Eisenkot’s Path to Government

As of this writing, representatives of Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party are scheduled to meet later today with their counterparts in Likud ostensibly to speak about how they could work together to form some semblance of a unity government. Truth be told, to describe that meeting as one laden with traps set for Eisenkot’s people would be an understatement.

We have all been around long enough to know what the Likud’s marching orders from Benjamin Netanyahu will be for that meeting. We can all bet that the non-negotiables will be that if a unity government is formed with a projected prime ministerial rotation built in, Likud will only agree to it if Netanyahu is Prime Minister first. In addition, the Likud people will be instructed not to agree to sit in a coalition that includes any of the 19 Israeli Arabs elected to, and now members of, the 26^th Knesset.

Based on sad experience with Bibi as the first Prime Minister in earlier rotational unity governments, most probably Gadi Eisenkot will not get to sit in the Prime Minister’s office during such an arrangement, which will most likely fall before he can do so. Therefore, if the Yashar representatives give any serious consideration whatsoever to a unity agreement with Likud, it should only be if Eisenkot is the starting Prime Minister.

That, however, is not Eisenkot’s only option for forming a government. What would be preferable in the eyes of a large, but difficult to accurately estimate, portion of the population here is to form a minority government with the 48 seats owned by the “change bloc” (i.e. Yashar [21], B’yachad [12], Democrats [8], and Yisrael Beytenu [7]). While this does not give Eisenkot a majority, the Israeli Arab party’s additional 19 seats (i.e. Ra’am [8] and the Joint list [11]) have offered to vote with the “change bloc” which would then give Eisenkot an eminently stable voting majority of 67.

Of course, it is also possible that if Eisenkot were to move in this direction, United Torah Judaism, with seven presently uncommitted seats, would also join the government in order to protect its financial interests in continuing to secure the benefits its constituency now enjoys.

While I am well aware of the discomfort amongst most Israeli Jews about having Arab Israeli parties in the coalition, a discomfort which I clearly understand after the events of October 7^th, there is also an argument to be made to at least include Ra’am with its 8 seats in the coalition. Ra’am, after all, was part of the Bennett government’s majority. Its leader, Mansour Abbas, clearly stated in a speech at the December 2021 Globes Israel Business Conference, that: “The State of Israel was born as a Jewish state, and the question is how we integrate Arab society into it”. He added that it was the decision of the Jewish people and that the state “will remain one.” This is a position he has reiterated on a number of occasions since 2021 as well.

At some point we have to admit the truth that all of us know in our hearts because we see it every day: 25% of Israeli doctors, 27% of Israeli nurses and 49% of Israeli pharmacists today are Israeli Arabs. Those Israeli Arab doctors, nurses and pharmacists helped to treat thousands of Israeli soldiers gravely wounded in Gaza and Lebanon — saved their lives and saved their limbs — even though many of these Israeli Arab medical workers had relatives in Gaza whose homes were being destroyed and whose lives were being taken by some of those very same soldiers. All of this was done without first asking about the political views of their wounded patients. They may not serve in the IDF but the IDF could not function without them.

This all may be an inconvenient truth for many of us living here in Israel, but it remains a truth nonetheless and one which needs to be addressed head on.

At the end of the day the Yashar representatives meeting today with Likud negotiators need to remember that one of the key goals of the “change bloc” and the reason many people voted for them was their clear position about the need to change the current government so that we can move in a more constructive direction and avoid the drift to becoming Sparta that Bibi pushed earlier this year as a goal for Israel.

We dare not emulate Sparta, which eventually lost its political autonomy when the Roman Republic conquered Greece and absorbed the region. Under Roman rule, Sparta survived simply as a cultural curiosity. After 3,500 years of existence, we Jews have a better future ahead of us than becoming a cultural curiosity. Let us hope that Eisenkot’s emissaries to tonight’s meeting hold to their principles and remember why we voted for them.