Israel's new government makes history while facing many challenges

Now a third mode has emerged, a collective of antagonists led by a chief with hardly any Indians of his own. Indeed, whatever its achievements and life span, this model has already made history in its very birth.

CALLED by its architects a “unity government,” the new coalition is both less and also more than what this title suggests.

Unity governments, in which the biggest party and the main opposition party join hands, are not an Israeli invention, though Israel indeed had many of them, including some that were remarkably successful.

Britain fought World War II while led by a Tory-Labor government, a model Israel first copied in June 1967, four days before the Six Day War, when Menachem Begin’s Gahal joined the Labor-led government.

However, that government included 111 of the Knesset’s 120 members, and its leader, Levi Eshkol, headed a faction of 46 lawmakers, 19 more than the next largest faction. The current government, by contrast, won the Knesset’s confidence by a minimal 60-59 vote, with one of its eight member-parties’ 62 lawmakers voting against it, and another abstaining.

Moreover, the Knesset’s largest faction, Likud, is in the opposition while the new coalition’s largest party, Yesh Atid commands only 17 lawmakers as opposed to Likud’s 30. Even more improbably, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and his party, Yamina, represent a mere 5% of the electorate.

Lastly, and most boldly, Israel’s 36th Government is a collection of political opposites ranging from Bennett, a former head of the Judea and Samaria Council, to Islamist preacher Mansour Abbas, whose United Arab List is the first independent Arab party to fully join an Israeli coalition.

Between these poles the coalition includes almost every vegetable in Israeli politics’ colorful salad: Right, Left, Center, Arab, Orthodox and liberal members as well as one Druze minister, practically every walk of Israeli society except ultra-Orthodoxy. The experiment, in short, is as brave as its challenges are daunting.

IN TERMS of leadership the new government is an inversion of Benjamin Netanyahu’s second premiership, a 12-year-period during which he became so dominant, and such a soloist, that he negotiated entire peace agreements without even telling his coalition partners including his defense and foreign ministers.

Bennett’s government is this attitude’s antithesis, a confederation of equals in which every important decision will have to be an exercise in teamwork, if the government is to last.

Technically, the new coalition copied the previous government’s deal between Netanyahu and Benny Gantz, who had an equal number of ministers even though the former’s Knesset faction was more than double the latter’s size. Now, Bennett and his government’s other right-wing party, Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope, occupy six of the new security cabinet’s 12 seats, even though they jointly represent only one-fifth of the coalition’s lawmakers.

The other half is headed by Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist Yesh Atid, who is scheduled to rotate with Bennett as prime minister in August 2023, much the way the previous parity agreement was planned to do between its own two signatories. As with Netanyahu and Gantz, the new government’s two parts also have veto power over any of its moves.

The difference is that between Netanyahu and Gantz there was little trust, and their deal collapsed less than one year after it was born. Bennett and Lapid, by contrast, seem to respect and understand each other, and also do not threaten each other electorally.

That is why this government’s linchpin is neither a big party nor a dominant leader, but a personal partnership between two men backed by a rainbow coalition of bitter rivals who resolved to cooperate despite their ideological differences.

The consequent experiment in leadership by partnership and government by consensus will rise or fall on its partners’ ability to avoid contentious issues; to affect consensual issues; and to prove that what Israelis share is larger than what divides them. This test will unfold in five spheres: health, transport, crime, constitutional reform and religion.

PREDICTABLY, THE new government’s first test emerged on the pandemic front, when the coronavirus’s Delta variant spread in several towns, days after Bennett entered the Prime Minister’s Office.

Bennett and his health minister, Meretz leader Nitzan Horowitz, a pair of ideological arch-rivals who had never done anything together, now built a new corona cabinet and jointly decided to restore restrictions like wearing masks within public buildings and enhance restrictions at Ben-Gurion Airport.

To do that, they will need the close cooperation of Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman, a nationalist firebrand now tasked with showing he can be levelheaded and impartial.

The same will go for Transportation Minister and Labor leader Merav Michaeli.

There is no public debate surrounding

Israel’s congested highways and dated public transportation.

Greater Tel Aviv’s first of three light railway lines will open next year with the others following by 2027, and three underground lines planned for 2030. Jerusalem’s existing line will be joined by two more within six years. Other cities are far behind. The aim, therefore, is to accelerate work and show results.

Equally consensual, but even more elusive, will be the issue of crime and street safety in the Arab sector.

With almost 50 murders within the Arab sector this year alone, the extent and intensity of this scourge – mostly fed by blood feuds, so-called honor killings, and organized crime – underpinned the United Arab List’s decision to join the government.

With Abbas planned to become a deputy minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, and with his party slated to head the Knesset Committees on both interior and Arab affairs, Bennett said his government will make the war on crime in the Arab sector a major priority. Abbas also obtained expanded budgeting on education, housing and welfare throughout the Arab sector.

The pragmatism all this demands from both Bennett and his Arab partners has been tested early, when time arrived for the annual renewal of a regulation preventing citizenship from Palestinians who married Arab-Israelis. After some posturing, Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked (Yamina) and Regional Cooperation Minister Esawi Frej (Meretz) negotiated a compromise, excepting what they called “humanitarian cases.”

Even more contentious will be the government’s task on constitutional reform.

Beset by an ongoing debate over relations between the three branches of government, and traumatized by the past two years’ political stalemate and multiple elections, Israelis of all walks agree that some kind of systemic change is imperative. At the same time, all realize that change will have to be slow, measured, and relatively consensual, or it won’t work.

This is the backdrop against which Justice Miniser Sa’ar set up a public committee which he hopes will hammer a bill that will offer ways for the Knesset and the High Court of Justice to override each other.

Until now, the Right has been militant about curtailing the court’s power while the Left opposed any dilution of the judiciary’s clout. By assembling a panel of politicians and jurists who range from Shaked on the Right to Hebrew University law Prof. Mordecai Kremnitzer on the Left, Sa’ar hopes to reach a compromise which will  allow him to proceed to other constitutional changes.

Lastly, on religion, the new government wants to make room at the Western Wall for egalitarian and feminist services; let restaurants use liberal organizations’ kosherness supervision, and allow prospective converts some choice when choosing their converting rabbi. The process on this front may climax with the installation of modern-Orthodox chief rabbis when the current pair’s term ends in 2023.

Enabled by ultra-Orthodoxy’s absence from this government, such reforms would make the most of an otherwise straightjacketed government’s limited maneuver space.

Whatever its delivery, the Bennett-Lapid government has already broken ground in its personal makeup.

With an Islamist party, five observant Jews including the prime minister, an unprecedented nine women and also Israel’s first paraplegic minister – Energy Minister Karin Elharrar (Yesh Atid), a mother of two who works from a wheelchair due to her muscular dystrophy – this government is a social poster and a political enigma: it may produce a bad past’s grapes of wrath, or a happier future’s buds of hope.

Either way, sealing two years of political acrimony, and emerging through the smoke of the worst ethnic riots in Israel’s 73 years, this celebration of diversity is news regardless of its imprint, a sight that for now seems less like a political species, and more like a mirage.