What to expect from the weak and weird coalition that displaced Netanyahu after 12 years in power in Israel

It was less than an hour before midnight in Jerusalem, the deadline for presenting a coalition government that prevent a fifth election in two years for the Israelis. It was when Mansour Abbas of the Islamist Ra’am party, the first representative of 21% of Arab Israelis to reach a government, signed. The bizarre coalition, made up of parties ranging from the far right to the left, has enough votes in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, to form a government and end Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12 years in power. They are united more by fear than by love. They are together to put an end to the government of “Bibi”, this is how everyone knows the Prime Minister. It’s the only thing that merges them. And the question that arose last night in the streets of the old town was whether this single objective is enough to rule Israel.

Yair Lapid, the centrist responsible for forming the government After Netanyahu failed to do so after the March 23 election, he officially informed President Reuven Rivlin that he had sufficient support to move forward and swear in a new cabinet. Lapid’s main partner is nationalist Naftali Bennett, who will be prime minister under a rotation agreement between the two in this post. The fragile new government, which will have a narrow majority in the Knesset, will take office in ten days, still leaving it a small margin so that the bank that answers Netanyahu in parliament can attempt some sort of obstructionist maneuver. It is a specialty of the Prime Minister and his men.

The announcement of the creation of the government was accompanied by the appointment of the country’s new president. Parliament elected Isaac Herzog to replace popular Reuvin Rivlin, who comes from the same party as Netanyahu, despite being seen as his political enemy. The vote can be seen as further proof of the end of the Netanyahu era and the politics it defined. Herzog is the closest thing to a “prince of royalty” that the Israeli political system can conceive of, being part of the once dominant Ashkenazi elite – in reference to the Jews arriving from Europe – who shaped the Israeli state during decades of rule after its founding in 1948.

The new coalition is Alphabet soup. It is made up of the Yesh Atid, Yamina, Kahol Lavan, New Hope, Labor, Yisrael Beiteinu, Meretz and United Arab List parties. While some analysts have praised her for reflect the breadth and complexity of Israeli society, others believe that its members are too incompatible to perpetuate their pact, and they see it as the epitome of Israel’s political dysfunction.

The alliance will be led until 2023 by Naftali Bennett, a former leader of the settlerscleric, who opposes a Palestinian state and wants Israel to annex most of the occupied West Bank. It’s a Former ally of Netanyahu who is often described as more to the right than the prime minister. The son of American immigrants, Bennett, 49, was the founder of a successful software company, commander of the military, Netanyahu’s chief of staff and minister of defense. He was also the executive director of the Yesha Council, a group representing the various Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. Until the last electoral cycle, Bennett was part of a political alliance with Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right leader.

If the government lasts an entire legislature, it would be led between 2023 and 2025 by Yair Lapid, a former centrist television host considered a standard bearer of secular Israelis. Lapid, 57, is a journalist turned politician nine years ago and Minister of the Economy in one of Netanyahu’s coalitions. His party came second in the legislative elections in March, with 17 seats. He was the new prime minister, but he stepped down from his post for two years in pursuit of his main goal, which was get rid of Netanyahu. He is the Tel Aviv-born son of former Justice Minister Yosef “Tommy” Lapid, a fiercely secularist, who also quit journalism to enter politics. Her mother, Shulamit Lapid, is a well-known novelist, playwright and poet.

To get a feel for what the new government might be like, you can explore Lapid’s positions since he founded the Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party in 2012. When he held the finance ministry, he focused on reorganize the system of subsidies to the ultra-Orthodox community, which he accuses of extracting money from the state instead of looking for a paid job. Most of its changes have been revoked by subsequent administrations. Regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Lapid is in favor of a two-state solution, but he opposes any division of Jerusalem, which the Palestinians regard as their capital. In 2019, Yesh Atid joined Israel Resilience and Telem to form the centrist Blue and White coalition, formed under the leadership of former military leader Benny Gantz. Azul y Blanco then fought right-wing Netanyahu’s Likud in three elections in less than a year. Lapid split from the alliance after Gantz joined Netanyahu – to form a fragile and short-lived government in March 2020 – and since. became the liberal voice of Israel’s secular middle class.

Netanyahu has tried in recent weeks to portray Bennett as a left sold, and Likud supporters circulated images of him wearing an Arab keffiyeh on social media. They also staged pickets and protests outside the home of Ayelet Shaked, his right-hand man and controversial former justice minister. Bennett, Lapid, Shaked and various journalists and judicial officials who are pursuing various corruption cases against Netanyahu they had to benefit from police protection, in what the national intelligence service, the Mossad, described as an “incentive atmosphere”, they compare to the smear campaign suffered by former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, shortly before he was assassinated in 1995 by a religious extremist. Only the eleven days of the Gaza conflict – which left 250 dead on the Palestinian side and 12 on the Israeli side, including dozens of children – allowed a political truce, but the dirty campaign resumed immediately after the ceasefire was agreed. May 20 fire.

Netanyahu faces a lawsuit against him for fraud, bribes and breach of trust in three corruption cases. The horizon most feared by the Prime Minister was that which had been created after the agreement of the opposition, that of going through justice without the protection of his position. He and his wife could go to jail if found guilty.

Last night his supporters listed on Israeli television the achievements they claimed to have achieved by Netanyahu. The first and most important is to have forged a very close alliance with former President Donald Trump who awarded him the recognition by the United States of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the green light to formalize annexation of about a third of the occupied West Bank. They also celebrate that there is “Normalized” diplomatic relations with four Arab states, notably through the Gulf alliances against Iran. Coming from the most centrist and democratic sectors, he was seen as an authoritarian prime minister capable of anything to stay in power.

Israel is now in the hands of a weak coalition whose main mandate is to create a certain political stability which ends with the growing divide between Israeli citizens of Arab and Jewish descent. The last war in Gaza sparked violent clashes in integrated neighborhoods and towns. The rest will be to dismantle the strong political and social fabric that has supported Netanyahu for 12 years and the eternal unresolved issue of peace with the Palestinians.

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