The possibility of Jewish-Arab collaboration to end the Netanyahu regime and its deployment of Israel into permanent war and instability in the region has provoked a desperate response. The UK’s Tony Blair has rushed to Israel, holding meetings yesterday with Prime Minister Netanyahu and then President Isaac Herzog. Herzog was in the middle of a two-day marathon of talks with Israel’s 11 different political parties, which tilted heavily in favor of dumping Netanyahu.
Blair’s cover story is that it is time to discuss President Trump’s so-called peace plan. The reality is that Israel is caught up in changing its government this week and Blair has had no interest in pushing any peace plan on Israel in over a year.
Yisrael Beytenu party chief Avigdor Lieberman today came out publicly with his political blackmail of Netanyahu’s opponent, Gadi Eisenkot. Lieberman posted on X that his seven-seat party will withdraw from its election coalition with Eisenkot if Eisenkot forms a government that depends upon support from the two Arab parties. Doing so would take Eisenkot’s 67-seat coalition down to 60, one short of the number needed for a majority.
Lieberman had to choose between giving up one of two former ‘red lines.’ So, to keep the Arab-majority parties out, he made the “painful” compromise of inviting the ultra-orthodox United Torah Judaism party—a longtime Netanyahu ally—to join the Eisenkot bloc. “It pains me, and I know it’s painful to many others.”
Yet this scheme only yields a 55-46 advantage for Eisenkot over Netanyahu, which still depends upon Arab party support to get 61 votes on legislation. So, Lieberman adds to his scheme the need to get at least another six of Netanyahu’s bloc to join kingmaker Lieberman. To add to his wild scheme, he now asserts that it is Eisenkot’s fault, because in the last 10 days of the election, he somehow lost the coalition 7 to 8 seats—a claim backed up by no experts or data analysts, nor even by Lieberman, himself. So, Eisenkot now needs to submit to Lieberman’s crazy scheme.
He concludes that every effort must be made to form a 61-seat coalition without the Joint List and Ra’am, including the possibility of bringing in “three or four Likud lawmakers.” This is “the only strategy that reflects the interests of the State of Israel and the Jewish people.”
In normal English, Lieberman vowed to pull out of his support of Eisenkot and get 13 of Netanyahu’s bloc to join him in a no-Arab ‘Eisenkot’ government. This is simply turning an Eisenkot government with coordination from Israel’s Arab parties into the Netanyahu ‘unity’ government, under a different name. And if this turmoil doesn’t pan out, it will at least prevent a government from forming, play into Netanyahu’s hands and force a new election.
