Cover story in Issue 1, April 27, 2009 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.
Benjamin Netanyahu introduces his government
Photo: Flash 90 , JRep
On the last two days of March, some of the most powerful politicians in the country cooled their heels outside about-to-be-installed Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu's Knesset office, like supplicant schoolchildren waiting for an interview with the headmaster.
There was a constant procession, in and out of the room, as Netanyahu informed the Likud party hopefuls which ministries they would be getting in his new government. In typical Netanyahu fashion, the new leader, in full view of the attendant media, was showing off who was boss.
Almost a decade after leaving the prime minister's office, Bibi was back and enjoying every minute.
In the small hours of the next morning, shortly after the new government was sworn in, Netanyahu received further confirmation of his return to center stage. U.S. President Barack Obama called to say he wanted to be the first foreign leader to congratulate him on his second coming.
Netanyahu ended his first term in 1999 under a cloud, widely seen as one of Israel's worst prime ministers and drummed out of office by a landslide. The question pundits are now asking is whether 10 years older, chastened and vastly more experienced, Netanyahu will, like Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s, do significantly better second time round.
The prologue has not been auspicious. Israel's 32nd government is the largest and potentially the most unwieldy in its history. There are 30 ministers and eight deputy ministers: In other words, nearly one third of the 120 Knesset members and half the 74 coalition members are in the government. That does not augur well for the workings of the government or the Knesset.
Moreover, some of the coalition partners have been bickering for years. For example, there are fundamental differences between Netanyahu's two main coalition partners, Labor and Yisrael Beiteinu, on approaches to the Palestinians, Israeli Arabs and the Supreme Court, and, against that background, there is bad blood between their two leaders, Ehud Barak and Avigdor Lieberman.
Netanyahu also made some "creative appointments" which could cause turf wars: Moshe (Bogey) Ya'alon as minister for strategic threats and Dan Meridor as minister for the secret services and the atomic energy agency could have trouble with Defense Minister Barak; and Silvan Shalom as minister for regional development could clash with Foreign Minister Lieberman, as could Barak, who has also been promised a say in shaping and directing Israel's peace policies.
Likud spokesmen blame the proportional election system which leads to a plethora of parties for the size of the coalition and its inherent contradictions. The smaller the representation of individual parties in the Knesset, the more parties there have to be in the coalition and the more promises the prime minister has to make, they say. Critics, like Kadima leader Tzipi Livni, say Netanyahu could nevertheless have built a smaller and more coherent coalition based on the 68 seats garnered by Likud, Kadima and Labor in the February election. And she argues that Netanyahu himself is to blame for creating a cluster of superfluous portfolios and appointing "ministers of nothing" and "deputy ministers of zilch."
Be that as it may, the government of Netanyahu's making is the one that will have to face some of the most acute challenges in Israel's history: Iran's nuclear weapons' drive, Israel's tarnished international standing after the Gaza war, its relations with the Arab world and the Palestinians in that context, and all this in the throes of the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s.
In his first policy speech in the Knesset,
Netanyahu made it clear that dealing with the Iranian threat would be his top security priority. Indeed, for Netanyahu, preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons is almost a sacred mission. He sees a nuclear bomb in the hands of radical Islamists dedicated to Israel's destruction as an existential threat and speaks in terms of preventing a second Holocaust. In public he says it doesn't matter how Iran is stopped, but privately admits he has little faith in diplomacy or sanctions. Confidants say he sees himself as a key player in Jewish history charged at a crucial hour with the responsibility of saving his people, and some contend that, as a result, he has already made up his mind to use force to set the Iranian nuclear program back several years.
Others in his inner circle, however, expect him to be far more cautious, pointing out that he would not have undivided backing from the defense establishment for a strike. On the contrary, some key military officials argue that taking out key Iranian nuclear facilities is not something Israel should contemplate doing on its own. For one, they argue, an Israeli attack on Iran would almost certainly spark a major war with Tehran and its proxies, Hizballah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and possibly Syria as well. Even more importantly, the officials say, Israel would be ill-advised to act without an American green light.
So far American leaders have been loath to encourage Israel. Last year the Bush administration turned down an Israeli request for heavy bunker-buster bombs for fear that Israel was planning to use them against strongly fortified Iranian nuclear installations. U.S.
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has been strongly opposed to any Israeli attack, and in early April told the London-based Financial Times that he "would be surprised" if Israel "did act this year." Nevertheless, the Americans are taking the possibility of an Israeli strike very seriously. In early April, General David Petraeus, the top American commander in the Middle East, told Congress that "the Israeli government may ultimately see itself so threatened by the prospect of an Iranian nuclear weapon that it would take preemptive military action to derail or delay it."
