Naftul In, Bibi Out

 I had an important decision to make last Sunday morning: what music to listen to as I drove around in far-eastern Connecticut looking for the last-minute things we needed to buy for Emil’s wedding that afternoon. Lots of things suggested themselves, but I finally settled on “Brightly Dawns our Wedding Day,” a quartet from The Mikado and one of Arthur Sullivan’s most lovely choral pieces. The music—a BBC recording that Spotify recommended—was gorgeous. But, as I drove around looking for open stores, I realized that I was listening not only to an appropriate piece of wedding-day music, but also to a (choral, but trenchant) comment on the topic I knew even then I wanted to write about this week: the new government in Israel and the promise it holds for the future.

The plot line of The Mikado is a bit complicated, but the basic idea is that the singers are rejoicing over a happy marriage about to take place and noting, in four-part harmony, that one must always rejoice over happy events even without knowing what the future will bring. (Within the storyline of the operetta, the union being celebrated is unlikely to endure for more than a single month because the groom’s execution has already been scheduled for thirty days in the future. Emil and Adam’s union, on the other hand, I fully expect to be permanent and enduring. But the deeper point is that love should always be celebrated for its own sake and not merely because of where it might conceivably lead or tragically not lead, which idea I certainly can endorse wholeheartedly.) In the end, no one knows the future. But when two hearts are joined as one and from two separate individuals emerges a couple wholly devoted to each other’s welfare—that is a moment to rejoice, not to suffer over your inability to forecast every twist and turn on the road ahead.

And that is something like the set of thoughts I bring to the remarkable and—at least by myself—unexpected departure of Benjamin Netanyahu for greener pastures (or jail) and the no less unexpected ascension of Naftali Bennett to the office of Prime Minister.

Bennett heads a coalition of, to say the very least, strange bedfellows. In fact, it would not be entirely wrong to say that the parties to the new coalition, co-led by Bennet and his unlikely partner Yair Lapid, are united by more or less nothing at all other than their wish to send Bibi packing, which goal they have actually managed to accomplish. So the question isn’t whether the parties to the new government are each other’s natural allies (which they certainly aren’t) or whether they will attempt to exploit each other’s wish for the government not to collapse to accomplish their own goals (which they certainly will), but whether they will be able effectively and successfully to govern a nation known for its political fractiousness and, at least recently, political instability. That, more than anything else, is the question.

They are a very diverse lot, the partners to this new coalition.

Most unexpected of all, I suppose, would have to be Mansour Abbas, head of the Islamic Raam party. At first blush, there shouldn’t be anything too surprising here—Arabs make up about 20% of the Israeli population and there have been many Arab MKs in the past. But this is the first time an Arab party has been invited into the corridors of power as a member of the governing coalition. Is this a sign of desperation, welcoming into the government people whose allegiance to the Jewish nature of Israel is beyond tenuous? Or is it a sign of health, and of great health at that, this notion of a democracy specifically not excluding citizens from positions of power because of their ethnicity or their faith? I think I think the latter: part of the democratic process has to be a willingness to allow all citizens to be represented by the leaders they themselves choose. And that right cannot be abrogated by their unwillingness to toe this or that party line. It’s a daring move, bringing Raam in. It could obviously backfire. But it could also herald a new period in Israeli politics, one in which the citizenry is represented in the government in an unprecedented, but ultimately reasonable and fair way. We’ll see.

Bennett himself is the leader of the Yamina party, a tiny right-wing group that has exactly six seats in the 120-seat Knesset. That’s both good and bad: good, because Bennett’s retention of power will obviously have to depend on his ability to compromise with people who are in many ways totally dissimilar from himself or the other MKs of his own party, but bad because it means the PM has no natural power base on which to rely and will almost definitely be at odds with the vast majority of his fellow Knesset members. Yair Lapid, who heads the centrist and very hopefully-named Yesh Atid (“There Is A Future”) party, will take over as Prime Minister in two years. (In the meantime, he will serve as Foreign Minister.) Yesh Atid did better than Yamina, but they still only have seventeen seats in the Knesset. That means that together Bennett and Lapid only control twenty-three out of 120 seats. Will there be enough common ground for the members of the government to govern? Or will the coalition collapse almost immediately now that the only glue holding them all together—their common loathing of Netanyahu—has vanished with the object of their loathing himself. I suppose we’ll see about that too.

The other parties in the coalition are all far more likely to be uncomfortable in each other’s presence than comfortable. The left-wing Labor and Meretz parties have almost no important positions in common with the right-wing New Hope and Yisrael Beiteinu parties. Nor does it bode particularly well that the sole centrist party in the government now is Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party. (Gantz will remain in place as Minister of Defense.)

It’s also important to notice who isn’t in the new government. For the first time in a long time, there are no Haredi parties represented. Whether that will signal a sea-change in Israeli policy towards drafting ultra-Orthodox young men remains to be seen, as also remains to be seen whether the new coalition will have the strength finally to break the Orthodox stranglehold on matters of personal status (like marriage and divorce) and to offer a fair deal to non-Orthodox Jews in Israel whose tax shekels pay the salaries of the nation’s Orthodox rabbis but who must also pay dues to their own synagogues to support their own clergy. It’s unlikely that the coalition will want to step too heavily on the toes of the nation’s ultra-Orthodox population. On the other hand, the possibility of change with respect to the imperious, self-righteous way the chief rabbinate has been permitted to impose its will on the entire nation is something we can only hope to see realized.

So the chances of long-term success are not great. The coalition holds a razor-thin majority of exactly two seats in the Knesset. (This basically means that for anything at all to be accomplished, more or less every single member but one of the coalition has to be on board.) There are eight parties that belong to the governing coalition, a number only exceeded one single time in the past history of Israel. Whether that turns out to be the kiss of death or a sign of vibrant democracy at its most pliable and effective remains too to be seen. On the other hand, the new government includes nine female cabinet ministers, the most ever. But on the other other hand, none of the governing parties is led by a Jew of Middle Eastern or Sephardic origins—not a good sign for a nation in which non-Ashkenazic Jews have often felt looked over or disregarded.

So, to sum up, there are a thousand good reasons to expect the Bennett government to collapse momentarily. The man himself is a bit of an anomaly too—he will be Israel’s first religiously-observant Prime Minister who appears in public wearing a kippah, yet he leads a nation overwhelming secular in its orientation. (Whether his ascension will eventually be seen as emblematic of the nation’s move from the secular Zionism of the state’s founders to the kind of religious Zionism that has religion itself at the core of its self-conception—that too will be revealed only in the future.) He is Israel’s first Prime Minister born to American parents too, a natural, fluent English-speaker (like Netanyahu) who will do well on American television—which is key for Israeli politicians who want to win the hearts of the American public. But, of course, Bennett is also a natural Hebrew speaker—which is important since he now leads a nation of native-born Israelis to whom the ability to speak English well is unimportant and who will be far more closely tuned into the nuances of his Hebrew-language speeches and rhetoric.

The Israel of today is not the Israel of 1948. But neither is it the Israel of 1967 or even of the early 2000s. The nation today, particularly in the wake of the success of the Abraham Accords, is facing a set of potential foreign policy break-throughs, including with the Palestinians, that are unprecedented. So maybe the notion of a coalition that includes left-wing, right-wing, and centrist parties, plus an Arab party, will turn out to be the perfect government to move Israel successfully into the next decade, one—and the first—that can truly claim to represent the widest possible spectrum of opinions and positions. Things could go south at any moment, obviously. But for the moment I’m hoping for the best and wishing PM Bennett success in leading his nation forward successfully for these next two years.