https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/unusual-new-israeli-government-joseph-puder/
The unusual happened at the Israeli Knesset (parliament) in Jerusalem on Sunday, June 13, 2021. The bloc of Change (the anti-Netanyahu bloc) was able to form a coalition government with less than the required 61 Knesset members voting their confidence in the government led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid. The vote was 60 for the new government and 59 against. Lapid, the force behind the Change Bloc, and the alternate Prime Minister in rotation with Bennett, had to summon Labor Knesset member Emilie Moatti from her hospital bed to vote while lying on a stretcher, just to make it 60… The Arab Islamist list (Ra’am in Hebrew), part of the new coalition government, had one of its four members abstain. Without Moatti’s vote there would have been no Lapid-Bennett government. Naftali Bennett will be leading the most diverse coalition in Israel’s history.
Another unprecedented fact about the incoming government led by new Prime Minister Naftali Bennett is that he leads a party of only six Knesset members in the unicameral Knesset of 120 members. The outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest serving PM in Israel’s history (15-years in total, and last 12 consecutive years) leads the largest party in the Knesset with 30 members. Amichai Chikli of Bennett’s Yamina party voted against his own leader, pointing out that he could not bring himself to sit in the same government with the far-left Meretz party that is part of the new coalition.
The new coalition government has one binding issue in common; all eight parties wanted to get Netanyahu out of office. There is little else they share. Yair Lapid’s (57) center-left party, Yesh Atid (17 seats in the current Knesset) has a liberal agenda on domestic-economic affairs; its platform says little on foreign and security affairs. Interestingly, while its platform calls for an effective government with no more than 18 ministers, the current Change Bloc that Lapid has concocted has 27 ministers. Yesh Atid, a secular, Tel Aviv centered party believes in drafting Haredi boys into the IDF, and the integration of the Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) community into Israeli society. Lapid served as Finance Minister in 2013, under Netanyahu, who subsequently fired him. Lapid was also a member of the security cabinet. A former journalist and a TV host, Lapid shares President Biden’s commitment to a two-state solution with the Palestinians, but he opposes the division of Jerusalem. Lapid is now Israel’s Foreign Minister and is slated to rotate with Naftali Bennett and become the Prime Minister in 2023.