Bye-bye, Bibi. Netanyahu may be unceremoniously ousted as opponents agree to new coalition

[jserraglio]

WAPO

Israeli opposition parties reach agreement to oust Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

JERUSALEM — A diverse coalition of Israeli opposition parties said Sunday that they have the votes to form a unity government to unseat Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader and its dominant political figure for more than a decade.

Under the agreement, reached after weeks of negotiations spearheaded by centrist opposition leader Yair Lapid, former Netanyahu defense minister and ally Naftali Bennett will lead a power-sharing government.

Netanyahu has been struggling to hold onto power after four inconclusive elections in the past two years while facing an ongoing corruption trial. Bennett is one of several former loyalists who have flirted with joining the so-called change coalition, a collection of parties that span the political spectrum but share a desire to end Netanyahu’s 12-year tenure.

Their announcement follows the 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip this month, which some analysts speculated would help bolster the embattled Netanyahu. At the outset of the fighting, Bennett, a former Netanyahu protege who had been poised to join a unity government with Lapid, said the military operation, which killed more than 250 Palestinians and 12 Israelis, had ended his interest in joining with the anti-Netanyahu coalition, which has the support of left-leaning and Arab parties.

But after an Egyptian-brokered cease-fire took hold May 21, criticism of Netanyahu surged again. Some 47 percent of Israelis opposed the cease-fire and 67 percent said they expected another round of fighting with Hamas within the next three years, according to opinion polls published last week by Israel’s Channel 12. Netanyahu’s rivals said the operation lacked a coherent or long-term strategy and that Netanyahu’s failure to stop Hamas rocket fire from raining down on Israel or secure the remains of Israeli soldiers was further proof of his need to leave office.

“With the best intelligence and air force in the world, Netanyahu managed to extract from Hamas an ‘unconditional cease-fire.’ Embarrassing,” tweeted Gideon Saar, another former Netanyahu protege now with the change coalition.

As the negotiations to oust him progressed, Netanyahu responded with fury.

“What’s changed since [the conflict?] A few days have passed? Has something changed? Of course not,” he said in a video posted on Twitter. “We just got out of a war, from a military operation, and it was clear, amid the battle, that it’s not possible to fight with Hamas from a left-wing government.”

He urged Bennett to join his bloc of ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionist parties to form a right-wing government. “It’s still not too late,” he said.

On Sunday, Netanyahu offered a last-ditch, three-way rotation agreement to Saar and Bennett. Saar immediately refused.

“Our position and commitment was and remains: to change the Netanyahu regime. We will continue to act accordingly,” Saar said on Twitter.

[maestrob]

Corruption has its price.

I really used to respect him, until Republicans invited him to speak to Congress. Something clicked in my brain that he was not quite right then, and he's been sliding downhill ever since.

It's past time for him to leave the scene.

Let the prosecution proceed.

[barney]

Yes, it has to be good if Netanyahu exits, stage right. But I don't give the new alliance long, ranging as it does from Islamist Arabs to right-wing pro-settler parties to left-wing alliances. I suspect it will tear itself apart quickly, and Israel goes back to the polls yet again. It might be that the country is ungovernable.

[maestrob]

Yes, it has to be good if Netanyahu exits, stage right. But I don't give the new alliance long, ranging as it does from Islamist Arabs to right-wing pro-settler parties to left-wing alliances. I suspect it will tear itself apart quickly, and Israel goes back to the polls yet again. It might be that the country is ungovernable.

Hmm...

Just like we're becoming?

Can there be too much of a good thing?

[Ricordanza]

Yes, it has to be good if Netanyahu exits, stage right. But I don't give the new alliance long, ranging as it does from Islamist Arabs to right-wing pro-settler parties to left-wing alliances. I suspect it will tear itself apart quickly, and Israel goes back to the polls yet again. It might be that the country is ungovernable.

I'm a little more optimistic. The participants in this potential "unity government" are going into this arrangement with their eyes wide open. But there's no doubt that it will be a challenge to hold this coalition together.

