Oded Balilty/AP Photo
Standing six feet apart from one another, more than 2,000 Israelis protested Netanyahu in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square on Saturday night.
Israel has had three elections over the last year, but there is still no government in sight. The only substantial development since the March 2 election is the coronavirus, which has not only eclipsed the perpetual political deadlock and granted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu uninterrupted media coverage as leader during the pandemic, it has also put his corruption trial on hold, as most court proceedings have been frozen—even one as critical as three charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust against a sitting prime minister in power for over a decade.
Benny Gantz, the former army chief and head of the Blue and White party, who entered politics just a year ago with the sole mission of unseating Netanyahu in the name of democracy and the rule of law, betrayed his million or so voters last month when he decided to enter negotiations with Netanyahu to form a national unity government, where the two rotate as prime ministers (Netanyahu goes first). Citing the emergency brought on by the coronavirus, Gantz said, “This is not the time for infighting and mudslinging” and broke his only campaign promise to never serve in a government headed by an indicted Netanyahu. Gantz has thus put himself in oxymoronic negotiations over a power-sharing agreement with the man he has vowed to replace in three consecutive elections, oscillating between pushing a bill to outlaw Netanyahu’s ability to serve as prime minister under indictment, while simultaneously propping up that very scenario. If by May 8, no government is formed that has the backing of at least 61 members of parliament, Israel will head to an unheard-of fourth election in August.
The impasse in negotiations between Gantz and Netanyahu over how their unity government would operate has nothing to do with responding to the pandemic or with the Palestinians. Gantz and Netanyahu have not been discussing the failure of Israel’s health ministry to prepare its most vulnerable communities, and Gantz already withdrew an earlier demand for a right to veto the U.S.-Israel plan to annex large swaths of the West Bank. The obstacle to their unity government is Netanyahu’s crusade to avert the law. While Gantz has secured a member of his party to be appointed minister of justice, negotiations have been stuck over Netanyahu’s demands to have unprecedented authority over judicial appointments that would essentially circumvent Israeli law to ensure he can remain in power. According to Israeli law, a minister under indictment cannot serve in the government, and while a prime minister technically can, Israel’s Supreme Court could step in and rule otherwise for the first time in the country’s history.
Netanyahu’s greatest fear is that after reaching a coalition agreement and beginning to serve as prime minister, he will be disqualified by the courts. He is therefore making demands that would either thwart his disqualification, or launch Israel immediately into another round of elections if he is, where he hopes to muster up more votes.
“It is an absurdly illegitimate demand for automatic legislation that would cancel out the Supreme Court decision outright and take Israel directly to a fourth election,” prominent Israeli human rights attorney and left-wing Meretz party member Gaby Lasky told me. “It’s a way for Netanyahu to ensure he starts his trial as prime minister and has the leverage to threaten the district judges presiding over his trial with promotion to the Supreme Court,” she explained. But exercising that kind of power would be more than a threat—it would be a bribe.
“If Gantz allows for Netanyahu’s interference in these legislative matters, he is not protecting Israel’s democracy at all. The opposite,” Lasky says, adding, “Gantz should first and foremost concern himself with the Knesset’s independence, but in his negotiations with Netanyahu he is undermining that separation of powers.” More than two thousand Israelis, standing six feet apart on spots marked on the ground, took part in a pro-democracy rally in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square Saturday night to protest Netanyahu and oppose a unity government led by him. Several politicians, including Gantz’s former political partners Yair Lapid and Moshe Ya’alon gave speeches, as well Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint List, the third-largest party in Israel, representing the vast majority of Palestinians and a paucity of Jewish citizens. Tellingly, Gantz was not there.
While Netanyahu has, like many other leaders around the world, consolidated his power amid the coronavirus, and is using state security services and counterterrorism tactics to track the virus without legal oversight, the pandemic has also laid bare the fact that so much of Israel’s essential workforce—specifically its doctors and health care workers—are Palestinian citizens. In recent weeks, an image of two paramedics, one Jewish, one Palestinian, each praying beside their ambulance while on break, went viral, provoking headlines about their inspiring coexistence and how the virus does not distinguish between Arabs and Jews. But it has in fact highlighted just how discriminated against and excluded Palestinian citizens are from Israel’s political process. They have never been a part of any governing coalition in Israeli history, and most Israeli politicians, not just from the right, do not treat them as equal partners.
When Gantz was first tasked with building a coalition after the election, he could have formed a minority government (a government without an absolute majority) with the outside support of the Joint List. It would have been complex and unstable, but it would have achieved the goal of unseating Netanyahu. Gantz chose to cooperate with his corrupt rival rather than work with Palestinians, without whom he would not have had the mandate to try and form a government in the first place.
As Odeh told me, “there has never been a crisis that highlights the shared fate of all citizens. The true test for an opposition to Netanyahu and his politics is Arab-Jewish partnership. That is the way to bring peace, equality, and social justice.” While three inconclusive elections and a pandemic have made it abundantly clear that Israelis need to make fundamental changes in their approach to break the political deadlock, most Israelis do not appear ready for any kind of genuine partnership with Palestinians.
Even Amir Peretz, the head of Israel’s founding Labor Party, the party Rabin led into the Oslo Accords that cost him his life, and which has been decimated in all three recent elections, decided to join the Netanyahu-Gantz unity government, obliterating whatever was left of its reputation as an alternative to the Likud and a champion of peace. He was joined by Itzik Shmuli, the young up-and-coming politician who was one of the leaders of Israel’s 2011 social-justice tent protests. However, Labor’s third spot, Knesset member Merav Michaeli, refused to follow suit, has condemned the decision, and is trying to thwart it. A recent poll shows Labor would not even reach the 3.25 percent electoral threshold in a fourth election. Israel’s Zionist left is completely shattered, and it has become clear that the only real opposition, not just to Netanyahu, but to Israel’s systematic right-wing approach, is a fully democratic model that sees the Palestinian parties taking an active part in the governing process. As Gaby Lasky told me, “We need something new. So many Jews do not have a political home. The only real left that can have an impact is one of Arab-Jewish partnership.”
