OCCUPIED-AL-QUDS: Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said on Monday that Foreign Minister Yair Lapid ‘will soon take over’ as premier, after the pair agreed to dissolve their fraught governing coalition and trigger new elections.
In a joint press conference with Lapid -- the architect of the alliance -- Bennett said he made the "difficult" decision to dissolve parliament in order to protect Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.
The coalition that includes religious nationalists like Bennett, Lapid’s centrist party, hawks, left-wingers and Arab Islamists had until June 30 to renew a measure that ensures West Bank settlers live under Israeli law.
Multiple Arab lawmakers within the coalition refused to support the move in a Palestinian territory under Israeli occupation since 1967. Bennett said the expiration of the West Bank measures would have created "security risks" and "constitutional chaos".
"I could not allow that," he explained. Dissolving the government before the measure expires means it is automatically renewed until a new government is formed.
Bennett and Lapid agreed to a complex power sharing arrangement when they forged their unprecedented, multi-party coalition one year ago and ousted former premier Benjamin Netanyahu.
Under their terms, Lapid takes charge of the caretaker government, while Bennett is responsible for dissolving the alliance. "I stand here with my friend Yair Lapid, who will soon take over as prime minister in accordance with an agreement between us," the prime minister, said, promising an "orderly" transition, expected next week.
Lapid thanked Bennett for "putting the country before his personal interest".But Saar, a former Netanyahu ally who turned on the ex-premier, said his political goals were unchanged."The goal in the near elections is clear: preventing the return of Netanyahu to the premiership, and enslaving the state to his personal interests," Saar tweeted.
Political analyst and polling expert Dahlia Scheindlin told AFP earlier this week that while surveys continue to show Netanyahu’s Likud party remains Israel’s most popular, there is no certainty that fresh polls will give him a governing majority.
"In all the surveys in the last two months, only one survey gave (Netanyahu and his allies) 61 seats and that one was a few weeks ago, so it is not like there is a trend (of Likud rising)," she said.
The Netanyahu-led opposition had warned it would submit its own bill to dissolve the 120-seat parliament on Wednesday but Bennett and Lapid appear to have moved to pre-empt that opposition bill.
Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute think-tank, said the move highlights that Israeli governance remains in crisis. "The decision by Prime Minister Bennett to disperse the Knesset... is a clear indication that Israel’s worst political crisis did not end when this government was sworn into office, but rather merely receded only to return when this coalition failed to find a way to continue moving forward."
"While this government was one of Israel’s shortest to hold office, it played an historical role by including an Arab party in the coalition and in the decisions made by the national leadership, and therefore paving the way for the possibility of more inclusion by the Arab minority in the political process," Plesner added.