Can Israel’s Government Survive? Aluf Benn on the Unlikely Premiership of Naftali Bennett
"So far he’s shown a remarkable ability to play the very bad cards he was dealt."
GEOPOLITICS
Overshadowed by the war in Ukraine and the controversy surrounding Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s attempt to act as a neutral mediator between Kyiv and Moscow, Israel’s domestic politics recently re-entered crisis mode. Thanks to the defection of a member of Bennett’s parliamentary coalition, his government is now teetering on the edge of collapse. Israel has been thrust back into familiar territory—indeed, following four indecisive elections in two years, the most remarkable thing about Bennett’s tenure is that he’s managed to hang on this long. To help sort out what’s happened, what it means for the future, and why Israel seems to have succumbed to a permanent case of gridlock, I called up Aluf Benn. Few know the country’s politics better; having held many different reporting roles at the newspaper Ha’aretz, he’s served as its editor-in-chief for the last 11 years. We spoke on Tuesday.
Octavian Report: Bennett took office almost a year ago with a precarious one-seat majority in the Knesset. The only thing uniting his eight-party coalition was opposition to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Explain how Bennett has managed to hold the coalition together this long.
Aluf Benn: As you say, the coalition is anti-Bibi; it was designed solely in order to keep Netanyahu out of office. It’s a partnership between right-wing Zionist parties, the Zionist left, and, for the first time in Israel’s history, an Arab party. All that unites them is the feeling that Netanyahu and what Netanyahu represents is bad for the country.
The way he’s kept it together has been by avoiding the elephant—or the mammoth—in the room, which is the Palestinian issue. You cannot have an agreement between the Jewish right and left, let alone between the Jewish right and a party representing Arab voters, on that topic. So the decision was to keep the status quo inherited from Netanyahu, which meant no peace talks, no annexation of West Bank territory into Israel, and some mild expansion of the settlements in the West Bank. And at the same time, try to avoid trouble on other fronts: Gaza, Lebanon, and between Jews and Arabs in Israel—which exploded a year ago, right before this government took office. Meanwhile, the government has tried to focus on domestic issues, like passing a budget for the first time in two years and addressing all sorts of social and healthcare issues, including COVID.
Now, Bennett lacks much political power, and he leads a very small party, Yamina, that is falling apart. He also lacks the public support Netanyahu enjoyed. So Bennett has allowed his ministers to run their ministries as private fiefdoms most of the time. Meanwhile, he has focused on three issues.
Number one is the pandemic; he has made all major decisions related to that, and has made a point of getting credit for Israel’s successes on that front. Number two is security. And number three is foreign policy. There, as I said, Bennett has made very few changes from Netanyahu’s foreign policy. Israel still opposes a nuclear deal with Iran. Israel still opposes meaningful peace talks with the Palestinians. Israel is still trying to expand its ties with the Gulf monarchies like the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, bypassing the Palestinians.
Netanyahu’s claim to fame in Israel was his magnificent ability as a public speaker in English, which allowed him to talk to the gentiles in their own language, to connect with world leaders and to be recognized by them. When Bennett took office, he was unknown to most world leaders and global audiences. So he has made a point of meeting as many foreign leaders as possible. In the first days of the war in Ukraine, he took a flight to Moscow on Shabbat—despite being a religiously observant Jew—in order to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and declare Israel a mediator between Russia and Ukraine. This diplomatic mission ultimately went nowhere, but to the Israeli public, it made Bennett look like a major-league player.
So that’s how he’s kept this government going. Give the different parties in the coalition a lot of stuff to do in their own areas of responsibility, and lead from behind.
OR: But now the government looks like it’s on the verge of collapse. What happened?
Benn: Not long ago, the 61st member of the coalition in the Knesset defected. Now the coalition enjoys only the support of 60 members, with 60 in opposition. But that doesn’t mean that the government is going to fall apart right away. First of all, the opposition includes six members of the Joint List, an Arab party. They may oppose the government, but they also oppose Netanyahu. So the Joint List won’t support the formation of a new government led by Bibi.
Second, in order to bring the government down, you need the Knesset either to vote for a successor government or to prevent the sitting government from passing a budget. These tests are down the road. The Knesset is now in recess, but Bennett clearly faces an uphill battle.
OR: Will the Joint List use the increased power this situation has given it to push for its priorities?
