Israel’s new government faces a crisis of legitimacy

Israel’s new government is unlikely to address crucial issues. Here is what Bennett can do to improve things.

By Ken Abromowitz, INN

Israel’s new government, led by Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, faces a crisis of legitimacy on multiple levels:

1) In Israel’s parliamentary democracy, Bennett became Prime Minister with a 61-member coalition (the slimmest majority possible in the 120 seat parliament). There were only seven members of his Yamina party in the coalition, and no participants from Likud, Israel’s largest party. Some suspect that one or two seats were pinched by the Left during the long night of the last election.

2) Though Yamina voters support a right-wing agenda, Bennett betrayed them by creating a left-wing government.

3) Israel is a right-wing country, but is now governed by a left-wing government.

4) The 61-seat parliamentary coalition is held together by the four seats of the Ra’am (United Arab List) Arab party, which is loyal to the Muslim Brotherhood movement, financed by Israel’s enemies in Qatar and Turkey. Furthermore, Ra’am does not accept Israel’s Basic laws (the country’s de facto Constitution).

5) The new government also excludes the religious parties, which have formed the ideological backbone of traditional right-wing governments.

6) The new government seems unable to address contentious issues that could break up this coalition of minor irrelevant parties.

7) Thus, the new government is unlikely to address the massive, illegal Arab building activities in the southern Negev desert and Area C of Judea and Samaria.

8) The new government is also unlikely to arrest imams who incite violence in public and from the safety of their mosques.

9) The Bennett government is more likely to acquiesce to the Biden administration’s pressure to appease US enemies, thus affecting Israel’s national security.

10) The new government is also unlikely to reform and improve the textbooks from which Arab students in Israel are taught under the Israeli Arab curriculum.

Here is what we at Save the West think the Bennett government should do:

1) Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Gaza branch, must be criminalized, and inciting imams within Israel must be arrested.

2) Israel’s Minister of Education must regain control over the Israeli Arab curriculum. Also, the Israeli secular education system must be purged of teachers advocating Marxism, Islamism, and anti-Zionism.

3) Violent Arab looters within mixed Jewish-Arab cities, who rose up under Hamas instructions during the 11-day Gaza war, must be jailed for a long time or deported to Gaza.

4) Israel’s internal security forces must be strengthened. The police alone cannot do it.

5) Israel’s external security agencies need to be upgraded to contend with the long reach of Iran, which is developing nuclear weapons and ICBMs to target Israel (and America). Hezbollah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, now fires missiles into Israel, but has yet to be punished sufficiently. Iran is using its triad of physical, political, and narco-terror organizations all over the world. In addition to Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, and the Gaza Strip, they also operate in Africa, Europe, and Latin and North America.

6) In addition to all of these challenges, Israel must continue to fight the COVID-19 epidemic relentlessly, through vaccines, new therapeutics, and judicious use of medical services.

With so much to do, the current dysfunctional government coalition seems unable to tackle the big issues. The “anybody but Bibi” slogan got this government into power. However, thus far, the Bennett Cabinet seems unable to address Israel’s urgent internal and external threats effectively. It is doing an inferior job to the Netanyahu administration, which Bennett so severely criticized during the election. Unless the new government is able to rise to its challenges, it could soon be replaced by a Likud-run government, most likely led by Netanyahu, that would do the job.

Threat Analyst Ken Abramowitz is author of “The Multifront War.”
Editor: Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld, President, American Center for Democracy (ACD)