New elections as Israel’s govt fails
Coalition collapse opens the door for Netanyahu return
Israel’s weakened coalition government announced yesterday that it would dissolve Parliament and call new elections, setting the stage for the possible return to power of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or another period of prolonged political gridlock.
The election will be Israel’s fifth in three years, and it will put the polarising Netanyahu, who has been the opposition leader for the past year, back at the centre of the political universe.
“I think the winds have changed. I feel it,” Netanyahu declared.
The previous four elections, focused on Netanyahu’s fitness to rule while facing a corruption investigation, ended in deadlock. While opinion polls project Netanyahu, who is now on trial, as the front-runner, it is far from certain that his Likud Party can secure the required parliamentary majority to form a new government.
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, a former ally and aide of Netanyahu, formed his Government a year ago with the aim of halting the neverending cycle of elections. But the fragile coalition, which includes parties from across the political spectrum, lost its majority earlier this year and has faced rebellions from lawmakers in recent weeks.
Announcing his plan to disband the Government during a nationally televised news conference, Bennett said he had made “the right decision” in difficult circumstances.
Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who heads the large centrist party Yesh Atid, now becomes the interim prime minister until the election, in which he is expected to be the main rival to Netanyahu.
Bennett’s coalition included factions that support an end to Israel’s occupation of lands captured in 1967 and claimed by the Palestinians, to hardline parties that oppose Palestinian statehood. Many of the parties had little in common beyond a shared animosity to Netanyahu. Often described as a political “experiment”, the coalition made history by becoming the first to include an Arab party.
The coalition eventually unravelled in large part because several members of Bennett’s own hardline party objected to what they felt were his pragmatism and moderation. Netanyahu, meanwhile, whipped up the opposition by accusing Bennett of co-operating with “terror supporters” — a reference to his Arab partners in the coalition.
Palestinian citizens of Israel make up about 20 per cent of the country’s population but are often seen as a fifth column and have never before been part of a coalition. Although Netanyahu himself had also courted the same Islamist party last year, the criticism appeared to make some of the hardline members of Bennett’s coalition uncomfortable.
The final blow to the Government was the looming expiration of a law that grant Israel’s West Bank settlers special legal status. The law underpins separate legal systems for
Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank, a situation that three prominent human rights groups say amounts to apartheid. Israel rejects that allegation as an attack on its legitimacy.
Parliament had been set to extend the law earlier this month, as it has done for the past 55 years. But the hardline opposition, comprised heavily of settler supporters, paradoxically voted against the bill in order to embarrass Bennett. Members of the coalition who normally oppose the settlements voted in favour in hopes of keeping the Government afloat. But a handful of coalition members, including Arab lawmakers and hardline nationalists, either abstained or voted with the opposition to defeat the bill and fracture the coalition.
Bennett and Lapid will now present a bill to dissolve Parliament in the coming days. Once that passes, the country will head to an election, most likely in October. —AP