50 days after the clear election victory, Benjamin Netanyahu told Israeli President Isaac Herzog by telephone this Wednesday that he had managed to form an executive with the radical right and the ultra-Orthodox, although he had not yet finalized the coalition agreements. In the purest style of political negotiations in the country, he did so at 11:30 p.m. (10:30 p.m. Peninsular Spanish time) “half an hour before the deadline to communicate the agreement or request a final four-day extension” and after one intense last-minute give-and-take with two of his key partners. Ministers have until January 2 to be sworn in.
Bibi, as she is popularly known, will lead a coalition of six parties: the one that presides (the conservative Likud); three from the far right who merged into a single list (Religious Zionism, Jewish Power and Noam); and two ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Shas and Ashkenazi United Torah Judaism. They provide 64 of the 120 seats in Parliament.
It will be the sixth term of Netanyahu, the leader who has ruled the Jewish state the longest: 15 years, even longer than founding father David Ben-Gurion. It will also be the country’s most right-wing government since its inception in 1948, a title held by others over the past three decades, only to be surpassed years later. Today, 62% of Israelis identify as right-wing (70% between the ages of 18 and 24), 22% more than in the late 1990s. Of the 110 seats held by the Jewish parties, 106 are in the bracket that spans from the center to the extreme right.
The far right will have unprecedented power in the new executive branch. The coalition agreements stipulate that the leader of religious Zionism, Bezalel Smotrich, will take up office as finance minister and after two years will be able to swap the portfolio of the interior ministry with the head of the Shas list, Arieh Deri. In addition, a position has been created for him: “special minister” in defense through which he will assume prerogatives affecting the lives of the occupied Palestinians and which will now be administered by a military agency. “The only way to describe it is as an extension of civilian governance to the West Bank, which effectively amounts to an annexation, although it is deliberately not labeled as such,” criticizes Michael J. Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum, an American Jewish organization in favor of a negotiated solution to the conflict in the Middle East.
Smotrich has already indicated that he will base some of his economic management on religion. “A lot of economic theories have been tried, right? Capitalism, socialism… One thing they haven’t proved: “If you obey carefully,” he said, quoting a verse from Deuteronomy in which God promises plenty to those who keep His commandments and serve Him. “The more Israel promotes the Torah, Judaism, the commandment to settle on the land, kindness and solidarity, the more abundance the Lord will give us,” he added in an interview with the ultra-Orthodox newspaper Mishpajá.
Bezalel Smotrich, left, speaks to his party colleague Orit Strook, in Parliament, on the 13th. GIL COHEN-MAGEN (AFP)
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Itamar Ben Gvir, leader of Jewish power and star of the most radical religious nationalism, remains in charge of National Security, an expanded version of the Ministry of Public Security in charge of the police force. With a fierce anti-Arab speech, he will have direct authority over the border police stationed in the West Bank. Ben Gvir lives in one of the most radical settlements, Kiryat Arba, and until recently displayed in his living room a portrait of Baruch Goldstein, the settler who murdered 29 Palestinians in 1994 by opening fire indiscriminately during prayers in the Hebron mosque .
Even Avi Maoz, leader of the Noam List, a tiny homophobic party that alone would never have surpassed the 3.25% of the vote needed for parliamentary representation, will be the equivalent of a foreign minister, with the power to oversee outside education programs to review topics such as gender equality, preparation for the army or the Arabic language.
express legislation
These are some of the suits Netanyahu has custom-made for his new partners to return to power, including explicit parliamentary procedures. One of the most controversial is that of Aryeh Deri. The future interior and finance minister was convicted of a tax offense but the out-of-court settlement reached last January saved him from prison. With that sentence preventing his appointment as minister, next Monday Parliament will vote on the final version of an amendment “adopted at first reading this Tuesday” that limits the ban on taking a portfolio to those who face jail .
The second rule of the letter corresponds to one of Ben Gvir’s demands: the assumption of powers that belong to the police chief today. This Tuesday, the still Minister for Public Security, Omer Bar-Lev, did not bite his tongue: “This man was a terrorist operation [condenado por pertenencia a Kaj, partido ilegalizado y declarado terrorista], whose vocation was racism. The Israel Police Force is run by a menacing and belligerent man who lacks responsibility and experience and who wants to turn it into a political body,” he said during the furious parliamentary session where the proposal passed its first reading. The opposition accuses Netanyahu of leading a democratic erosion that threatens the separation of powers to retake as prime minister because the position protects him in the three corruption cases he is charged with.
Aware of the fears the new coalition is raising in the White House and in sectors of American Jewry – more liberal than Israel – Netanyahu has given interviews to the country’s media in recent days spreading the message that he is the one , which he is in Charge and not Ben Gvir or Smotrich. “They join me, not I join them,” he clarified last Thursday on national public radio. Jewish groups in the US have made their concerns public, and the influential newspaper The New York Times has published an editorial calling the new government a “significant threat to Israel’s future”.
Efraim Ganor, an Israeli commentator for the Maariv newspaper, focuses on the mistrust of Netanyahu that has permeated the negotiations. “The fact that none [de los socios] You were willing to make coalition deals until all your lawsuits were settled, and you have written evidence of this. Nothing like this had ever happened before and it says something about the trust they have in him,” he writes this Wednesday.
Distrust is one of the main reasons why King Bibi has spent almost the last two years in opposition. The broad alliance (ranging from the right to the pacifist left, including an Islamist-inspired Arab party) that ousted him from power had only in common that they either rejected or felt betrayed by the leader when they ruled together. In fact, the first law passed by the new parliament this Tuesday aims to quell a possible internal rebellion in the Likud. It prevents four MPs from forming an independent faction in the Knesset. Two rounds of polygraph tests are also already underway in the prime minister’s office after a conversation between an MP and Netanyahu’s wife Sara was leaked, Israel Hayom newspaper reports on Wednesday.
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