[maestrob]

Thing is, they'll have to concentrate on the economy and other domestic issues that don't involve Arabs in any way. I sincerely doubt that there will be any progress in the Palestinian issue at all, but maybe that's impossible until they recognize Israel 's right to exist anyway, no matter who is running the country.

[barney]

Thing is, they'll have to concentrate on the economy and other domestic issues that don't involve Arabs in any way. I sincerely doubt that there will be any progress in the Palestinian issue at all, but maybe that's impossible until they recognize Israel 's right to exist anyway, no matter who is running the country.

That's certainly true, Brian. Especially the last sentence.
I appreciate the optimism above. I just fear that each of the coalition partners has red-line issues, that these are mutually contradictory, and cannot be avoided for long. It's true that they must and will focus at first on issues that do not divide, and that help the entire nation, ie economic ones.

[maestrob]

Israel’s Coalition of Patriotic Traitors

June 14, 2021
By Bret Stephens

Opinion Columnist

Israel’s new government must be a puzzle for anyone who thinks of the Jewish state as a racist, fascistic, apartheid enterprise.

Issawi Frej is Arab and Muslim and used to work for the Peace Now movement. Now he’s Israel’s minister for regional cooperation. Pnina Tamano-Shata is Black: The Mossad rescued her, along with thousands of other Ethiopian Jews, from hunger and persecution when she was a small child. She’s the minister for immigration and absorption. Nitzan Horowitz is the first openly gay man to lead an Israeli political party. He’s the health minister. At least one deputy minister, as yet unnamed, is expected to be a member of the Raam party, which is an outgrowth of the major Islamist political group in Israel.

As for Benjamin Netanyahu, “King Bibi” has finally left office — churlishly, bitterly, pompously — but in keeping with the normal democratic process. He faces criminal indictments in multiple cases. His immediate predecessor as prime minister, Ehud Olmert, spent 16 months in prison on corruption charges.

It’s some fascist state that subjects its leaders to the rule of law and the verdicts of a court. Meanwhile, Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority, “postponed” elections in April. He’s in the 17th year of his elected four-year term of office.

A new government, even one as fragile and fractious as Israel’s, is always an opportunity for a course correction. But the course correction Israel most needs is not the one its critics generally suppose.

Netanyahu lasted in office as long as he did not because Israelis wanted a strongman or someone who would crush the Palestinians. He lasted because he was, in many ways, good at the job.

Over his 12 continuous years in office, the Israeli economy roughly doubled in size. Last year’s Abraham Accords brought the overarching Arab-Israeli conflict to a near conclusion, even if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains unsolved. Despite periodic battles with Hamas, there were no all-out wars. Israelis were more secure in their persons during the Netanyahu years than they had been in the decade prior. And Israel’s Covid-19 vaccination campaign was the envy of the world.

Against Iran, Israel conducted arguably the most successful covert-ops campaign in modern history. With respect to Palestinians, Netanyahu avoided both the territorial concessions demanded by the left and the re-occupation of Gaza desired by the extreme right. Toward the United States, Netanyahu defied Barack Obama and got what he wanted from Donald Trump: the American Embassy in Jerusalem, recognition of Israeli sovereignty in the Golan Heights, and U.S. withdrawal from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.

None of this may square with the wishes of Western elites or progressives, whose obsession is for a Palestinian state. But what Israelis wanted in the last election wasn’t a Palestinian state, which is a good idea in theory but (for now) a terrible idea in practice.

What Israelis want is a better form of politics, the one area in which Netanyahu conspicuously failed. It’s a politics freed of his habits of demagogy, vilification, sleaziness and sheer pettiness — a politics that ultimately brought him down.

That’s the promise of the new government. It’s led by Naftali Bennett, a right-winger and former director of the settlers’ council who is the first religiously observant Orthodox Jew to be prime minister. It’s anchored by Yair Lapid, a centrist and former TV journalist who epitomizes secular Israel. It got into power thanks to the support of the Raam party’s Mansour Abbas, a religiously conservative Muslim who has implicitly given a stamp of endorsement to a government whose policies — especially toward Palestinians — he surely opposes. It includes members who are to the right of Likud and to the left of Labor.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/14/opin ... e=Homepage