Yesh Atid withdrew from the World Zionist Congress coalition agreements, its chair, Yair Lapid, announced in a statement on Wednesday, adding that instead, the party would submit a bill to the Knesset to nationalize the Jewish National Fund (KKL).
A vote officiating a potentially obsolete WZC agreement had finished on Wednesday morning, after WZC factions had negotiated a different agreement over Tuesday night that many parties were confident was to be the last.
But this, too, was the latest in a series of collapsing deals for positions in Israel’s National Institutions, with Lapid saying that the agreements were representative of a broader problem of systemic corruption.
“This evening, I want to announce that Yesh Atid has decided it will not be part of any of the agreements in the Zionist institutions. We will not take jobs, we will not take budgets, we will not take managerial positions, and we will not be part of the deal being stitched together there,” said Lapid.
“We entered politics to fight corruption, not to be part of a system to arrange jobs for the Netanyahu family and the Deri family. We wanted to clean the national institutions of the culture of corruption and political appointments, but it’s not possible. There’s no way to do it, and no one to do it with.”
Yesh Atid pulls out of WZC agreement
Lapid referenced the controversy that scuttled the first WZC agreement on the last night of the convention last Wednesday. It involved Culture and Sport Minister Miki Zohar’s proposal to appoint Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s son, Yair, to the position of World Zionist Organization executive.
This was just a single instance of nepotistic clientelism for “or a large group of party operatives,” according to Lapid. Yesh Atid and other parties had pulled from that first deal, declaring the appointment of the prime minister’s son as a “red line.”
The new agreement’s “creation of seven new departments with countless employees,” which Lapid said were “not necessary,” was further evidence of a corrupt system. On Wednesday night, the WZC leadership introduced and passed a constitutional amendment to expand the WZO’s executive board from 14 to 24 positions.
“The only reason they’re being set up is to hand out more and more jobs and budgets to political cronies at the expense of the Jewish people, and at the expense of Israeli taxpayers. It’s an entire culture of corruption. We will fight it, not join it,” said Lapid.
“These are not Yesh Atid’s values. We won’t lie to ourselves that we can ‘influence from within.’ I don’t usually walk away from a fight. We very much wanted to enter the institutions, to clean them up, to return them to serving the interests of the state and the people,” he said.
After the first agreement fell apart, the WZC voted to extend its convention by two weeks, technically. It created a new coalition agreement and put it to a vote on Sunday. Still, the vote and agreement were rejected by Right-leaning groups as not inclusive enough, although some WZO sources asserted that the rejection stemmed from pressure from the Prime Minister’s Office.
Though a vote by delegates had already been initiated, it was extended by an extra day while behind-the-scenes negotiations continued. Factions across the political spectrum expressed confidence that the third agreement would hold.
However, Lapid said on Wednesday that “after seeing all the details, I’ve reached the conclusion that they can’t be fixed – they need to be shut down.”
“I call on the other political parties to reconsider whether they are willing to be part of an agreement that is so clearly an act of corruption and dirty politicking,” he said. “We, in any case, will not be there.”
Yesh Atid is set to submit a bill to nationalize JNF-KKL, which Lapid said would serve as a means to circumvent corruption.
He also indicated that he supported the nationalization of other National Institutions, which include WZO, Keren Hayesod, and the Jewish Agency for Israel, bringing them “under state law, state audit, and the strictest transparency regulations.”
Yesh Atid’s chair expressed concern about how the National Institutions mediated the relations with Jewish organizations abroad. “They are not cynical, but they’re not naïve either – they understand exactly what’s going on in these institutions.”
“It pushes them even further away from the State of Israel and from Zionism,” he continued.
The WZO had announced on Wednesday morning that voting for the second agreement had ended. That said, in accordance with a WZO Zionist Supreme Court ruling in response to right-wing petitions to delay the vote, the results were not to be announced until the Court could also consider the respondent’s answer.
The third agreement had positioned World Mizrachi CEO Rabbi Doron Perez to become the president of the WZO or chair of Keren Hayesod.
However, the second agreement had him set to become WZO chair in rotation with incumbent World Likud head Yaakov Hagoel.
The third agreement would still have had Hagoel in the WZO chair rotation, but with a Yesh Atid representative. The Jewish National Fund leader would reportedly have been Yesh Atid MK Meir Cohen, in rotation with a Likud official.
The second agreement did not list Yair Netanyahu among those proposed for the executive role. Nevertheless, it did include a provision in which the WZO leadership would elect two members to the executive on behalf of “the Likud in the National Institutions.”
Sources said that this clause would still be included in the third agreement, but there was disagreement on whether it would have allowed Netanyahu to be elected as the executive.
Negotiations had been complicated by infighting within the Likud over leadership and the failure to hold elections. Slates had negotiated and come to separate understandings with the different factions, ultimately leading to the first coalition agreement, which excluded Hagoel’s faction.
Beyond Perez being set to rotate the WZO chairmanship with a Yesh Atid representative, the Likud and Yesh Atid were set to alternate as the KKL chair. After Zohar’s faction proposed Netanyahu to the executive, a second agreement with Hagoel’s faction was hammered out over the weekend.
The third agreement was then finalized on Tuesday, with many factions satisfied with the result as a “wall-to-wall” consensus, except for Otzma Yehudit, at the request of the Left factions.