler hardman and former minister Avigdor Lieberman to moderate centrists of Labour – Meretz and Blue and White. Linked to them – and a first for an Israeli coalition – are Arab Israeli members of the Knesset, including Mansour Abbas of the Islamist Ra’am party.
How they will work together is anybody’s guess. They come together at an important juncture in Israel’s 73 year-long history. Israel has managed Covid, but now faces the legacy of the bitter communal fighting between Arabs and Jews domestically, including the disorders at the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, which in turn sparked 11 days of a rocket and bombardment war between Israelis and Hamas to and from Gaza. That left a toll of at least 253 Palestinians killed in Gaza, many women and children among them, and some 15 Israelis. This was the fourth conflict over Gaza since 2005. Relations with Palestinians, whether of Israeli citizenship, on the West Bank or in Gaza, will have to be addressed by the new government.
It will be tricky. Several of the big beasts in the coalition such as Bennett and Lieberman have promoted extending Jewish settlements and opposed recognising at all an independent Palestinian state. Others in the coalition will want to address complaints about Arab Israelis being treated as second class citizens – a de facto apartheid.
The new government has a majority of two seats out of 120 in the Knesset. But some members of the pro-government parties have been muttering about abstaining in a confidence vote, or defecting altogether. The vote is due to be held sometime next week, and only then can ministers be sworn in.
Meanwhile Benjamin Netanyahu has been working from the playbook of his old friend Donald Trump. He’s not exactly claiming he has been robbed by electoral fraud but, Trump-like, he is saying he is a victim of a dangerous left-wing conspiracy. He has vowed to wreck the new government before it can even get down the slipway. He is fighting for his political life, and possibly his freedom. Currently he is on trial for fraud, bribery and breach of trust. Out of office, he has no immunity and a guilty verdict could put him in jail.
The formation of the new eight-party coalition may seem like the main political drama running in Israel now. This would be a mistake because politics there is playing a remarkable double bill, each feature with a powerful narrative. The new government, when it arrives, will face a huge development in Palestinian Arab politics. On 12 May, Palestinians held a general strike in Israel itself and Jerusalem, on the West Bank and in Gaza, and in the Palestinian camps in Lebanon. It is proving one of the most successful political demonstrations by Palestinians in modern times – a new expression of national self-consciousness and will.
As we have reported for some time now in Reaction, multiple opinion surveys in Palestinian communities show a new political spirit, especially among those of 40 and below. They have rejected the “old” leadership of the Palestinian Authority by Fatah, and the military autocracy of Hamas in Gaza. Curiously, too, they see the peace process enshrined in the Oslo Accords of 1993 to 1995 as all but a dead letter in practical terms. It would be hard to regenerate the Accords as they stand. In an outstanding Webinar discussion by the ISPI-Med2021 think tank of Italy a month ago, the dynamics of the new mood, galvanised by the latest clash over the Jerusalem Holy Places and Arab evictions, the rockets and bombing of Gaza, were spelled out.
“There is a new sense of a Palestinian movement – a genuine movimento among the Palestinians of the immediate neighbourhood (ie Israel, the West Bank and Gaza) and the diaspora,” one of the researchers explained. In the US and Europe, during the bombing of Gaza, the slogans and flags of Palestinian Lives Matter were paraded by members of Black Lives Matter. As Yair Lapid, Naftali Bennett and their allies were drawing up their government agreement, the New York Times printed a full page news feature from Jerusalem on 1 June under the incongruous headline, “As Israelis Await Netanyahu’s Fate, Palestinians Seize a Moment of Unity.”
This is the new reality the next Israeli government will have to face. I doubt it will engage in direct talks with Palestinian Authority ministers or Hamas – but they will have to make some move in some form towards the Arab neighbours at home in Israel or in the territories. “I don’t think you are going to get the new government talking about peace deals,” says Richard Pater of the Anglo-Israeli think tank BICOM, “there is just too much to do – even if the government runs a full four-year term, which is pretty unlikely. But I think they will make moves with allies such as the US and Egypt to mitigate the situation in Gaza, for instance.”
A fifth of Israel’s population is Arab, and Arabs play a vital role in the economy – a crucial labour corps in service industries, hospitals and health clinics, for example.
The problem is that the Palestinians are trapped by their own sclerotic domestic politics, and know it. The 85 year-old Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah should have called elections on the West Bank this month. He didn’t, knowing he would lose. The Hamas regime won a vote in Gaza in 2006, but would lose one now. It has continuously postponed elections. The stock of Hamas is high as a symbol of protest among Arabs in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, but in its birthplace of Gaza it meets deep skepticism.
One of the oldest loyalists of the old PLO and Fatah of Yasser Arafat, Hanan Ashrawi, told a colleague there is now huge change in the Palestinian political mood. “Here in the West Bank and Jerusalem, it’s a sea of the green flags of Hamas protest,” she told a friend last week. “It’s like an earthquake,” she confided to the New York Times. “We are part of the global conversation on rights, justice, freedom, and Israel cannot close it down, or censor it.”
On 2 June there was another vote in the Knesset, when Isaac Herzog was elected his country’s 11th president by 87 votes. Son of a former president, grandson of Israel’s first Chief Rabbi and nephew of the statesman Abba Eban, who formally brought Israel into the UN, in style, manner and thought, he is almost the total opposite of Benjamin Netanyahu and his Trump-like penchant for confrontation. He may even have to decide whether to pardon Netanyahu if he is convicted.
Yet there is one item of mundane but vital business to concentrate the minds of the new government above all – the need to pass a budget. In the churn and burn of four elections in the last two years of Netanyahu’s regime, parliamentary time and a working majority couldn’t be found to get the budget through. Pater says: “The absolute necessity to do this should guarantee that the new government lasts at least a year.”