Bibi finally forms coalition
On Saturday night, just hours before his deadline passed, Benjamin Netanyahu presented a new government to Israel’s President Shimon Peres.
Prime Minister Netanyahu had spent six gruelling weeks trying to form his coalition, encountering major conflicts with potential partners during negotiations. “There were difficulties in the creation of this government and I congratulate you that you succeeded in forming the government in time,” Peres told Netanyahu. “The task of forming a government is complex and requires great efforts and resourcefulness.”
US President Barack Obama was one of the first world leaders to congratulate Netanyahu. A White House statement said that the President “looks forward to working closely with the Prime Minister and the new government to address the many challenges we face and advance our shared interest in peace and security”.
The new government gives Netanyahu a far smaller majority in Knesset than he had originally hoped for. He has the loyalty of 68 of the chamber’s 120 members, which means that a rebellion by either of the coalition’s senior partners could bring down the government – a situation he was keen to avoid. Only the smallest coalition party is dispensable.
Three parties will serve alongside Netanyahu’s Likud-Beteinu: the new centrist Yesh Atid which has 19 seats, the staunchly pro-settler Jewish Home which has 12 seats, and Tzipi Livni’s dovish party, known in Hebrew as Hatnuah.
Charedi parties are furious that, after decades propping up governments, they have been left out in the cold. Their exclusion from the coalition is a result of the success of Yesh Atid, which became the second largest party at the election largely on its promise to draft Charedim to the army. Post-election Yesh Atid and Jewish Home argued that having Charedi parties inside the government would derail its plan, and refused to serve alongside Charedim.
In Charedi strongholds of Jerusalem, new anonymous posters hung in public places decry the exclusion, and take particular exception to the Orthodox-run Jewish Home’s refusal to sit with fellow Orthodox parties. “Remember what Jewish Home did to you,” the posters declare, tweaking the biblical commandment regarding the Israelites’ ancient enemy Amalek.
The line-up of ministers in Israel’s new government has left settlers exhilarated and doves disappointed.
The office that signs off settlement building projects, the Ministry of Defence, has been allocated to Likud’s Moshe Yaalon, a former military chief of staff who thinks that the two-state solution is a lost cause. His deputy is the ultra-hawkish Likud parliamentarian Danny Danon.
Yaalon commented last year that, “at the moment the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a problem with no solution”, and said that people who claim there is a solution are engaged in “self deception”. He added that it is conceivable that the settler population in the West Bank could rise from 350,000 to a million.
The government office that will formulate the West Bank building plans that the Ministry of Defence will be asked to sign, the Housing Ministry, has been allocated to a pro-settlement enthusiast. Uri Ariel of Jewish Home is a former secretary-general of the settler umbrella organisation the Yesha Council, and its construction arm.
Gershon Mesika, head of the Samaria Regional Council, went so far as to tell an Israeli journalist that the combination of these two appointments looks like a “wet dream”. Dani Dayan, a board member of the Yesha Council and until recently its chairman, told The AJN that the appointments send “good signals” to Jewish communities in the West Bank.
Previous defence minister Ehud Barak was widely despised by settlers for his left-leaning politics. Relations between Barak and settlers became especially tense since last spring, when he swooped in and evacuated a settler house in Hebron while other ministers were still deliberating what to do about it.
“With Barak a lot of [settlement building plans] were stuck on his desk and could not advance,” said Dayan, commenting that he expects this to change under Yaalon.
The political left has the same reading of the situation – but instead of viewing it as hopeful, views it as worrying. The Yaalon-Ariel pairing is a “very bad combination”, Labour Party secretary-general Hilik Bar told The AJN.
He said: “This is going to be a very right-wing government that will keep the freeze in negotiations with the Palestinians and be bad for Israel’s interests. It will be even worse than the last government.”
NATHAN JEFFAY
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