The election results in Israel were unfortunate in the sense that they didn’t produce a clear winner or a clear mandate. Shimon Peres has passed over Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni and granted Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu the first chance to form a government. Netanyahu has six weeks to form a majority coalition, but his options are terrible. At least for now, both the Kadima Party and the Labor Party are refusing to join the government. If Netanyahu cannot change their minds, he’ll have no choice but to form a government of the hard right, including hard-line religious parties and Avigdor Lieberman’s racist Yisrael Beiteinu Party, which seeks to require loyalty oaths on Israel’s Arab citizenry as a condition of continued enfranchisement.
With Livni out, Netanyahu might have little choice but to forge a coalition with nationalist and religious parties opposed to peacemaking with the Palestinians and Israel’s other Arab neighbors.
This could set Israel on a collision course with the U.S., the Jewish state’s top international patron, and its new president, who has vowed to make Mideast peace a top priority. And Netanyahu’s hold on power would be more tenuous in a narrow coalition of rightists, where his allies could bring down the government in the face of any concession for peace.
What does Barack Obama think about Israel’s hard-right (and Likud, in particular)? Here’s what he had to say about them in February 2008.
“I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt a unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel and that can’t be the measure of our friendship with Israel,” the Illinois senator and contender for the Democratic presidential nominee told a group of Jewish leaders in Cleveland on Sunday. “If we cannot have an honest dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make progress.”
Everyone in Israel is well aware that America’s new president is unsympathetic to the Likud Party and to Israel’s opponents of concessions for peace. Netanyahu is aware of it, as well. And, as disastrous as Bibi’s previous reign as prime minister was for the peace process, he is well aware of mistakes he made, including in the political narrowness of his coalition. He does not want to form a right-wing government both because he believes that doing so undermined his last turn at power and because he wants to be free to maneuver and negotiate on terms acceptable to the new administration in Washington. Yet, he may have no alternative if the Kadima Party holds firm in refusing to join the coalition.
If Netanyahu does form a coalition that exludes Kadima and Labor, the whole world will react with revulsion and that government will fall the moment Bibi makes any concessions. Under these circumstances, it may be that the prime ministership is a job not worth having. One solution is for Likud and Kadima to form a power sharing arrangement where Livni and Netanyahu each serve two years of the four-year term. Both sides are talking in uncompromising terms at the moment, but that is at least partially a matter of staking out negotiating turf.
It should be the quiet policy of the Obama administration to bring all its influence to bear to persuade Netanyahu to accept a power-sharing arrangement. I think Bibi can be convinced that half a turn at prime minister is better than a full-term under constant threat of a no-confidence vote and an inability to pursue policies he sees as prudent and necessary.
I wish the Israelis luck. But, more than that, I wish them wisdom.
