In less than a week since he accepted unconditional ceasefire with Palestinian resistance organizations in Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu could be ousted from the office of the Prime Minister very soon. His destruction of civilian buildings and homes on children won’t save his political future it seems.
Encouraged by his failures in Gaza fourth war which lasted for eleven days from 10 May 2021, Netanyahu rivals said they will form a coalition to bring an end to his political career. Hundreds of children and women killed and maimed in this war.
Naftali Bennett, leader of the small right-wing party Yamina, announced Sunday evening he is working toward a coalition agreement with Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist party Yesh Atid, to join a new government, CNN reported.
In a prime-time address Sunday, Bennett told Israelis he is joining the new government to prevent a fifth round of elections and “rescue the country from spin.”
“It’s a seismic event in Israeli Politics, and if the coalition is sworn in, it would bring an end to Netanyahu’s 12 years as prime minister,” added CNN.
Israel has now become known as the only apartheid state in the world whose governments and military organizations are committing crimes against Palestinian human beings on daily basis.
The latest eleven-day war with the Palestinians in Gaza proved that it is clearly a moral failure and the discrimination against Palestinians in the 1948 occupied territories of Palestine exposed it as being undemocratic entity nor it is liberal. From within Israel is divided and in chaos.
“After four elections and a further two months, it has been proven to all of us that there is simply no right-wing government possible that is headed by Netanyahu. It is either a fifth election or a unity government,” Bennett said as quoted by CNN.
A short while after Bennett spoke, Netanyahu made a statement of his own in which he denounced the Yamina party leader as a man who cared about nothing other than becoming prime minister.
Reminding Israelis that before the March election Bennett had said he would not sit in a government led by Lapid, Netanyahu said his right-wing rival’s principles did not have the weight of a feather, CNN reported.
Bennett was trying to pull off the “deception of the century,” Netanyahu said.
It is widely expected that any unity agreement would see the position of prime minister rotate with Bennett going first and Lapid second.
It’s an unusual arrangement, one made unique by the fact that Bennett’s party won only seven seats in the last election. But his party became one of the kingmakers in Israeli politics, as both Netanyahu and the pro-“change” bloc tried to woo Bennett, needing his seven seats to get them closer to the 61-seat majority needed to form a government in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament.
The “change” coalition will likely be made up of parties from the right to the left of Israeli politics, but it would still almost certainly need some sort of outside support to reach the 61-seat threshold. That support may come from outside the government, such as one of the Arab parties, most likely the Islamist United Arab List, led by Mansour Abbas.
And there may not be much uniting such a wide range of parties other than in their desire to oust Netanyahu. With pressing issues such as how to keep the ceasefire holding with Hamas-led Palestinian resistance in Gaza and rising tensions in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, this could be a fragile government easily broken apart by ideological divisions.
Lapid now needs to reach and sign formal coalition agreements with all of the parties before announcing his coalition, first to Israel’s President and then the speaker of the Knesset.