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A 5th Israeli Election In 3 Years? Here’s How We Got Here And What Happens Next. By Gabe Friedman nd Ron Kampeas
From left: Naftali Bennett, Benjamin Netanyahu and Yair Lapid. (Getty Images/ Design by Grace Yagel)
(JTA) — It has become a common refrain: Israel is heading towards another national election. A whopping five times since 2019, to be exact. On Monday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, the two men who had cobbled together a historically diverse coalition to oust Benjamin Netanyahu from power a year ago, announced that they will help fasttrack a bill to dissolve the Knesset, or Israeli parliament. New votes will likely be cast in October. Many readers have had the same questions: Why does this keep happening? What happens next? Could
Netanyahu make a comeback? Read on for the answers. Why are Bennett and Lapid calling for new elections? The short answer: they have lost their parliamentary majority after multiple politicians defected from their coalition. The government, formed almost exactly a year ago, had a shaky foundation from its start, combining a slew of parties that historically would have not worked together: Bennett and Ayelet Shaked’s national religious Yamina, Lapid’s centrist secular Yesh Atid, the left-wing Meretz and the Muslim Arab Ma’an. As soon as the new government was in place, lawmaker Amichai Chikli quit Bennett’s Yamina Party to join the opposition, citing the presence of Meretz and Ma’an in the government. That gave the Bennett-Lapid government a 61-59 majority, which lasted until April, when Idit Silman, also in Yamina, quit because of a court ruling allowing families to bring food that was
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not kosher for Passover into hospitals. That made it 60-60. The final blow came as the result of behind-the-scenes maneuvering by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been leading the Knesset opposition and whose veteran politician wiles had helped him remain Israel’s leader for a record 12 years. Netanyahu, who reportedly had been meeting with Yamina members to try and lure them away, seized the opportunity to create a crisis. Normally, he and his Likud Party would vote to extend Israeli legal protections to Jewish West Bank settlers. But Netanyahu realized that he could anger Yamina politiTHE
cians by helping to tank the measure, which has been passed repeatedly since just after the 1967 Six-Day War. Without Likud votes and the votes of coalition members on the left who oppose the occupation of the West Bank, the extension did not pass, infuriating Yamina members and other right-wing politicians in parliament. It was the ultimate example of an issue that split the coalition’s diverse parties into poles that could not be reconciled. Nir Orbach, another Yamina Knesset member who had been twisting himself into See ELECTION on Page
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