Israelis and Arabs set aside their differences to boot ‘King Bibi’ out

After 12 years in power and a string of scandals that would make even the most hardened political operator blush, Israel’s longest serving prime minister was toppled by a crisis of his own making.

Three of the coalition leaders who removed Benjamin Netanyahu from power yesterday were his own former protégés: Naftali Bennett, Gideon Sa’ar and Avigdor Liberman.

All three men left Mr Netanyahu’s Likud party to set up their own Right-wing movements. They had grown deeply concerned about his ongoing corruption trial, which they felt made his position untenable.

Those new parties went on to drain support from Likud during four inconclusive election results between 2019 and 2021, their leaders ultimately joining forces to strip him of office altogether. While it was Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of Yesh Atid, who brought this coalition together, it will be led by Mr Bennett for the first two years as part of a power sharing deal.

Mr Bennett was once such a fervent admirer of the outgoing prime minister that he named his son after Mr Netanyahu’s brother, Yoni, who was killed during the Israeli hostage rescue operation at Entebbe in 1976.

However, after their falling out, Mr Bennett became the thorn in Mr Netanyahu’s side that proved to be fatal for his time in high office.

The coalition also secured its majority with help from an Arab party, the same minority group which Mr Netanyahu has spent years demonising for political gain. At the end of the 2015 election campaign, he infamously warned that Arab citizens of Israel were “voting in droves”, in an attempt to scare floating Right-wing Israeli voters.

The stunt worked, but yesterday an Arab party – Ra’am – became the first in Israel’s history to join a government. The man who spent much of his political career pitting Right-wing Israelis against Arab citizens inspired them to discover rare common ground: their determination to oust him.

While Mr Netanyahu’s own party has mostly stuck behind him throughout the corruption trial, it handed his enemies fertile ground for a campaign to chip away at his credibility. This included weekly mass protests against his rule in Jerusalem which dubbed him “Crime Minister”.

And Mr Netanyahu’s insistence that the trial was a “witch-hunt” only drove former allies further away. It remains to be seen whether Israel’s new government will hold firm. But the political demise of “King Bibi” suggests that Israel has grown weary of his divisive style, and is now ready to accept the more circumspect, compromise-driven approach demanded by this unity government.

Mr Netanyahu’s insistence that the corruption trial was a ‘witch-hunt’ only drove former allies further away