The Bennett-Lapid government coalition is teetering on the edge, as chaos begins to reign among its member parties.
The Islamic Ra’am (United Arab List) party is shuffling the deck, with one candidate on the party’s list resigning his post as the party attempts to oust rebel MK Mazen Ghanaim.
The MK has opposed several key government votes, including the recent Judea and Samaria emergency statute that must be renewed regularly to continue application of Israeli civil and criminal law in the region.
Ghanaim’s vote against the bill, together with that of rebel Meretz lawmaker Ghaida Rinawi-Zoabi and opposition parties, killed renewal of the law last week in a vote of 58 to 52.
Ra’am MK Walid Taha has denied the party has any intention of forcing Ghanaim out.
Moreover, Ghanaim must voluntarily leave his seat for Ra’am to replace him – and at the moment, that doesn’t seem likely.
If he does resign, the party is likely to advance as the next candidate someone who will support and abide by coalition discipline.
Ala’a al-Din Jabareen, next on Ra’am’s list for a Knesset seat, is a known hard-liner and would mostly likely would have followed Ghanaim’s path.
But Jabareen resigned on Sunday morning, saying he “did not wish to enter the Knesset at this stage.”
A supporter of Gaza terrorists who in 2018 praised rocket fire aimed at Israel from the enclave, Jabareen said in his statement that he had discussed the situation with his family and with fellow members of the Islamic Movement.
“I ask God Almighty to grant success to my comrades in the Islamic Movement. I wish Ra’am well and to achieve everything that is in the interest of our Arab community and its urgent issues,” he added.
Next on the Ra’am Knesset candidate list is Rahat deputy mayor Ata’a Abu Mudaygham, a loyalist to party chairman Mansour Abbas but one who is slated to replace Mayor Fayez Abu Suheiban in Rahat by the end of this year.
If Ra’am manages to force Ghanaim out, Abu Mudaygham would be more of a temporary placeholder than anything else, giving way before the end of the year to the next candidate, Yasir Hujeirat, an official in the Islamic Movement.
Hujeirat is from the northern Israeli Bedouin town of Beir al-Maksur and is seen as a party loyalist who would be unlikely to make waves in the coalition.
That is, if Ghanaim leaves.
The minor upheaval taking place in Ra’am, however, is a wavelet compared to the virtual tsunami underway in the rest of the coalition, particularly in Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party.
The first to abandon ship was coalition whip Idit Silman, who quit the coalition this past April.
Next to go was MK Amichai Chikli, who had spent the past year siding with the opposition more than he had with his own party and its coalition.
MK Nir Orbach is vacillating; he has already threatened once to leave – shortly after Silman’s flight — but was persuaded to stay in a flurry of party meetings.
Orbach’s commitment is still less than firm, however, and on Sunday Bennett continued the series of meetings that began last Wednesday night and continued Thursday evening.
Among Orbach’s concerns are the long-term survival of the coalition as well as the image of the government as one that “capitulates to Arabs,” as he told Israel’s Channel 13 News last month.
But Yamina is not the only party in the coalition in danger of losing the support of its members.
Blue & White party MK Michael Biton, who heads the Knesset Economic Affairs Committee, has also given notice that he will be voting with the opposition against his party’s coalition government.
Biton had set a two-week ultimatum for Bennett to deal with the issue of transportation rate hikes, which he opposes. The deadline was reached Sunday with no resolution of the issue.
In response, Biton announced he would no longer vote for coalition legislative measures, other than to block a no-confidence motion and to support renewal of the Judea and Samaria Law.