Benn: The struggle on the Arab side is between the Joint List, which is more nationalist and sees its supporters as Palestinians who live in Israel but are part of the larger Palestinian nation, and Ra’am, which is part of the coalition and whose leader, Mansour Abbas, has declared that Israel was and is a Jewish state and will remain that way.
The main question for Israel’s Arabs is whether Ra’am’s participation in the coalition will convince Bennett, a right-wing prime minister, to allocate enough of the budget and grant other tokens of equality to Israel’s Arab minority. The Joint List is arguing that Abbas has allowed the Jewish right to form a government but received very little, if anything, in return. The jury’s still out on that one. But it’s important to remember that ideologically, there is zero difference between Bennett and Netanyahu on the issue of Israel vis-à-vis the Palestinians. That means that if Netanyahu, who’s now on trial for corruption, cuts a plea bargain, resigns, or in some other way leaves the arena, then you’ll have a reshuffle in Israeli right. The right-wing already enjoys a solid majority of 72 out of the Knesset’s 120 members. The only thing currently dividing them is Netanyahu, and if he goes, then they could build a pure right-wing coalition that could do whatever it wanted.
The left-wingers and Ra’am want to avoid that, which is why they have the biggest interest in keeping the coalition and the government alive for as long as possible—even if that means ideological compromise on settlement expansion, more aggressive security policies, or more free-market reforms that run against their socialist ideals.
OR: Israel has received a lot of criticism internationally, especially among the international Jewish community, for its perceived neutrality on Ukraine. Explain Israel’s position, and whether that position is popular or unpopular inside the country.
Benn: Historically, Israel has had very little freedom of movement in areas outside its immediate vicinity because it has been so dependent on the United States—politically, diplomatically, militarily, economically, and culturally. In the Ukraine war, however, Israel has for the first time tried to play things differently than the rest of the West: by going to Putin, trying to play the mediator, not sanctioning Russia, and, at least so far, not giving any arms to Ukraine.
Now all that’s starting to change due to American pressure to take a stand with the West. But so far, the government’s position—that in order to have freedom of action in Syria [where Israel has repeatedly bombed Iranian-linked targets], you need to keep the Russian bear on your side—has been largely accepted by the Israeli public. Throughout history, Israel’s foreign policy has always been about survival. Whatever morality or memories of the Holocaust may say, national interest has always prevailed. Israel has supplied arms to the worst regimes on earth—to South Africa during apartheid, to Chile under Gen. Augusto Pinochet, to the Chinese Communist Party. Israel has sold cyber weapons to Saudi Arabia, to other dictatorships, you name it. Because Israel’s security considerations have always trumped everything else.
OR: Israel has suffered a recent increase in terrorist attacks. What’s behind them?
Benn: One can never really know why these things happen. The basic tenets of the conflict have not changed. There is a growing feeling that what we see is what we’re going to get for a long time, and that has led some people on the Palestinian side, both inside Israel and in Gaza and the West Bank, to attack Jewish Israelis. So after a long period of quiet, we had these recent terrorist attacks, in which the perpetrators used guns rather than knives or suicide bombs.
The under-reported story in Israel is the number and frequency of IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] killings of Palestinians in the West Bank when they try to arrest terrorist suspects or to disperse a protest and so on. Meanwhile, the Palestinians see no effort to mitigate the conflict. So things explode every once in a while, but the basic causes and the basic reasons have not changed. So far, the current Israeli government, the military, and the police have made an effort to avoid a skirmish, but we always sit on a sort of explosive that could go off at any time. It could happen now, it could happen next week, or it could happen next year. We never know.
OR: The biggest change in Israel’s foreign relations in recent years has been the Abraham Accords and the normalization of ties with the U.A.E., Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. What impact has this had within Israel and outside Israel?
Benn: It’s a very big deal. When you go to Ben Gurion Airport these days and look at the list of departures and arrivals, the largest number of flights are to Abu Dhabi, to Dubai, to Cairo, to Sharm El-Sheikh, to Casablanca, to Marrakesh, and so on. That’s unprecedented. For the first time, Israeli businesspeople are renting offices in Dubai. Nothing like that ever happened with any of the previous peace deals Israel has struck with Arab states. Those were mostly security alliances between the security and intelligence chiefs, and not so much with the wider publics. This is different. Bennett has gone to five or six meetings in the region. That’s unprecedented. And it’s not only the Abraham Accords that’s changed. This government has also much improved its relationship with Turkey, which had gone down the drain for several years. And it has improved the relationship with Egypt.
