Prime Minister Naftali Bennett acted for the end of his government on Monday, June 20, plunging the country into a new political crisis.
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The government of Naftali Bennett could last a few more days, a few weeks at most. But his fall was written. Monday, June 20, the Israeli Prime Minister preferred to finish it himself rather than leaving his opposition, the majority in Parliament, dragging him to early elections. By announcing his intention to dissolve the Knesset before the end of June and organize a new ballot in the fall, he closes his short year in power – a brevity record in the history of the country.
He closes a parenthesis of stability in the long crisis that Israel has been going through since 2019, causing the fifth elections in less than four years. Monday evening, Mr. Bennett, from the extreme right religious, preferred the “we” to “I” to take stock of his mandate, and explain his breakdown again with his former mentor, Benyamin Netanyahu, that’s one year. In a speech with sacrificial accents, he estimated that he had drawn Israel from the “chasm” where the ex-Prime Minister led him, prosecuted for corruption; The latter was fighting foot against the judicial system, the media and the institutions, gangrenees according to him by “the left”.
Party implosion
Not without elegance, Mr. Bennett gave way to his partner, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Centrist, Yaïr Lapid, who will assume the interim during the long campaign to come. Architect of an unprecedented coalition of eight parties, going from the left to the far right, Mr. Lapid intends to fight against “the dark forces which threaten to destroy us from the inside”. He who had orchestrated the fall of Mr. Netanyahu, after fifteen years of reign, has four months to accustom the electorate to these words: “Prime Minister Lapid”. In mid-July, he will welcome the American president, Joe Biden, during the first visit to his mandate in Israel. Its possible displacement in Paris, in preparation, seems on the other hand compromised.
Monday, Mr. Bennett explained that his coalition had lost the means to renew a series of laws which maintain in the West Bank territories an apartheid regime, submitting the Palestinians to military occupation, while Israeli law ‘Apply to some 450,000 settlers, excluding East Jerusalem. These exceptional laws, renewed by all left and right governments since the 1967 conquest, expired at the end of June. They will be mechanically submitted to the next Knesset.
There is an irony to see thus falling a coalition which sought to put under the bushel the ideological cleavage between Israelis on the left and right, on the fate reserved for the occupied territories – as on the relations between the State and the religious. His fall was acted by the implosion of Mr. Bennett’s party, who lost three of his seven original members, and by the defection of two Arab deputies of the coalition, members of a small Islamo-Conservative faction, the list United Arab, and left -wing formation Meretz.
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