Israeli politics is in meltdown as the country heads towards its second election within six months. The ramifications of such turmoil for the country and the region are huge – but none of this needed to happen. That it has is down to the frantic efforts of Benjamin Netanyahu to stave off three looming corruption charges.
The Israeli prime minister’s desire to avoid a criminal trial is why he called an otherwise unnecessary April election in the first place. And it is why, when he failed to assemble a rightwing coalition by Wednesday’s midnight deadline, the man soon to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister persuaded his malleable Likud parliamentarians to back a bill to dissolve the Knesset – instead of allowing president Reuven Rivlin to entrust another candidate with the task of trying to form a government.
The alternative course – trying to form a broader coalition with the opposition party, Kahol Lavan – looked hopeless because its leader, Benny Gantz, had refused to join with a prime minister whom Israel’s attorney-general intends to indict on the three counts of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. (He denies any wrongdoing, labelling the accusations a “witch-hunt”.)
By this weekend “King Bibi”, as his most ardent supporters like to call him, had fully expected to preside over a government preparing to pass a bill granting a sitting prime minister immunity from prosecution. It was in return for this that he had, before the election, held out to his ultra-nationalist, would-be coalition partners the seismic prospect of annexing at least parts of the occupied West Bank. And to satisfy them further, he was ready to promote unprecedented curbs on Israel’s supreme court.
Unfortunately, Netanyahu reckoned without Avigdor Lieberman. Having emerged as kingmaker, the ambitious Moldova-born former foreign and defence minister, who was once a close lieutenant of Netanyahu, decided not to bring his five Knesset members into what would have then become a right-wing majority government. The sole point at issue was a draft law to end the wholesale exemption of ultra-Orthodox men from military conscription – now likely to be a key issue in the next election. Lieberman refused to compromise on the law with the ultra-Orthodox parties, another crucial element of Netanyahu’s putative rightwing coalition.
While Lieberman may pick up new votes beyond his mainly Russian-speaking constituency – both for standing up to Netanyahu and for posturing as the champion of secular Israel – he is, to put it mildly, no liberal. A super-hawk who has demanded the death penalty for terrorists, he called for Arabs living in Israel to lose their citizenship unless they declare formal allegiance to the state. And he resigned from the cabinet last year, protesting Netanyahu’s failure to enact even harsher military measures against Gaza.
But his sabotaging of the coalition process has not only severely weakened Netanyahu but also cast fresh doubt on the Trump administration’s faltering plans for a “deal of the century” to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. After the spectacularly ill-timed visit of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East adviser Jason Greenblatt for talks last week with Netanyahu to bolster this month’s Bahrain conference on economic aspects of the plan, US officials insisted the conference, which the Palestinians boycotted, would go ahead.
However, it is still unclear whether or when the administration intends to unveil the political aspects of the plan, which had been delayed to await formation of a stable Israeli government, and was satirised on Thursday as the “deal of the next century” by Palestinian Liberation Organisation negotiator Saeb Erekat.
Despite his attempts to make light of it, the collapse of the coalition negotiations is a severe personal blow to Netanyahu. Even if the parliamentary arithmetic had allowed him to form a government without Lieberman, his chances of escaping prosecution have shrunk.
The election is fixed for 17 September, just a month before he is due to face a pre-indictment hearing, leaving little or no time to introduce an immunity bill if and when he forms a government with no doubt increasingly reluctant coalition partners. He could also face an internal revolt from impatient Likud rivals.
It remains to be seen whether Lieberman again emerges as a kingmaker, but it looks increasingly likely that Netanyahu’s one-time ally will go down in history as the king-breaker.
