Israel’s New Election Is an Opportunity for Its Arabs
The idea of Netanyahu forming a coalition with Arab parties was a joke this week in the Knesset. What if it wasn’t?
Who will stand with him?
Photographer: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty ImagesWednesday in Israel’s Knesset was raucous. Ever since his Likud party’s narrow victory in April’s election, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had struggled to cobble together a coalition of at least 60 votes — half of the parliament. But Netanyahu, ordinarily a master strategist and a deal-maker who has held his post for 10 consecutive years, could not get it done.
On the surface, Netanyahu’s problem was a battle between the ultra-Orthodox Haredim, who insisted that they would not join the right-leaning coalition unless they were assured that Haredi men would continue to be largely exempt from military service, and Avigdor Lieberman, the arch-secularist but hawkish powerbroker who insisted that his party would not join the coalition unless Netanyahu rejected the Haredi demands. Lieberman, hoping to garner the future support of Israel’s secular majority, announced that he would not serve in a “Torah-law government.”