Tsafrir Abayov/AP Photo
Israeli politician Naftali Bennett, second from right, leader of the right-wing Yamina party, and his party candidate Ayelet Shaked, right, greet their supporters after the first exit poll results, at their party’s headquarters in Petah Tikva, Israel, March 24, 2021.
The new Israeli government is scheduled to be ratified by the Israeli Knesset by June 14.
The partners in the proposed government will be centrist parties Yesh Atid and Blue and White; right-wing parties Yisrael Beiteinu, Yamina, and New Hope; and the left-wing Labor Party, Meretz, and Ra’am, an Islamicist, socially conservative party. The largest party by far is Yesh Atid, led by the mastermind of this mish-mosh (the technical term), Yair Lapid. The center-left together holds more seats than the right wing, but without the right-wing parties, this plane would not fly. Therefore, for now, the right-wing parties—especially Yamina—hold more immediate power.
What holds them all together is one man and one issue: the sitting prime minister, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. Disdain for him in this crowd, which includes six former ministers in various Netanyahu governments and three former chiefs of staff to his office, was a powerful uniting factor. Ra’am, the Islamic party, seemingly amenable to either Bibi or this new government, decided to sign on after receiving a small portion of their own demands.
The death threats to both the left and the right in this proposed “change” government, as its members are calling it, are constant and real. The Shin Bet security services are working overtime and with enhanced capabilities to guard party leaders from threats, all of which emanate from the extreme Jewish right wing.
The sitting prime minister, with so much to lose, is attempting to chip away at the right-wing members of this alliance.
Meanwhile, there is no doubt that on June 2 something historic and game-changing happened in Israel. The entire country was on edge, awaiting the culmination of negotiations that anchored a fourth election in two years. For the Jewish left, even though they would not be in charge of the government or its policies, there was near unanimity that this government needed to be a go. The Arab left, not so much.
Let me explain by illustration. With less than an hour before the clock ran out on the Israeli election negotiations, a friend of mine called me frantically from his kibbutz near the Gaza border. A bastion of Labor Party voters and especially strong supporters of the new Labor Party leader, Merav Michaeli, he and his neighbors were worried that Michaeli’s final stance in the negotiations could keep the new “change” government from being formed. I told him not to worry—I had a strong hunch that the Labor Party would figure out a way to square the circle, as it did, and as did each of the eight parties in this profoundly odd coalition. But his sense of desperation said it all. Michaeli was in last-minute negotiations, trying to make a principled stand on something key to all Israeli leftists, an independent judiciary, yet for this friend and so many like him, all they wanted was to rid the nation of Bibi, first and foremost.
For the Zionist left, represented in this government by the Labor Party and Meretz, it’s an opportunity and a challenge: to rebuild a camp that has been battered these past 12 years, and that really hasn’t held significant power since former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was murdered 26 years ago.
There are some immediate items that this government must accomplish. First, they must pass a state budget, something that Israel has gone without since March of 2018. How to prioritize the budget issues will be the first tremendous problem, with the various political leanings inside the coalition, but there are items that everyone can agree on, like some family subsidies and basic operations that are needed to keep the ministries functioning. Much else will be punted to a future budget.
Then there are the more fraught, but equally urgent, legal issues. For personal gain, Bibi has sought to tamper with the mechanisms of the state, especially regarding the independence of the attorney general and the state prosecutor. According to Israeli news reports, New Hope, Yamina (settler leader Naftali Bennett’s party), and Yesh Atid agreed that they would act to split the position of attorney general and to instate reform in civil rights investigations and in legal proceedings. Beyond that, there will be internal struggles, especially between the left and a right wing that envisions a Federalist Society model for the Israeli judiciary. But having the left inside the coalition will offer stopgaps to much of these efforts.
For the Zionist left, it’s an opportunity and a challenge: to rebuild a camp that has been battered these past 12 years.
Then there is the not small issue of democratic speech, the complete corruption of the airwaves and the media in general under Netanyahu, who not only sought to purchase the press (as one of his trials is now investigating) but also took on the Trumpian phraseology of blaming the media for everything not in his favor. Recently, during the Gazan war, several mainstream TV reporters had to get security details thanks to this incitement.
Another issue that will at least be considered is how to take away some of the privilege and autonomy of the ultra-Orthodox leadership in its very real challenge to the authority of the secular state.
