For all its potential to heal a deeply divided nation, for several Israelis — including myself — this moment feels nearly bizarrely unbelievable. “It doesn’t feel like the big change that people here have been hoping for,” said Ruth Margalit, an Israeli journalist and friend of mine. “But when you look at the last 12 years, I think Netanyahu has managed to neuter political debate so much that it only makes sense that there is no one single rival to overtake him and that the only alternative is this sort of mishmash of a coalition.”
That mishmash, Margalit added, is a direct product of Netanyahu's vitriolic brand of politics, which succeeded in uniting an improbable group of bedfellows against him. “It says something concerning the political culture here that a candidate with six seats in the Knesset out of 120 is accepted by all the parties as a natural fit for prime minister,” she said, referring to Bennett. “It's quite insane when you think about it.”
At a small protest in Tel Aviv Wednesday night, liberal Israelis were rallying in support of the proposed new government. Then the news broke, and the protest turned into a celebration. “My friends who were there were saying how strange it felt go out on the streets for Naftali Bennett,” Margalit laughed. “We could not have expected this in a million years.”
If this unlikely partnership of previous political enemies holds, Israel will have pulled off a remarkable achievement in multi-party democracy, with legislators holding vastly diverse views uniting to remove the most powerful, dominant leader in a generation. Yet Netanyahu’s provocative, alienating style has imbued Israeli politics with a toxicity that some fear will linger long after he leaves the scene — that is, if he does leave, which thus far he shows no intention of doing. As the prime minister’s opponents look nervously to the upcoming Knesset vote, the question remains how long it will take for a deeply bruised country to emerge from Netanyahu’s shadow.
One of the more surprising members of the new coalition is Meretz, a left-wing party that calls for an end to Israeli occupation of the West Bank. The last time Meretz sat in a governing coalition was in 1999, before the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada essentially erased the left-wing Israeli peace camp. Yasser Arafat’s rejection of then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s peace offer at the Camp David Summit in 2000 — and the wave of deadly terror attacks by Hamas that followed — led several Israelis to conclude that Palestinians were not truly interested in peace. That natural drift to the right was exploited, then steered to an extreme, by Netanyahu.
Now, Israelis of several political persuasions hope Bibi’s departure will eliminate some of the vitriol that has characterized politics under his leadership. Knesset member Tamar Zandberg, the previous head of Meretz who is set to become environment minister in the new government, faced nightly protests outside her home this past week, as well as death threats from right-wing extremists against her and her 15-month-old daughter.
She’s encountered threats before, but says this is the first time the threats looked to have an immediate goal. “This was organized in order to make an impact on the timing of forming the new government I’m supposed to be a part of,” Zandberg told me on Wednesday, with coalition negotiations still underway. She noted that Netanyahu mentioned her name five times in a televised address delivered after Bennett announced he would work toward a coalition. “And then the next day suddenly it all started," she said. "I think it’s very similar to what Trump and his hate groups and supporters were doing in the time before the Capitol attack.”
This atmosphere of hatred and division is precisely why Zandberg and other left-leaning politicians were willing to join hands with their right-wing rivals. “No question, this is not our dream government,” she said. Yet most of her voters support the new government, she said, “because they want to change the toxic air they breathe from their leadership.”
“It’s not just the corruption and the indictments and the right-wing policies,” Zandberg continued. “Israelis got used to hate as a way of life. … There is a deep illness here that needs to be healed.”
There are already signs that the “government of change” will adopt a more conciliatory tone than Netanyahu ever did. In his call to President Reuven Rivlin informing him that he had reached a coalition agreement, Lapid said, “This government will work to serve all the citizens of Israel, including those who aren’t members of it, will respect those who oppose it, and do everything in its power to unite all parts of Israeli society.”
Bennett, for his part, apologized on Thursday for derisive comments he previously made about Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am. He called the new, unprecedented partnership “a non-negligible opportunity to turn over a new leaf in the relationship between the state and Arab Israelis.”
Still, several feel the atmosphere will not change overnight.
“It feels like for a while at least, not much will change,” Margalit said. “I don’t think they will come in with these sweeping reforms, but at least maybe there will be some sort of renewed protection of and trust in democratic institutions, such as the courts and the press. That has been absent for a while.”
The prospect of Netanyahu’s ouster has also raised hopes of returning to more normal governance. Under Netanyahu, the government acquired a reputation for leaving important positions unfilled, appointing loyalists to positions they were unqualified for, and, for the last two years, failing to pass a budget or initiate any legislation at all.
“In some respects,” said Plesner, “the bar for this unity coalition is not very high. Just managing the affairs of the state in a reasonable manner would be considered a significant change.”
Even with the coalition agreement signed and a Knesset vote likely to happen around June 14, Netanyahu is doing what he does best: anything he can to stay in power. The morning after the agreement, the prime minister took to Twitter, declaring, “All the legislators who were elected by right-wing voters must oppose this dangerous left-wing government” — even though it’s led by Bennett, a decidedly right-wing previous aide to Netanyahu. That same day, the pro-Netanyahu newspaper Israel Hayom, backed by the late American mogul Sheldon Adelson, ran the front-page headline, “Netanyahu is not giving up.”