A day at the Knesset that started with dramatic expectations of a political upheaval ended very quietly on Monday, as Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's government easily survived two motions of no-confidence.
News developments on Monday night indicated that the rest of the week might very well end up going the same way.
Bennett's governing coalition depends on the four votes of the Ra’am (United Arab List) Party of MK Mansour Abbas, who returned on Monday from a family vacation in Turkey. He will set the tone at Tuesday’s fateful meetings of the Ra’am faction and the party’s governing Shura Council.
Abbas will come to the meetings armed with new decisions by several government ministries implementing and expediting large allocations to the Arab sector.
New and enticing allocations to the Arab sector that are in the 2023 state budget will conveniently be leaked by Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman on Tuesday from a meeting with top officials in his ministry.
Abbas will also come to the meetings with Prof. Camil Fuchs’s poll that was broadcast on Channel 13 Monday night. It found that if elections were held now, Ra’am would not cross the electoral threshold.
It is perfectly logical that Arab voters do not yet see the fruits of the labor from Ra’am being in the government. It takes time for allocations to reach the average Arab voter. Consequently, the later the next election is, the better it is for Ra’am.
The 36 seats for the Likud and nine for the Religious Zionist Party predicted by the poll could scare off even the most militant members of the Shura Council from bringing down the government and perhaps enabling the Right to rule alone.
If Ra’am announces it will stop the Likud’s Knesset dissolution bill from passing on Wednesday, sources close to opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu said the bill would not end up being brought to a vote.
By law, if a Knesset dissolution bill is defeated in the plenum, it cannot be brought to a vote again for six months, so the Likud intends to be very careful with the use it makes of the most powerful weapon in its political arsenal.
The cooperation between the coalition and the Joint List in defeating the Likud’s no-confidence motion on Monday will likely be a red light to the Likud for relying on the Arab party’s votes to bring Bennett down in a Knesset dissolution bill.
That cooperation also impacted the more militant MKs in Ra’am. Faction chairman Waleed Taha accused the Joint List MKs of hypocrisy for pressuring Ra’am to end cooperation with the government over the Aqsa Mosque issue and then joining forces with the coalition themselves.
Anger at the Joint List could help Abbas quell rebellion inside his faction just in time for votes that matter.
If the coalition survives this week, it will be easier to survive the entire summer session of the Knesset until the end of July.
The coalition is still very far from safe ground, but there will not be blood – yet.