Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Israeli coalition gets reprieve as Islamist party rejoins
JERUSALEM — Israel’s governing coalition was granted at least a temporary reprieve from its latest crisis Wednesday when one of its partners, a small Islamist party, agreed to rejoin the coalition.
The Islamist party, Ra’am, had suspended its involvement a month ago in protest of police actions at Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.
The eight-way coalition yokes together politicians who would normally be ideological opponents.
The suspension came in the first week of a new parliamentary session in which opposition parties had been counting on Ra’am’s support or acquiescence to dissolve parliament and force an early general election, Israel’s fifth in less than four years.
But the party’s leader, Mansour Abbas, disappointed them, saying it was better for Israel’s Arab citizens if his party remained in the government.
“We are leading a political process of cooperation that is meant to provide an answer or a solution for the Arab citizens of Israel,” Abbas told reporters Wednesday. “Ra’am has taken the initiative to take responsibility and to advance this process.”
Justifying the decision, Abbas listed many of the chronic problems facing Israel’s Arab minority, which makes up about one-fifth of the population, including rampant crime and gun violence, inequality in housing and education, and the lack of municipal services in dozens of villages in the Negev desert, which Israeli authorities do not recognize.
The government was formed less than a year ago in an effort to end a chaotic political stalemate that resulted in four general elections over a period of less than two years.
Headed by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, the leader of Yamina, a small right-wing party, it brought together parties from the left, center and right, as well as the conservative Islamist party. The coaltion opposed former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who stands trial on corruption charges.
Bennett’s coalition lost its thin majority last month when a member of his party, Idit Silman, the coalition’s chair and effectively its chief whip, resigned, leaving the government and the opposition in a tie in the 120-seat parliament.
In announcing her resignation, Silman stated that the government’s direction did not reflect the values of the rightwing voters who brought Bennett’s party to power. She said it was time to change course and to try to form a new “national, Jewish, Zionist” coalition with right-wing lawmakers.
The situation has made Abbas, 48, the leader of Ra’am, one of the most closely watched figures in national politics, as he holds the keys to the longevity of the government.
Political observers waited anxiously Tuesday night and Wednesday morning for a decision from Ra’am’s advisory body, the Shura Council of the southern branch of the Islamic Movement in Israel, regarding the party’s participation in the coalition.
The decision to stay in the coalition may also have been influenced by recent polls showing that Ra’am, which was the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli governing coalition, might not gain enough votes in a new election to make it back into parliament.
Netanyahu, now the opposition leader, and his conservative Likud party have used Bennett’s dependence on Ra’am and Abbas to rally their base, while vilifying Ra’am’s lawmakers as supporters of terrorism.
“The whole country has seen that Naftali Bennett’s government of surrender and weakness is being held hostage by the Shura Council,” Netanyahu said Wednesday.
Netanyahu has denied that he, too, held negotiations with Abbas in an attempt to form a majority coalition after the last election. Abbas said Wednesday that he had documentation of those negotiations on his cellphone and threatened to make some of it public.