While that might sound extremely cynical, it is not intended as an accusation that for political purposes the new government wants anyone in this country to fall ill.
But a coronavirus upsurge – one that had nothing to do with coalition politics and whose timing in relation to the week’s political developments is completely coincidental – is still fortuitous for the government following the loss of a vote that exposed its inherent weakness.
Why? Because the corona crisis gives the government a chance to demonstrate to the public what it can do, and not allow the opposition to dominate the agenda by showing what, because of ideological differences, it cannot.
Showing what the coalition cannot do is opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s overall strategy. He wants to play on the internal contradictions inside the coalition so that it will ultimately fall apart.
This was the reason the Likud led an opposition that on Tuesday voted against a law that it actually believes in and has long supported, one that prevents West Bank or Gaza Palestinians from obtaining Israeli citizenship and living with their Israeli-Arab spouses inside the Green Line.
This is also why on Wednesday the Likud managed to get the coalition to pull a vote on a Defense Ministry proposal to extend the work of a committee that checks the validity of declarations by women saying that their religiosity precludes them from IDF service.
This opposition strategy is also why next week it will bring laws for preliminary readings to the Knesset that coalition parties Yamina, New Hope and Yisrael Beytenu ideologically agree with, but can’t vote for because they are in a coalition with other parties that fervently opposed those bills.
These bills include a stiffer citizenship law, as well as one law that would revoke citizenship or residency of anyone convicted of terrorism and receives payment from the Palestinian Authority, and another that would revoke social benefits from anyone convicted of terrorist offenses.
The goal in all this is to show that deep ideological differences prevent the government from effectively governing.
But, as Public Security Minister Omer Bar Lev said in a KAN Reshet Bet interview, while there are certain issues where it will be difficult for the coalition to cobble together a majority, there is a consensus in the coalition on “80% of the issues for the good of the country, and I hope that we can focus on them.”
And those are the battle lines that have been drawn: the opposition will do everything it can to highlight the 20%, while the coalition will want to focus on the 80%.
This is exactly where the coronavirus, as jarring as it may sound, is actually helpful for the government: it allows the government to focus on something about which there are no huge ideological differences between the United Arab List (Ra’am), Meretz on the Left, or Yamina on the Right. If the government can manage the current COVID-19 outbreak in a responsible, transparent, orderly manner – something that critics say was sorely lacking under the previous government – it will go a long way toward instilling confidence in the country that this is a government that can work despite its ideological disparities.
The opposition, with votes meant to embarrass the coalition, wants to create the perception of a government in chaos, constantly on the verge of collapse. The government wants to create the opposite perception of a government in steady control, focusing on the issues that are important for people’s everyday lives. For this perception to filter down, however, the coalition needs to concentrate on those things it can agree on, not on issues that divide it.
The opposition will want to underline the ideological differences. The coalition – to succeed – must not volunteer issues of its own that make those wide ideological differences apparent.
ONE SUCH issue is Finance Minister Avigdor Liberman’s decision on Wednesday to introduce new conditions for receiving daycare subsidies for children up to the age of three that would preclude full-time kollel students from eligibility. According to the new conditions, eligibility for free daycare will be granted only if both parents work at least 24 hours a week, or if the nonworking parent is studying for an academic degree or learning a vocation.
This is a law aimed at pushing haredim into the workforce and is part of Liberman’s ideological agenda. That agenda, however, is not shared with the same fervor by everyone in the coalition, such as Bennett’s Yamina Party or Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope Party – parties that include some who see value in full-time Torah study, something that Liberman does not.
Liberman’s pushing this issue would be akin to Meretz MK Mossi Raz right now advancing an agenda calling for the dismantling of all illegal settlement outposts – something he very much believes in – or to Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked moving forward her agenda of extending Israeli sovereignty over Area C, something she believes in.
This coalition can exist only if each of the parties that make it up is willing to put in storage its ideological agenda until that distant day when it may become part of a more ideologically homogeneous government.
By highlighting the ideological differences and different worldviews of the coalition parties, the opposition wants the coalition to implode from within. Liberman’s proposal plays into the opposition’s hands.
IN ADDITION to taking steps to sideline, not put front and center, ideological issues, Bennett’s coalition learned a couple of other lessons from the Knesset defeats this week that could help it survive.
The first is not to underestimate the will of the opposition or to think that it will not do everything possible to trip up the government. Netanyahu justified the Likud’s vote this week by telling his faction that “bringing down the government is more important than the Citizenship Law.”
And if that is the rule that governed the Likud’s approach to this vote, it will certainly be the rule guiding its approach to any number of issues that will arise in the coming weeks.
The motivation of the opposition to bring down the government only got greater on Wednesday with Liberman’s new conditions for daycare. Any hope that someone in the coalition may have harbored that one of the haredi parties might move into the government was shattered by this move, with Shas head Arye Deri saying that he will fight with all his might to bring the government down.
Shaked naively thought that certain members of the Likud would break ranks, such as Avi Dichter, who fought for the Citizenship Law when it was first drawn up in 2002 and was at the time the head of the Shin Bet. No one did, which also shows the degree to which Netanyahu continues to have an iron grip on his party.
In fact, Netanyahu has a stronger grip on his party of 30 seats than Bennett has on his faction of seven. This leads to a second key lesson the coalition needs to learn for its survival: it needs accurate intelligence and information.
Until the very last minute, Bennett and Shaked believed that renegade Yamina MK Amichai Chikli, who did not vote for the government when the Knesset narrowly approved it last month, but who has raised his hand in favor of several coalition votes since then, would vote for the extension. They were wrong: Chikli cast the deciding vote against the bill.
Bennett and Shaked should have anticipated that this might happen, and taken actions to redress it. One such action would have been to convince Ra’am’s head, Mansour Abbas, to make sure that three of his four MKs vote for the bill, not only two as was the case on Tuesday – two other Ra’am MKs abstained. In the end, the vote ended in a 59-59 tie, not enough for it to pass.
But the opposition also learned an important lesson this week. Yes, the coalition is extremely fragile, and it will be possible to beat it in the parliament from time to time. But those legislative defeats will not bring down the government, and the coalition is more determined to make work what Bennett has called a “great experiment” in governing with parties form across the ideological divide.
The coalition ultimately lost the vote, but in the process, the parties that compose it showed an impressive willingness to compromise – from Meretz, Ra’am and parts of Labor, which voted for a law they would have voted against had they been in the opposition, to Yamina and New Hope, which agreed to changes in the law they would have opposed had they been on the other side of the political fence.
Just as the coalition underestimated the opposition’s determination, so, too, did the opposition underestimate the coalition’s willingness and ability to compromise to make this government work.
But perhaps that was all to be expected. Like two prizefighters who have just stepped into the ring, the two sides are feeling each other out and probing for weaknesses as they begin round one. •