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The Israeli parliament is set to vote in a new government later on Sunday, ending Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year tenure in power after four elections and two years of political paralysis.
The vote will mark a historic shift in the leadership of the Jewish state, replacing its longest-serving prime minister with Naftali Bennett, an ultranationalist whose Yamina party controls only six seats in the 120-member Knesset.
Bennett, a 49-year-old tech millionaire who bills himself as more right-wing than Netanyahu, will be premier for two years and is expected to leave the post and give way to Yair Lapid, a television anchor run by centrist Yesh Atid.
Lapid, 57, paired an eight-party coalition that united the left and right wing with an Islamist party to expel Netanyahu. It is the first time in Israeli history that an Arab party shares power with a Zionist government.
Right-wing Netanyahu, 71, has led Israel for 15 of the past 25 years. He has spent the last two weeks trying to separate the coalition, which will have a majority of one seat. He assaulted Bennett to join forces with the center and left, repeatedly describing him as the “century fraud”.
He is scheduled to join the opposition as a criminal defendant in the midst of an ongoing trial on three corruption charges. He has pleaded guilty to all charges and dismissed the trial as a politically motivated witch hunt aimed at ending his presidency.
For Israelis, who have gone through four elections since April 2019 (three ended in a stalemate, while one gave a short-lived unity government), the vote will point to at least one brief interruption to the political blockade. The coalition is weak and political analysts are already predicting its demise due to a wide variety of disagreements: rights of homosexuals, rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel, and even rights of non-Orthodox Jews to marry freely.
Netanyahu served as acting prime minister for much of the coronavirus pandemic, and eventually got enough vaccines to monitor one of the world’s fastest vaccination mechanisms. But the Israelis failed to reward that success with a clear victory for the right-wing party bloc in the March elections.
The formation of coalitions between its rivals was interrupted by a fortnight of community conflicts in Israel, accompanied by a 11-day aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip to contain the Palestinian militant group Hamas and widespread uprisings in the occupied West Bank.
More than 250 Palestinians were killed by Israeli security forces and a dozen were killed in Israel in the worst violence since the 2014 war with Hamas.
But opposition leaders (four of the parties are led by people Netanyahu has personally prepared, then betrayed in one way or another) gathered a coalition with just over half an hour left over before a term that would have triggered new elections.
It includes the Islamist party Ra’am, which represents the traditional Muslim vote among Israel’s 2 million Palestinian citizens. He joins the government in exchange for billions of dollars of investment for one of the most impoverished sections of Israeli society.
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