Today’s Top Stories
1. Israel finally has a new government but the new coalition was only agreed with under two hours remaining before the deadline. By making concessions to Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party, PM Netanyahu reached 61 out of the 120 seat Knesset, giving the coalition government a razor-thin majority of just one.
The new coalition, while in theory dominated by Likud’s 30 seats, made significant deals with the center-right Kulanu, the ultra-orthodox Shas and UTJ as well as the right-wing Jewish Home. It appears, however, that Netanyahu is keeping the Foreign Ministry in his pocket as a possible incentive to bring the opposition Zionist Union into an expanded national unity government later.
According to The Times of Israel:
Netanyahu was understood to have capitulated to the demands of the Orthodox-nationalist Jewish Home, the final recalcitrant coalition partner, and agreed to appoint Bennett as education minister, MK Ayelet Shaked as justice minister, and another Jewish Home member, Uri Ariel, as agriculture minister.
Shaked, 39, has only been in politics for two years. Netanyahu and Bennett were negotiating Wednesday over the scope of her authority in the job. Shaked will also have a seat in the key decision-making security cabinet, by virtue of being justice minister.
Netanyahu is likely to appoint several senior Likud colleagues to the security cabinet too, to offset their unhappiness at missing out on top cabinet posts, and to ensure that the security cabinet supports him on key decisions.
Predictably, chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat slammed the new government. It “will be one of war which will be against peace and stability in our region,” he told AFP.
AP has list of challenges facing new government while Financial Review (via Reuters) has a list of the most controversial legislative proposals from the new government.
See below for more commentary and reaction.
2. So much for the much-touted destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons. NY Times reports:
Two years after President Bashar al-Assad agreed to dismantle Syria’s chemical weapons stockpile, there is mounting evidence that his government is flouting international law to drop jerry-built chlorine bombs on insurgent-held areas. Lately, the pace of the bombardments in contested areas like Idlib Province has picked up, rescue workers say, as government forces have faced new threats from insurgents.
3. Haaretz reports that Israeli defense officials assume the terrorist cell that intended to place an explosive charge on the Israeli-Syrian border in the Golan Heights 10 days ago was operated by Samir Kuntar, who was working on instructions from Iran.
The incident, in which four militants were killed, took place less than 48 hours after an air strike attributed to Israel had destroyed weapons that were supposed to be handed over to Hezbollah.
Despite the proximity of the events, Israel believes that Iran had operated the terrorist cell, rather than Hezbollah. Israel also believes that the air strike in April was not connected to the attempt to plant explosives on the Israel-Syria border.
Israeli officials believe the terrorist cell’s activity near the border fence could be part of Kuntar’s attempt to reinstate the terror network he had set up in the Golan Heights.
Israel and the Palestinians
• Is Hamas digging a possible attack tunnel beneath a Gaza border kibbutz? The residents of Nirim think so and the IDF is going to investigate.
• Just what is a Saudi aircraft doing on the tarmac of Ben-Gurion Airport?
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— Amichai Stein (@AmichaiStein1) May 6, 2015
• The Egyptian military Wednesday shot dead three Palestinian gunmen who infiltrated through a smuggling tunnel in the Sinai town of Rafah on the border with Gaza, security officials said.
• Lawyers representing the widow of late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Wednesday denounced a French decision to close a murder inquiry into his 2004 death and vowed to ensure the investigation continued.
Around the World
• Iran has released a Marshall Islands-flagged container ship and its crew which were seized last week in one of the world’s major oil shipping lanes, the official IRNA news agency reported.
• Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has acknowledged that his regime is suffering military defeats, amid reports of splits and defections within his core supporters.
• Just what is going on at Al-Jazeera America? Following allegations of sexism and anti-Semitism in the workplace, CEO Ehab Al Shihabi has been fired. It seems, however, that he has, in fact, been demoted and replaced by a new CEO. More at the Daily Beast.
• A British theater has publicly apologized for boycotting a Jewish film festival during the 2014 Gaza war.
Commentary/Analysis
• Haviv Rettig Gur comments on the new coalition:
Netanyahu did better at the ballot box than any ruling party since the 2003 election, but can’t seem to translate an electoral victory into strong governance. The question that now looms over the political system is, why?
At the immediate tactical level, it’s clear that the most significant factor in Netanyahu’s embarrassment was Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog. It’s an open secret, already acknowledged by Likud officials, that Netanyahu turned to Herzog in recent days (and informally, weeks) in the hopes of piecing together a truly impregnable and effective coalition of as many as 77 seats (Likud, Zionist Union, Kulanu and the ultra-Orthodox parties).
Herzog said no, leaving Netanyahu with only one route to the premiership, a rightist-Orthodox 67-seat coalition. Then Yisrael Beytenu’s Avigdor Liberman dramatically bowed out of that coalition on Monday, taking his six seats with him and bringing Netanyahu’s best-case scenario down to the minimum required to form a government, 61 seats. With just two days left, Netanyahu had no choice but to acquiesce to nearly every demand made by Jewish Home, which held the last eight seats the prime minister needed to reach 61.
• Times of Israel editor David Horovitz isn’t impressed:
If Netanyahu had known how this would all play out — if he had foreseen the humiliating reality of Wednesday, May 6, when he found himself reduced to imploring Naftali Bennett to help him muster a wafer-thin majority — would he have put himself through all this? Would he have put the country through this whole election nightmare? Would he have dissolved his previous diverse coalition more than two years early, only to return with a smaller, narrower, potentially far more problematic one?
I greatly doubt it.
One thing is for certain: The coalition whose construction he breathlessly announced to President Reuven Rivlin on Wednesday night is not the “better, more stable… broad-based government” that he rightly told us we deserve.
• Sima Kadmon echoes similar sentiments:
Even a particularly wild imagination wouldn’t have been able to come up with such an ironic script, in which the prime minister – who was on the top of the world only six weeks ago and was certain that he would be able to put together his government with his hands tied behind his back – comes to the president at the very last moment, breathless, with a narrow coalition in which all the ingredients – including his friends in the Likud – despise him, while he, on the other hand, can’t tolerate them. …
What happened here in the past six weeks, and how a crushing election victory turned into a farce which Israel had yet to see, will be discussed for many years to come. How did negotiations with parties that had no other alternative end in a way which is worse than what any fresh intern at a law firm would have been able to come up with.
• The Washington Post contends:
The government will back Netanyahu’s position that the accord pushed by the Obama administration to restrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions is “a bad deal.”
The coalition, too, is composed of members unlikely to press for resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians, talks that consumed U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry for nine months last year until they collapsed in a round of bitter recriminations.
“This is not the government that will be able to bridge the gap between Israel and America and Europe,” said Reuven Hazan, a top political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“They will also be unified in their stand that they don’t trust the Palestinians and don’t want to make concessions to them,” he said.
• Following the shooting attack on a Texas community center hosting a Mohammed cartoon exhibition, Pamela Gellar’s case that the art display was a case of free speech is challenged by the NY Times, which called it hate speech:
Some of those who draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad may earnestly believe that they are striking a blow for freedom of expression, though it is hard to see how that goal is advanced by inflicting deliberate anguish on millions of devout Muslims who have nothing to do with terrorism. As for the Garland event, to pretend that it was motivated by anything other than hate is simply hogwash.
Featured image: CC BY-NC-SA Stefan Georgi via flickr with additions by HonestReporting.
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