While there will be many red lines that won’t be crossed to avoid toppling this fragile coalition, still, each minister will have some freedom in their own ministry. So, for instance, Labor Party leader Merav Michaeli, who will become transportation minister, will immediately seek to fund a starved public-transportation system within Israel, adding support for the poor and underserved periphery outside of the center of the country. Additionally, it’s assumed that she will freeze the building out of road infrastructure in the West Bank to benefit Jewish settlers that the Netanyahu government has begun. She will also seek to increase public-transport opportunities during the Sabbath, where presently the ultra-Orthodox Chief Rabbinate demands that there be none.
Another critical ministry that Labor has taken oversees the police. Currently, the minister in charge is nearly unmatched in his zeal for attacking demonstrators—especially those who are Palestinian—and giving police free rein. Omer Bar Lev, a Labor leader, will take that helm. Additional important placements are the three Meretz leaders: Nitzan Horowitz as minister of health, Tamar Zandberg for the environment, and Issawi Frej, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, in the Regional Cooperation Ministry.
The ultimate issue that lords over every other issue upon which any Israeli government must deal—the occupation itself—will be in a sort of deep freeze at least for the next couple of years. But in the meantime, the Israeli left—and increasingly a combined, but still timid, left of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel together—will attempt to grow their camp.
The reality is that the left in Israel simply can’t regain full power unless they combine with one of two segments of voters in Israeli society: those who support the Arab parties (mostly Palestinian citizens of Israel) or the ultra-Orthodox Haredi voters. Together, these segments represent nearly 40 percent of the Israeli voting public. Until now, the Haredi vote has gone almost solely to the right wing, and the Arab vote along with their leadership has been beyond the pale of acceptability for forming governments within the Israeli Jewish consensus. Now, that consensus has been broken wide open.
It’s ironic therefore that for the left, the “wrong” Arab party has broken this consensus by making Israeli history and joining a government for the first time. The Ra’am party is especially conservative on social issues and is vowing to block change on issues like LGBTQ family adoptions that have evolved into near-consensus between most of the left and right in Israel but are not favored by either Jewish or Muslim ultrareligious communities.
Ayman Odeh, the head of Israel’s Communist-style Hadash party and the Joint List that combines two other parties with it, was the leader out ahead forging a shared Arab-Jewish left partnership. In so many ways, he is one of Israel’s most visionary left-wing leaders. Yet his party decided not to endorse or join this new government, due to the leadership first round of Naftali Bennett. (Though importantly, Odeh went on record saying that his party would not be the reason that Bibi’s government remains intact.) Still, ceding the coalition to Ra’am’s Mansour Abbas could cost Odeh some support among Arab voters, many of whom have consistently polled that they want their leadership in the government and able to make a difference on key issues like housing, economics, and especially crime. But, no doubt, Odeh will be busy on the ground doing something that the left will deeply need if it is to achieve victories from this “change” government.
The Israeli Jewish left, so severely weakened, needs to find space within this “change” government to grow and breathe. But if it is to grow, it needs to expand its numbers by partnering for a shared Jewish-Arab Israeli future, fueled by a mobilized grassroots. Ultimately, nothing will succeed without an end to the occupation outside of Green Line (internationally recognized) Israel.
So where does this leave the U.S. administration? It’s no accident that on Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s recent trip to help formulate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, he added a last-minute late-night private meeting with Yair Lapid. He didn’t meet with the proposed incoming prime minister, Naftali Bennett. Bennett may sit in the prime minister’s office for the next two years, and his own number two—Israel’s own Margaret Thatcher—Ayelet Shaked, may continue to make demand upon demand to attempt to wield power and build her reputation, but the reality is that this is Yair Lapid’s government. His centrist vision for Israel is what welded it together; his patience and his determination are its bookends. If anything, Naftali Bennett, reluctant almost to the final moment to sign an agreement and encounter the very wrath of the ultra-right that he is now encountering, will have little to no maneuverability to achieve his ultimate goal, annexing the West Bank.
Still, and this is critical, through four election cycles the issue of the occupation was nowhere on the agenda. Israelis—Jewish and even many Palestinian citizens—were living in a sort of dreamworld, with the occupation of Palestinians in the West Bank, the closure of Gaza, and the unresolved status of East Jerusalem completely missing from daily or political discourse. Events of the last month changed all that. Just as this fourth election brought a potential first in Israel as the “change” government attempts to take hold, so, too, did the recent weeks of the war in Gaza, the extraordinary civil strife and violence—Jewish against Palestinian Israeli citizen—along with the ongoing unresolved tensions in East Jerusalem, return the issue of the occupation to Israeli political discourse. This is the issue that Israel can’t escape and that ultimately will shape its future.
This story has been updated.
