I wanted to flag this article on the coalition negotiations in Israel which I think captures a key reality of the moment. It’s very important. Netanyahu’s party won a resounding victory on March 17th. But the outcome (a narrow right wing coalition) is far less appealing for him than the one he faced when he assembled in 2009 and 2013. In both earlier cases he was able to get buy in from center or center-left parties. That gave him a fig leaf on the international stage – continued settlement activity but with the appearance of on-going two state negotiations which he nonetheless made sure would not g anywhere. This allowed him to pursue what was basically a right wing agenda while also keeping the demands of the US and Europe at bay. It also gave him room for maneuver within his coalition to pivot a bit right or left as conditions warranted.
Mazal Mualem says that Netanyahu is not simply bluffing when he threatens his ‘natural partners’ in the rightist parties with the prospect of forming a unity government or at least one that brings in non-right wing parties. She says he will eventually try to bring in Labor to broaden and change the complexion of his government. I don’t know enough to know whether he will really try to do that or whether he thinks that’s even feasible – it’s very hard to see what Labor’s incentive to do that would be. But I think she’s definitely right about Netanyahu’s predicament.
Here’s a key passage …
Netanyahu is now facing a new reality. On the one hand, he won the elections and strengthened the Likud, bringing it 30 Knesset seats. On the other hand, the emerging coalition is composed of right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties, at a time when relations with the United States are sliding uncontrollably down a slippery slope.
It has often been said of Netanyahu that he is the sum of all his fears. In this case, Netanyahu truly fears a narrow coalition government. According to a political source who spoke with him in recent days, Netanyahu sounded somewhere between troubled and scared of a government with Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Liberman and HaBayit HaYehudi Chair Naftali Bennett. In a conversation with Al-Monitor the source said, on condition of anonymity, “Netanyahu said that the relationship with the United States is so tense, that he thinks such a government will not be accepted there and in the world, in general, and will thus hurt us. He said several times that things were complicated. I understood from him that he was looking for a moderating element, for instance the Zionist Camp, in the coalition. My sense was that he was praying now that in the framework of the coalition negotiations, someone would demand conducting a diplomatic process with the Palestinians.”
There’s another element here that sheds light on the White House’s unwillingness to let Netanyahu simply walk back his two state comments. I think this should have been clear to them in 2009 and 2010. And Secretary Kerry was still working on the assumption that Netanyahu was genuinely open to a two-state settlement in 2013 and 2014. But I think everyone at the White House is very clear now what was really up over those five years. His statement in the closing days of the campaign were just a capstone to five years of increasingly incontrovertible – and to the White House, frustrating – evidence. The refusal to allow a simple walk back amounted to a statement: You’ve been lying to us about this for five years. Lying to us again won’t get things back to where we were. There’s a lot more going on here than pique.
