The Day After Netanyahu’s Mandate Expires, Every Dissident Is King

No anecdote is too miniscule to illustrate the smallness of Israel’s politics. So, I will start with an insignificant anecdote involving me and an Israeli TV show host. Since January, I have doubled as an analyst for Kan News TV, Israel’s public channel. Yesterday, as the clock was nearing midnight — the time in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s mandate to form a coalition would expire — I was asked to come to the studio to speak about the significance of the event.

“What are we going to talk about?” the host asked me on the phone as I made my way to the studio. I proposed a few options, and she responded to each with a sigh. “Should we cancel?” I asked (with a glimmer of hope; it was late). She then gave me the answer no man wants to hear: “It’s not you, it’s me.” Then elaborated: “I am just so tired of talking about the nuances of politics.”

Yet here we are, the day after, talking again about nuances — to be exact, the nuances of nuances. Last night, President Rivlin handed the mandate to form a coalition to Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid — as he was expected to do. But today, a young Member of Knesset — with no political experience and no followers except close family members — might have decided the fate of the unity government planned by Lapid and Yamina’s Naftali Bennett. Yesterday, Netanyahu lost his mandate, and the ball was kicked to the court of his rivals. Lapid and Bennett had a plan — not yet finalized, but getting close to being finalized. Bennett, with just seven seats, will be prime minister. Lapid, with seventeen, will wait two years for a rotation — if the government survives long enough.

The government is supposed to include rightists from Yamina and New Hope; centrists from Blue and White, Yesh Atid and Israel Beiteinu; leftists from Labor and Meretz and Islamists from Raam. A hectic and diverse collection of parties whose main shared interest is to unseat Netanyahu and have a half-functioning government.

Enter Amichai Chikli. He is an educator — and a political nobody. This morning, Chikli sent Bennett a letter telling him that he could not support a government based on falsehoods. During the campaign, Bennett vowed not to sit with Meretz. And he must. Bennett vowed not to sit under Lapid. And he is now ready to commit to such thing. He vowed to be loyal to a right-wing agenda. But he is ready to mix it with the agenda of centrists and leftists.

Chikli was having none of it. Maybe because he is naïve and inexperienced. Maybe because he is a man of integrity. Maybe because Netanyahu, or one of his emissaries, offered him a good deal. No matter what happened, without him, Bennett only has six MKs loyal to the cause, and the Lapid-Bennett coalition now has only 61 seats — the slimmest majority possible. One more defection, and this coalition is gone. One more defection, and a fifth election becomes — once more — the most likely scenario.

One more defection, and this coalition is gone.

And even without such an additional defection, how stable can a Lapid-Bennett coalition be? The bizarre Chikli episode is a cautionary tale. Because even if Lapid and Bennett are somehow able to pull it off, their coalition will be shaky and vulnerable. That’s a situation in which Israelis would use the expression “every bastard a king,” based on a 1961 film by Uri Zohar. What does it mean? I think it is self-explanatory: every Chikli can determine whether a coalition survives; every Chikli can wake up in the morning and send Israel to a new round of elections, Every Chikli gets to decide the agenda of a government. The bastard — be it Chikli or any other MK (Chikli is hardly the worst of them) — becomes our king.

Shmuel Rosner is an Israeli columnist, editor, and researcher. He is the editor of the research and data-journalism website themadad.com and is the political editor of the Jewish Journal.