Israel entered uncharted territory on Wednesday evening, when Blue and White leader Benny Gantz admitted defeat, telling President Reuven Rivlin that he was unable to form a government.
This is the first time that two candidates have failed to form a coalition, so, naturally, many people don’t know how things are going to proceed.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement that the US no longer considers Israeli towns in Judea and Samaria to be illegal was a dramatic one, reversing the position that the State Department has held for over four decades.
And it was made at a dramatic time, after an unprecedented two elections in one year, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failing to put together a coalition twice and Blue and White leader Benny Gantz having two days left until his deadline for the third attempt at forming a government.
The only way to put an end to the repeated rounds of rocket fire and IDF retaliation is to go to war in Gaza, and that would be impossible with a government dependent on Arab MKs, Deputy Defense Minister Avi Dichter said on Thursday.
Netanyahu and Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz with his plan on Saturday night: Netanyahu must give up on his 55-seat right-wing bloc, and Gantz must accept the “president’s plan” for a rotation for prime minister so that they can form a national unity government. If one doesn’t compromise, Liberman will support the other.
Both Netanyahu and Gantz began a series of consultations with their closest allies, advisers and leading figures in their parties. But one name has yet to be mentioned in the people consulted: Prof. Robert Aumann, the mathematician who won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his work in game theory.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu famously detests New Right co-leaders Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked, but there’s something he dislikes more than them: not being prime minister.
Therefore, it’s not surprising that as soon as there were whispers about the pair talking to Blue and White, Netanyahu made sure to lock them down by giving Bennett what he has always wanted since the start of his political career, which is the defense portfolio.
Many of the fans of the TV fantasy epic Game of Thrones were disappointed when the final episodes aired in May, to the extent that an online petition to redo them garnered more than a million signatures.
It’s not clear how many Israelis were looking for a do-over in our local competition for the Iron Throne, otherwise known as the Prime Minister’s Residence on Balfour Street in Jerusalem, but overnight Wednesday, we got it. Continue reading
The headlines are dramatic. Another election is on the way! Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can’t form a majority coalition!
Keep in mind, though, that we still have some time – not much – before we know if that is really true.
Throughout Sunday, Likud played both sides of the reports.
On the one hand, the party denied making a final decision of going to elections.
On the other, it made steps in that direction, ordering all MKs to report to the Knesset on Monday for a vote to hold an election and calling a meeting of the Likud secretariat to cancel the need for new primaries, since they already held a vote earlier this year. Party insiders leaked the contents of a Likud ministers’ meeting in which Netanyahu said he wants to add Kulanu MKs to the list for the next Knesset. Netanyahu’s spokesman Yonatan Urich tweeted a thinly veiled threat to Yisrael Beytenu: “For my next trick, I will need NIS 10 million for ads targeting Russian-speakers.” Continue reading
One could be forgiven for feeling a sense of déjà vu – after all, the above sentence could have been written at almost any time in 2018, as well. And, in fact, the election that took place only seven weeks ago was called in part because of an impasse on the very issue of haredi enlistment. Continue reading
Lahav Harkov 