OR: Let’s return to domestic issues. If this government falls, what happens next?
Benn: There are two or three options. One is that it doesn’t fall: the government is able to pass next year’s budget and survives until August 2023, when, under Bennett’s prenup with his coalition partner, Yair Lapid, Bennett steps down and Lapid becomes prime minister and serves for the remaining two years or so of the term. I wouldn’t give good odds to this scenario, but it could happen.
Another scenario, which is also unlikely, is that the right-wingers in the current government join forces with the Likud and the other right-wing opposition parties and form a new right-wing government.
The most likely scenario, which has become common in Israeli politics, is that the Knesset votes itself out and calls an early election directly or by failing to pass the budget. Most political analysts in Israel will tell you that we’re going to have the next election early next year or in the middle of the year.
What could be the black swans in this scenario? First of all, to Bennett’s credit, so far he’s shown a remarkable ability to play the very bad cards he was dealt, by forming a coalition and remaining in office. He now leads a party of just five people, and even most of them don’t support the alliance with Ra’am, the Arab party. Yet Bennett has managed to stay afloat. Will he be able to do this forever? I’m not sure. If there is a security explosion—another border war or a significant exchange of fire with Gaza or a major wave of terrorist attacks or a major Israeli offensive in the West Bank—in all of these scenarios, Ra’am would not be able to stay in coalition, which would then collapse very quickly.
The next test for Bennett is going to be the summer session of the Knesset, which starts May 9 and runs through late June. If he passes that, then he gets a free ride until October. Then passing next year’s budget will become the test.
OR: Meanwhile, Netanyahu is waiting in the wings, despite being on trial for corruption. Has his popularity increased or decreased since the last election?
Benn: According to polls, it’s remained pretty much the same. Bibi-ists, as we call them, remain loyal despite the ongoing trial. Every day, we hear new witnesses, but there’s been no erosion in Bibi’s support within the right-wing block. Nobody from that block has been willing to defect into the arms of Bennett and his coalition, which is pretty remarkable.
OR: How do you think Israel got to this point, where every election seems to either produce no government or a government that is so precarious that it can barely hang on and is prevented from doing anything big? What has created this permanent state of gridlock in Israeli politics?
Benn: We don’t have a winner-takes-all kind of election system as in the United States or Canada or the United Kingdom. Here the losers sometimes have more power than the winners. There is no majority power. The largest block, which is the Netanyahu block, is not strong enough to rule on its own. No faction has enough supporters to produce a stable government.
Netanyahu has betrayed all of his political partners in the past, and these people now lead the government coalition. They don’t want to do any business with Netanyahu. So as long as he remains in charge of Likud, elections will be all about yes or no to Bibi. It’s like the United States, where the last election was about yes or no to Trump. Yet we don’t have the kind of winner-takes-all system that would let the winner say, “Okay, now, we’ve won the election, we’ve got four years to do things.”
Meanwhile, Arabic-speakers have become the kingmakers. Ultra-Orthodox Jews took this position 34 years ago, and now it’s the turn of the Arab minority. So we get very fragile governments. Look at France. President Emmanuel Macron represents the same kind of public feeling, which is that we don’t really like him, but we hate the other person more. But again, in France you have a presidential system, so since Macron won the election, he gets to remain in office for five more years, rain or shine. In Israel, Bennett has to get up every day and find out whether he’s got enough votes to pass whatever he wants to pass
OR: What would it take to change things? Would it be enough to get rid of Netanyahu, or would you need structural reforms to the political system?
Benn: Well, structural reforms—like the direct election of the prime minister—have been tried before and failed. I don’t think that any kind of political engineering could easily change our situation, because we have a very fragile society. The idea behind proportional representation is that each part of society gets its own voice. But it’s sometimes very difficult to find the ideological differences among our parties, because politics here has become very personal. It’d be difficult to change that.
What could change that? Either an external crisis that creates some sort of cross-aisle ideological agreement, or else a new leader who is both politically popular and politically savvy. So far, we don’t have anyone like that, and if Netanyahu leaves, Likud has no designated heir who is both electable within the party and popular among the general public. So I guess our instability and fractured political system will remain with us for some time.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.