Forty-eight hours is the longest respite the Bennett government seems to be getting. On Sunday morning, the crisis which began last Thursday afternoon, when Meretz MK Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi announced she was resigning from the coalition in protest over the violent clashes between police and Palestinians in Jerusalem, ended.
After three days during which the government’s fall and a September election was all but signed and sealed, Ms Rinawie Zoabi agreed after a lengthy meeting with Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and his political team to come home. She was promised that budgets allocated to Arab-Israeli local authorities would be pushed over the bureaucratic hurdles and that seemed to be enough.
The real story behind the scenes is that she came under intense pressure from within the Arab-Israeli community not to precipitate an election in which Benjamin Netanyahu and a far-right coalition could come back to power.
That kiboshed Likud’s plans to hold a vote on dissolving the Knesset on Wednesday, but the coalition had little time to rest on its laurels before the next troublemaker appeared. This time it was Michael Biton, chair of the Knesset Economics Committee and member of Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party, who announced on Tuesday that unless the planned reforms in public transport and farming subsidies were not reconsidered, he would stop voting with the coalition.
This was only a medium-sized crisis, as Biton made it clear he wasn’t about to bring down the government. But it means that until matters are resolved with him, government legislation is paralysed. Another day in the life of a government without a majority.
There are two strands of opinion within the coalition. There are those who think that since there’s no realistic scenario in which another candidate, such as Mr Netanyahu or Mr Gantz, can form a government of his own, the lack of appetite right now within the coalition and parts of the opposition for 2022 being Israel’s fourth consecutive election year will keep the coalition afloat. There won’t be 61 MKs voting to dissolve the Knesset any time soon.
According to this theory, the government can somehow continue until March 2023, the last deadline for passing the next state budget, which even the biggest optimists currently fear will prove an insurmountable obstacle. On that timeline, the government has at most eight more months before an election is called for next summer.
But the optimistic scenario is based on the assumption that the coalition will hold, even if its internal contradictions don’t allow it to pass any significant legislation. Even minor new laws and amendments will become a recurring weekly drama. The coalition’s pessimists are convinced that, sooner rather than later, another MK will break and be prepared to vote for dissolution, probably before the Knesset’s summer session ends on July 27. In other words, the coalition has less than nine weeks to run, and 2022 will be another election year.
De-politicising
One election that did take place this year was on Tuesday.
The vote for the secretary-general of the Histadrut trade union federation was once a key date on Israel’s political calendar. Whether they belonged to a union or not, most Israelis had to be Histadrut members in order to access public health services (until the National Health Law of 1994 decoupled membership from health insurance) and therefore voted in its election.
The secretary-general wielded immense power, not just over industrial relations, but through the Histadrut’s ownership of major public companies. Some of them served as Knesset members simultaneously and went on to be ministers.
Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was also the first elected Histadrut secretary-general. He transformed the small union into a major power-base and nearly of all his successors, long after Likud first came to power in 1977, were senior Labour party members.
But the last time Israel had a Labour prime minister, some of the younger Histadrut members hadn’t even been born. Even though it’s now in the coalition, no-one currently sees it as a potential party of power in the foreseeable future.
Last January, the current secretary-general, Arnon Bar-David, announced that after being a party member all his adult life, he was leaving Labour because “the days when the dominant tone in the organisation was dictated by one party, or by one side of the political map are over,” and “the Histadrut is committed to representing the many voices within the nation that believe in organised labour”.
De-politicising the Histadrut doesn’t seem to have caused Mr Bar-David any personal damage. He was re-elected on Tuesday with 78 percent of the vote, without receiving an endorsement from any party.
His critics claim that he no longer represents Israeli workers and that the Histadrut itself has been greatly diminished over the years, amounting to little more than a forum for the powerful leaders of the large unions, some of whom have for years now been mobilising their membership to join other parties, like the Israel Aerospace Industry union, which has 10,000 Likud party members, to enhance their bargaining power.
Organised labour has weakened in many countries across the world but in Israel it has been a symptom of what the late author Amoz Oz called “the end of the Labour party’s historic role”.
But Israeli Labour isn’t just a party that was once in power; it is a party that literally built and founded the state, to a large part through the Histadrut.
Labour leader Merav Michaeli had too much on her plate this week, with the coalition’s troubles and her attempts to push through the public transport reform, to pay attention to the Histadrut election.
In the shrunken party circles around her, opinion is split between those who are convinced that Labour must regain hold of the Histadrut if it is to have any hope of ever returning to power and those who believe that it needs to shed that particular item of baggage in order to articulate a new winning narrative. As things look now, both sides are delusional. Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid has captured Labour’s historic role as being the main party opposing right-wing Likud and that space won’t be vacated any time soon.
Why no coverage?
The report in Politico on Tuesday that U.S. President Joe Biden had told Naftali Bennett a month ago that his administration wasn’t going to remove Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps from the State Department’s Foreign Terror Organisations list should have been cause for a major political celebration for the beleaguered prime minister. He had led the attempts to quietly but forcefully engage with the Americans on this issue.
There are a number of reasons why Mr Bennett derived only a brief moment of satisfaction.
First, he had been asked by President Biden to keep it to himself. Second, earlier this week when rumours began circulating, aides of Defence Minister Gantz, who was in the US this week, briefed reporters that it was his doing. Another reason is that Mr Bennett’s diplomatic advisor Shimrit Meir, who did most of the heavy lifting on this issue for him and would normally be doing the briefing, announced her own resignation two weeks ago.
But there’s a much bigger problem now. Assuming the Biden administration’s decision not to de-list the IRGC is also an acknowledgement that it has probably failed in its efforts to negotiate a return to the nuclear agreement from which Donald Trump withdrew in 2018, Israel still doesn’t have a joint policy with the Americans on how to deal with Iran’s nuclear programme.
Two weeks ago, the IDF briefed reporters that the US Air Force would be taking part in its annual war exercise, which includes this year a large aerial manoeuvre of fighter-jets simulating a long-range attack on Iran’s nuclear installations.
A few days later, the Pentagon’s Central Command put out a statement that while one of their refuelling tankers had conducted a “dry refuelling mission” with American and Israeli jets, it was “not tied to” the Israeli exercise.
Wherever the truth lies between the two versions, it’s clear that the US is not prepared yet to commit, at least not in public, to a new policy on Iran.
That may be what President Biden is coming to Israel for in his visit, now scheduled for 26-29 June. If the government lasts that long.
