Israeli coalition jolted as another lawmaker quits

Another member of Israel’s parliament said on Thursday she was quitting the ruling coalition, leaving embattled Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in control of a crumbling minority government.

Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi’s announcement further whittles away Bennett’s hold on Israel’s 120-seat parliament, reducing the coalition to 59 seats. Two other legislators from his own party have already bolted.

Rinawie Zoabi’s departure further raises the possibility of new parliamentary elections, less than a year after the government took office. While Bennett’s government remains in power, it is now even more hamstrung in parliament and will likely struggle to function.

In a letter to Bennett, Rinawie Zoabi, who hails from the dovish Meretz party, said she was leaving the coalition because she said it too often adopted nationalist positions on issues of importance to her constituents, Palestinian citizens of Israel.

She cited Israel’s conduct at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, which in recent weeks has been the site of clashes between police and protesters, as well as continued settlement building and the beating by police of pallbearers at the funeral of an Al Jazeera journalist shot while covering confrontations between Israeli forces and Palestinians .“Enough. I cannot continue to support a coalition that in such a shameful way hounds the society from which I came,” she wrote.

Bennett, who leads a small, hard-line nationalist party, heads an unwieldy coalition of eight ideologically diverse factions - from ones that support Palestinian statehood to nationalist parties and even, for the first time in Israeli history, an Islamist Arab party.