Daily Times

Last week, a man named Yair Lapid came under global spotlight for being tasked by Israel’s president with forming a new government in the country. For a country so long associated with one Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister of twelve consecutive years now, the news galvanized interest and attention. Against this backdrop, the prospect of a new government without Mr. Netanyahu, has begun to take on a real possibility. Naturally, it has followed that commentators have begun to ask the inevitable: Is the Netanyahu era coming to an end and, if so, what would it mean for the rest of the world.

Today, let us try to answer these questions. However, before we get to it, we must take a broad overview of the situation in Israel to understand the context. The first thing to note is that Mr. Yair Lapid, and his allies, alone cannot form a minus-Netanyahu government because they lack the numbers. They must rely on two parties. First, a party called Yamina, led by a rather controversial, uber-conservative, religious leader called Naftali Bennett, who is known for his hawkish positions on foreign policy and Palestine, and for saying things like “I have killed lots of Arabs in my lifetime and there is no problem with that”. Second, an Ikhwan-like Islamist Arab party called Ra’am, led by a conservative Israeli Arab called Mansour Abbas. For the anti-Netanyahu group to form a governing coalition, it must gain the support of both these parties.

Of the two, Mr. Bennett is driving a hard bargain as he understands that he has a king-maker role at the moment. He has sought the premiership for himself and, apparently, Mr. Lapid and allies have agreed to it. There is a reported rotational power sharing deal in the works wherein Mr. Bennett would rule as prime minister for two years while Mr. Lapid would serve as the foreign minister. Thereafter, the premiership would pass to Mr. Lapid and Mr. Bennett would take another role for himself.

For his part, the conservative Arab, Mr. Mansour Abbas has publicly stated that he would join any grouping of Israeli parliamentarians that can muster needed numbers to form a new government. He has not sought any ministerial role for his party or himself. Instead, he has sought chairmanship of at least one Knesset committee, such as the one on interior, and redressal of such grievances as Israel’s 20% ethnic Arab minority holds. In doing so, Mr. Abbas’s hope is to emerge as the most effective, and perhaps the sole, leader for Israel’s Arab citizens.

However, most parties in the anti-Netanyahu group detest the idea of working with an Arab party. In fact, this includes the self-styled “king-maker”, Mr. Bennett, who has said multiple times that he does not want to work with the Arabs. Similarly, other Israeli political leaders have voiced opposition to including Arabs in a governing coalition. In fact, one Right-wing leader called Bezalal Smotrich, has famously quipped that a government with Mr. Abbas was like a government with Hamas, a popular Palestinian group regarded as a terrorist organization by Israel. Thus, if Mr. Abbas and his Ra’am party are, indeed, brought into an alliance, the resultant coalition will be unwieldy, fraught with tensions and united only on the singular agenda of removing Mr. Netanyahu from power.

Even without Ra’am, if the anti-Netanyahu group, particularly through the efforts of Mr. Bennett – which are, indeed, afoot – manages somehow to break-off some of Mr. Netanyahu’s allies, the new coalition will be beset with a host of internal contradictions. See, for example, that the parties that form this grouping differ, often beyond the point of reconciliation, on virtually every issue under the sun. Thus, as soon as the core uniting purpose of removing Mr. Netyanhu is served, it is most likely that the new coalition will quickly fall into in-fighting. Put simply, while it is still unclear if an anti-Netanyahu coalition government will form at all, even if it does, it is very likely to be a rather short-lived one.

This is something that is hardly lost on Mr. Netanyahu himself and he remains a critical threat to any new government in himself. Here, he and his party have been hard at work, trying to break the anti-Netanyahu group. They have been going around making counter power sharing offers to parties in the rival camp. More importantly, they view Mr. Bennett as key to any future government. Therefore, they have launched a campaign to shame Mr. Bennett and his party for dealing with the Arabs, for compromising their core ideology and for selling out their ultra-conservative support base to deeply detested centrists and leftists who form the remainder of the anti-Netanyahu grouping.

For now, while Mr. Bennett continues to stick to his guns, saying he would join Mr. Lapid in forming a government, it is only a matter of time before he caves into considerations of electoral politics. If abandoning Mr. Lapid seems unlikely in the short-term, it remains very much possible that he would serve as an uber-conservative prime minister for his part of the rotating term, put a shine on his conservative credentials, and then depart the coalition citing some odd ideological difference. By doing so, he would have boost-charged his political career and, at least to his own mind, would have emerged as a new leader of the vast Israeli Right that, despite the divided Knesset, comes to 70% of the Israeli polity if you put respective vote shares of all Right-leaning parties together.

Finally, this brings us to the quintessential question of what a post-Netanyahu Israel will mean for the rest of the world. To this end, one must note that Israel is on a very decided slide into Right-wing conservatism. The Right is already dominant and even the anti-Netanyahu group has a very considerable Rightist representation. Add to this, Mr. Bennett and his party, the anti-Netanyahu group would bend heavily to the right. The Centrist and Leftist parties are splintered and have such little influence (with 28 seats altogether in a house of 120) that they can hardly be expected to weigh Israel out of its rightward turn.

Additionally, even if this motley crew of parties continues to govern for whatever amount of time, it would find as its opposition – once again – the conservative right of Israeli polity. In fact, they would meet Mr. Netanyahu and his Likud again, but now with him as the parliamentary opposition leader. What that means is that ultimately it would still be the scale of Right-wing politics that would be used to judge the performance of the new coalition government.

In such a scenario, Mr. Netanyahu should be expected to go back to his preferred playbook. That is to say, he would escalate his rhetoric, raise specter of war with Iran and other entities seen as detrimental to Israeli interests, and, ultimately, manufacture an ‘existential crisis’ for Israel so that he can return as Israel’s savior. He has done it while in government especially in the previous several years. Note for example, that under his leadership, Israel moved away from its secretive, sabotage-centered approach to combating Iran, and toward an openly acknowledged campaign of assassinations and other hostile actions. He is more likely to do this when pushed out of power.

With the legacy of the Netanyahu years above it, and Mr. Netanyahu himself behind it, the government would be under pressure to show muscle and react in ways that would not easily be eclipsed by Mr. Netanyahu. Thus, a minus-Netanyahu government should be expected to pursue with a renewed zeal the reactionary, aggressive and adversarial foreign policy that Mr. Netanyahu has set the country up with, especially on Iran. This is something that would be helped in no small part by the presence of a man like Mr. Bennett in a leadership role, who is even more hawkish in some respects than Mr. Netanyahu.

Lastly, as for Palestine, with the Right in opposition and mostly Right in government, it should come as no surprise that Israel will continue to pursue its one-state-promoting policies, including continuing colonial settlement of the West Bank. Ominously, with Mr. Bennett and his ilk becoming dominant in the ruling coalition, one can be sure that apartheid will only intensify in Israel.

With the above said, there are only two things that can possibly change in Israel post-Netanyahu. First, the modalities of apartheid and how they are enacted. Second, and this only if Mr. Mansour Abbas and the Ra’am party make it into a ruling coalition, the way Arabs – both inside Israel and inside Palestinian territories – view resistance to Israel. That is to say, at maximum, we can expect a view to form amongst Arabs that joining mainstream Israeli politics can bring at least some reward. More particularly for Palestinians, this view may take the shape of a corollary to the same and which would be: If we are to accept a one-state solution, and compete in Israeli politics, perhaps then, we can forge a new path forward in our resistance to Israeli apartheid.