Cynicism for Israel's New Coalition

The collective hatred for Benjamin Netanyahu has proved powerful enough to draw unprecedented unity among quite literally every other Israeli politician. Netanyahu, a man with a fierce grasp on power and crafty strategies to maintain it, has made it his near mission to divide Israel into as many factions as possible: left and right, Jew and Arab Muslim, religious and secular, orthodox and progressive, the list goes on. He has effectively driven Israel as a functional and ethical democracy into the ground. So much so is this the case that his opponents have abandoned the specificities of their respective ideologies for one common goal: ousting Netanyahu. Left-wingers who have long been sidelined by Netanyahu’s ultra-conservative reign are now cohesively working with politicians whose conservatism tops even Netanyahu’s. And the coalition, by agreeing to include an Arab Islamist party, Raam, is now breaking the long-standing Israeli political tradition of excluding Arabs from real government positions.

So now what? The coalition has yet to be sworn in and it can be guaranteed that Netanyahu will continue to do everything he can to prevent his removal. It can also be assured that he will disregard and undermine the institutions of democracy because, much like a recent U.S. president, Netanyahu will not yield to democracy if brings about a question of his power.

But assume democracy prevails and Netanyahu is successfully ousted. The unprecedented, unlikely combination of individuals and parties that is the new coalition makes the nature of it extremely precarious. This is not to say that the image of Yair Lapid, Naftali Bennett, and Mansour Abbas smiling for the cameras together as they scrape together a coalition government isn’t promising or uplifting. It very much is, as it the notion of the Netanyahu regime ending. But the reality is that an Islamist party is to exist in the same coalition as a man even more of a Zionist than Netanyahu. And the entire coalition has a delicate foundation of compromises that do not leave anyone at all satisfied. Dissatisfaction, which will eventually make itself known, within a coalition government is inherently dangerous. The coalition cannot stand with all of its members disgruntled.

The coalition can then be assumed to function as an interim government that will last just as long as it takes to reach the goal for which it was constructed. And for this achievement it can be applauded (if successfully sworn in). But the necessary question emerges of what is to happen after Netanyahu is gone, beyond the circumstances that forced reluctant compromise. When the threat of Netanyahu is no longer a uniting force, which political ideology will Israel adopt? As much as I would like for it to be Lapid’s centrist political party (Yesh Atid) because it seems to be the most plausible way to address the conflict with Palestine, one of the coalition’s compromises is that Bennett, the pro-settlement religious nationalist, will assume office as prime minister for the first two years of the coalition’s rule. So if the coalition crumbles within those first two years, it is very likely that it will be Bennett and his party that continue to hold power, meaning that Israel will have rid itself of Netanyahu but not his politics.

More optimistically, there is a silver lining that will last regardless of the coalition’s outcome. It is that Israeli right-wing Jews are working alongside Israeli Arab Islamists. They are for once on the same side. This introduces the prospect of hope for future relations between the Israeli Arabs and Jews and potentially even between Israel and Palestine. The danger of Netanyahu has proved to be so acute that Israeli Jews have been forced to examine what was on the horizon - a taste of which was provided by the recent 11-day war - and recognize that this was not an outcome they were willing to accept.