Picture, if you will, a world in which Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, Susan Collins, Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Maxine Waters, Stacey Abrams, and Tulsi Gabbard all got together to form a third party. Let’s call it the Anti-Trumpist Coalition.
If you can manage to conjure up such a bizarre group cooperating at the highest levels just to keep one man out of power you might possibly possess enough imagination to grasp what’s just happened in Israel. Because it is quite literally that.
There are, of course, highly significant differences between Israeli and American politics. Religious and national identities play a different role. There are many more than two parties and each represents interests that both overlap and differ from others in their broad camps. In Israel the overall electoral drift has long been to the right while in America it’s been going the opposite direction (which is why the GOP is so focused on voter suppression).
Yet both nations share in common a populist trend that, for different and overlapping reasons, produced a demagogic leader whom many were determined to toss out. In America that happened because there are only two dominant parties and, despite the ongoing inequities provided by the Electoral College, our demagogue was tossed from office. In Israel, because there are so many parties – and thus so many required to form a governing coalition – it took four elections in two years to dump Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu from the office of prime minister. That and one of the strangest coalitions ever formed in the history of world parliamentary governments.
Had Netanyahu not been a factor, the path toward a stable and very right wing coalition would have been very easy following each of the four elections (three of which would most likely never have occurred). The latest vote put in place no fewer than 70 right wing seats (it takes 61 to form a coalition). And since several parties came into being just to topple the guy at the top of the Likud list, it’s reasonable to assume that the right might have done even better than 70.
So who are the players here?
Well the name we’ve all been hearing is new prime minister Naftali Bennett. He’s a very modern Orthodox Jew of American extract who made a bundle in high tech. He’s also an extreme right winger whose party is actually called “Rightward” and whose platform demands annexation of much of the West Bank. He also used to work for Netanyahu.
His rise to the premiership was the most unexpected thing to happen, especially when we factor in the handful of seats his party won. And the folks sitting at the table with him.
Folks like Labor Party head and newly minted Transportation Minister Meirav Michaeli. And the members of the Meretz Party – the most left wing of the predominately Jewish parties – who have now installed their party chair and prominent gay activist Nitzan Horovitz as Minister of Health, outspoken leftist Tamar Zandberg as Minister for the Environment, and party stalwart (and Palestinian Muslim) Isawi Frij as Minister for Regional Cooperation.
And let’s not forget Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Israeli Palestinian Islamist Party who will be receiving a vice-ministerial position and without whom the coalition could not have been formed.
And then there’s Bennett’s right wing soulmates, every single one of them a former Netanyahu ally or employee! The New Hope Party, comprised of Likud defectors, will be seating a number of ministers, including a recent Netanyahu rival for head of Likud. Yisrael Beiteinu (“Israel is Our Home”) will be seating Avigdor Liberman – who once demanded that all Palestinian citizens of Israel take an oath of loyalty – in the Ministry of Finance. Others in his party will take seats in the government, too.
Yisrael Beiteinu, by the way, is a good reminder that Israelis are not Americans. A generally right wing party – autocratic in many ways – it was founded by Russian Jewish immigrants and is also fiercely secularist. There it parts company with many on the right, often cooperating with Labor and Meretz and the most important player in this whole weird coalition, the Yesh Atid Party, on issues of importance to non-religious Jews.
Founded in 2012 by journalist and TV celebrity Yair Lapid, the Yesh Atid Party (“There is a Future”) is decidedly centrist, at least in Israeli terms. Years ago I watched Lapid’s “Tonight Show” clone and later enjoyed his transition into hosting Israel’s Friday Night “Sixty Minutes”-style program. But nothing prepared me for his decision to enter politics. I was a huge fan of his dad, an outspoken journalist, atheist, and Holocaust survivor named Tomi Lapid who also dabbled in party politics. When he died, Yair wrote his biography – in autobiographical first person based upon his dad’s copious notes – and my respect for Yair grew.
His entrance to politics, however, soured me a bit on him. Israeli politicians have always compromised their principles in favor of power and after his surprise victory in 2013, when he joined a Netanyahu government to serve as Minister of Finance, it seemed to me that he was no different. (As a TV star he famously remarked that he “didn’t know anything about finance.”)
And yet without Lapid, this wondrous, fascinatingly bizarre government would never have come into being. Having garnered the second largest number of seats, he was the obvious choice to take a run at becoming prime minister. But he knew that without the right wing Never-Netanyahus he had no chance. So instead of seeking to become the king he chose to be the kingmaker, opening the doors to the far left, to the Palestinian Israeli parties and to anyone whose goal was to rid the country of Netanyahu.
Honestly, I don’t expect this coalition to last very long. But then again, I never saw it coming so I could be terribly wrong. I certainly hope that it will last long enough to put some brakes on the loopholes that kept allowing an indicted demagogue to divide Israel even more than it already is. And who knows? Maybe it will remind Americans that personalities are not policies and that it’s okay to cross even the most rigid ideological lines when the alternative is horrifying enough.
