The Israeli parliament on Sunday at 16:00 local time is expected to approve the formation of a new government that would unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after 12 consecutive years in power. Barring any unforeseen developments, Israel’s 36th government will for two years be led by Yamina chief Naftali Bennett before he makes way for Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid to assume the premiership for the remainder of an approximately four-year term.
The coalition will be composed of right-wing, left-wing and centrist parties, in addition to an Islamist party for the first time in the Jewish state’s history. Together, the eight political bodies will have a razor-thin majority of 61 lawmakers in the 120-member legislature, thereby making it especially fragile.
Sunday’s parliamentary session will begin with Bennett introducing his cabinet and outlining the government’s objectives. Lapid will speak next, followed by Netanyahu and representatives from all 13 factions in Israel’s parliament. There will then be a vote on replacing Knesset Speaker Yariv Levin (Likud) with Mickey Levy (Yesh Atid), followed by a vote of confidence in the new government.
Netanyahu — who also served as premier from 1996-1999 — is slated to become the leader of the opposition.
Israel has held four national elections since April 2019, which yielded just one government: a short-lived power-sharing coalition headed by Netanyahu and Benny Gantz of the Blue and White party.
Yossi Cohen, who recently ended his five-year tenure as head of Israel’s Mossad spy agency, hinted over the weekend that the Jewish state was behind efforts to thwart Iran’s nuclear program — including by blowing up the underground centrifuge facility at Natanz and assassinating top scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.
Tehran blamed a July 2020 explosion that rocked its Natanz uranium enrichment plant on sabotage. In April, another blast ripped through Natanz, damaging thousands of centrifuges.
In addition to discussing the November 2020 killing of Fakhrizadeh, Cohen warned that other Iranian scientists involved in the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program could be targeted for assassination. “If the scientist is willing to change career and will not hurt us anymore, then yes, sometimes we offer them” a way out, Israel’s former top spy said.
Cohen also spoke about the 2018 Mossad operation that smuggled out of Iran thousands of nuclear-related documents that allegedly proved that Tehran had conducted research and experiments geared towards building a nuclear weapon.
Indirect talks between the United States and Iran on reviving the 2015 nuclear deal resumed in Vienna, with the European Union saying that negotiations were “intense,” and Germany calling for rapid progress.
The sixth round of talks kicked off with a meeting between representatives of the remaining parties to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – Iran, Russia, China, France, Britain, Germany and the European Union. The US delegation is based in a hotel across the street as Tehran has refused to attend face-to-face meetings with officials from Washington.
The talks’ chief coordinator, EU foreign policy official Enrique Mora, who is leading the shuttle diplomacy between Iran and the United States, said he expects a deal to be finalized during this round of deliberations.
Former president President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the JCPOA in 2018 and re-imposed economic sanctions on the Islamic Republic that had been removed as part of the nuclear deal. Iran is reportedly currently enriching uranium to near-weapons-grade levels.
Israel’s technology sector broke a new funding record, raising a total of $10.5 billion since January. According to the website Start-Up Nation Central, an NGO that tracks Israeli innovation, the sum equals the total amount raised during 2020, which was also a record year.
Investment in Israel jumped 137 percent in the first five months of 2021 compared to the same period in 2020, higher than the global increase of 89 percent, according to data on the tech website. Investment in Europe has over the same time period increased by 123 percent, while in the United States it rose by 91 percent.
“The record funding in 2021 indicates that the growth in 2020 was not a short-term COVID-related boost, but reflects top investors’ increasing trust in the Israeli innovation ecosystem,” said Uri Gabai, CEO of Start-Up Nation Central’s new Research and Policy Institute.
Sixty percent of all investments in Israel have gone towards cybersecurity, FinTech and Enterprise Solutions companies.
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Recommended Reading
- In Stunning, Revelatory Interview, Ex-Mossad Chief Warns Iran, Defends Netanyahu (Times of Israel)
- Significance of UAE Being Elected to UN Security Council (Seth J. Frantzman, Jerusalem Post)
- How Congress Can Fight Hamas’ Use of Human Shields (Orde Kittrie and Matthew Zweig, Foundation for Defense of Democracies)
- Young Zionist Jews Say They’re Fighting Antisemitism on Social Media. What Are They Accomplishing? (Ben Sales, Jewish Telegraphic Agency)
- McDonalds Bringing Back McFalafel After Decade (Tzvi Joffre, Jerusalem Post)
