Israel’s rainbow coalition has little to unite it – how long can it last?
Israel’s new coalition is in power at last, having won a confidence motion by a single vote in the 120-member parliament, the Knesset. The split was 60 to 59, with one member of the United Arab List abstaining.
So much for the facts and figures. All the headlines today are about the end of the reign of Benjamin Netanyahu in a straight run of 12 years as prime minister, plus three more in a term in the 1990s.
Four of the principals in the new coalition are former allies of the outgoing prime minister, and have been careful to praise his achievements. Under his leadership Israel saw unprecedented prosperity, has navigated the Covid crisis as well as any up to now, and better than most, and juggled with the growing menace of Iran and its subordinates across the region.
But in the end Netanyahu, with his dazzling logrolling to stay in power, had become a large part of the problem of Israel’s governance and a source of the dysfunction of public administration and policy. Balancing left and right, he was encouraging the more extreme settlers, yet found no new path for dealing with the Palestinians. His time saw major confrontation with Hamas, leading to heavy bombardment of Gaza in 2014 and last month, costing over a thousand lives. Some critics believe the latest confrontation which led to 11 days of bombing in the Strip and thousands of rockets fired into Israel by Hamas, could and should have been de-escalated at an early stage – but for Netanyahu’s need to cling on to power.
A complex and brilliant public performer, with showmanship skills to rival Donald Trump or Silvio Berlusconi, Benjamin Netanyahu has said he will now lead the opposition in the Knesset. His followers compare his defeat to that of Winston Churchill at the ballot box in 1945, and they say that like Churchill he will return to office.
In the meantime, he faces the small matter of his trial on counts of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. It could end up with a jail sentence. The new government will have to face up to this if it lasts into next year.
It may be preparing a clemency deal with the ex-PM. Suspiciously few of the political obituaries across the English language press today have mentioned the trial. Perhaps it may be a matter of courtesy, reluctance to intrude – if so, bully for good manners but it makes for rotten journalism.
Over the past two years Israel became a blocked democracy. Four general elections left no clear winner, nor a lineup of parties and seats that could form a stable government. It means no budget has been passed. Getting one approved by the new Knesset is now an urgent priority.
The points of agreement between the eight parties of the coalition are relatively low-key and practical. One is that no leader should be prime minister for more than two successive four year terms, eight years in all – an agreement that, if passed by parliament, would make a future 12-year run like that of Netanyahu impossible. Other reforms aim at tidying relations between the Supreme Court and the Knesset. The outgoing prime minister was often accused of politicising the personnel and activity of the judiciary.
In the same spirit, the office of attorney general is to be split effectively into two offices – one the state prosecutor, and the other the administrator of the courts and legal services. In the run-up to the charges being brought against Netanyahu, supporters had suggested that the attorney general and his lawyers be fired.
In the outline of coalition agreement there is much about the defence forces and their recruitment, especially regarding the terms of compulsory national service. This has been contentious almost since the foundation of the state in 1948. Ultra-Orthodox Jews, from the Haredi community especially, have been given exemption on grounds of conscience. Increasingly, young men from the Haredi have been volunteering for elite units in the Israeli Defence Force; the studies of the motivation and sociological background of this new elite make fascinating reading. There are new proposals in the coalition agreement for national service conscripts to do alternative public welfare work other than in the armed forces.
The new prime minister, Naftali Bennett, has stated firmly that the new administration will not get involved in peace talks with the Palestinians. It is the biggest issue that divides the eight parties of the alliance—from the hard Zionist right, of which Bennett’s own Yamina has been a standard bearer, to the peaceful moderates and Arabs of the Ra’am party. But most of the messages of congratulation from world leaders, from Joe Biden to Britain’s foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, mentioned the need for reconciliation and the need to break the deadlock in the peace process. Sooner or later, the new coalition will have to address the issue of the relationship with Palestinians in Israel and in the territories. It will have to decide whether the present stalled talks, based roughly on the Oslo accords of 1993-95, can be revived or whether a fresh start is needed.
Specific but limited demands have been made for the Arab community who are Israeli citizens, a grouping now with four members in a ruling coalition. Their leader, Mansour Abbas of the Islamist Ra’am party – a first for any Israeli government since 1948 – has requested higher welfare payments. He also wants the Kaminitiz Law of 2017, which imposes harsh penalties on what are deemed property and development abuses by Arabs, to be frozen until 2024 at least. The Kaminitz Law raises questions about the Nation-State Act of 2018, a favourite son of the Trump presidency. It reinforces the status of Israel as a confessional Jewish state, saying that it is the state and homeland of all Jewish people. This conflicts with the notion of Israel as a pluriform democracy with equal rights enjoyed by Jewish and non-Jewish Israelis, i.e. the Arabs of Israeli citizenship.
Mansour Abbas and his Arabs also want welfare help for the impoverished Bedouins in the Negev desert. Gideon Sa’ar, a former Netanyahu ally but now heading his own New Hope party, has said he wants full supervision for Arab construction in Zone ‘C’, by far the most populous area of the occupied West Bank. This could either be an opportunity for reconciliation, or yet another flashpoint.
None of the discussion in politics and the press across the different Palestinian and Israeli communities this week reflects the major inflexion point of the past few weeks in the affairs of both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli communities. Politics in Israel have now changed for Israelis with the departure of Netanyahu. But politics have been undergoing a seismic upheaval among the Palestinians.
The battle for Gaza is becoming a litmus test. For the past two decades Gaza has become victim to the myopia of militancy on the part of Hamas, and the tactical short-termism of the IDF. Hamas fires its rockets in increasing volume, but not necessarily accuracy, and in return the IDF guns and planes shell and bomb – a cycle that has played out five times since 2005.
This time it has been left to Egypt and Qatar to stump up $500 million each to rebuild the latest IDF bomb damage from May. But there are no talks, at least not of a meaningful nature.
On 12 May Palestinians called for a general strike, across their communities in Israel, the West Bank territories, Gaza and the camps in Lebanon. Arabs and Israelis had been fighting in hitherto peaceful towns and cities like Lod and Haifa. The protest of the strikers in many cases was not only against the Israelis but their own ageing and corrupt leadership – of Fatah and the PLO on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem and against Hamas in Gaza. Many of the new Palestinian movement also reject the Oslo peace accords as a basis for negotiation with the Israelis. They want to start all over, from the beginning.
This may be a test the new unwieldy coalition in Israel will have to meet soon – certainly by the end of the year. We may get an indication of how adroitly this will be addressed by Naftali Bennett and his partner Yair Lapid – the true architect of the coalition – in the next few days. They have to ensure that another planned march by “United Israel” Zionists in the Arab areas of the Old City of Jerusalem goes off peacefully and steers away from the most sensitive sites sacred to all three religions of the book in Jerusalem. This is how the troubles of last month began. The march has already been rerouted, but if it goes wrong, the new post-Netanyahu government could almost be over before it has begun.