Netanyahu Blinks First, Invites Election’s Big Winner to Join Coalition

As the calendar ticks-off days until Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s deadline for cobbling together a coalition government, the incumbent blinked first in the stand-off with the January election’s big winner, television-personality-turned-politician, first-timer Yair Lapid. On Sunday, after not having had direct contact with Lapid since immediately after the election, Netanyahu issued a formal invitation for the “Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party to join the government. The gesture is more complicated than it seems because Lapid has made a pact with an unlikely bedfellow, the chairman of the right-wing “Jewish Home” party Naftali Bennett, that neither party joins unless the other does. In the case of Lapid, that means Netanyahu will apparently have to forego extending an invitation to the religious parties that Lapid refuses to sit alongside in a government, breaking Netanyahu’s tradition base of support. While Lapid and Bennett’s parties are not even on the same page regarding the issue of making peace with the Palestinians, they do share the primary agenda item of ending the ability of religious sects to opt out of mandatory army service, an obligation they argue must be shared by all – an argument that is virtually consensus outside the religious community. Even with the invitation to Lapid, Netanyahu is expected to ask the president – and receive – the two-week extension allowed by law in order to form the government. Nevertheless, given the pre-election polling and certainty of the conventional wisdom that saw Netanyahu again forming the government, the extension request will minimally be a political embarrassment for Netanyahu. A street corner/social media debate is now underway between Netanyahu’s Likud and Bennett’s Jewish Home parties with each accusing the other of being the cause of the reduced influence of the nationalistic right wing in the next government.