TEL AVIV: After a stint in opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu will return to power in Israel on Thursday, leading what analysts describe as the most right-wing government in the country’s history. Senior security and law enforcement officials have already voiced concern over its direction, as have Palestinians.
“It becomes for Netanyahu’s partners a dream government,” Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute think-tank, told media. “And one side’s dream is the other side’s nightmare,” he said, adding: “This government is expected to take the country in a completely new trajectory.”
Netanyahu, 73, who is fighting corruption allegations in court, already served as prime minister longer than anyone in Israeli history, including a record 12-year tenure from 2009 to 2021 and a three-year period in the late 90s.
He was ousted from power in the spring of 2021 by a motley coalition of leftists, centrists and Arab parties headed by Naftali Bennett and former TV news anchor Yair Lapid.
Netanyahu will present his new government to the Israeli parliament for a ratification vote at 11am (9am GMT). Following the election on Nov 1, Netanyahu entered into negotiations with ultra-Orthodox and extreme-right parties, among them Bezalel Smotrich’s Religious Zionism formation and Itamar Ben Gvir’s Jewish Power party. Both have a history of inflammatory remarks about the Palestinians.
They will now take charge respectively of Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank, and of the Israeli police, which also operates in the territory occupied by Israel since 1967. Even before the government was sworn in, the majority parties passed laws that would allow Aryeh Deri — a key ally from the ultra-Orthodox Shas party — to serve as a minister despite a previous guilty plea to tax offences.
They also voted to expand the powers of the national security minister, a portfolio set to be handed to Ben Gvir who would have authority over the police. The assignment comes despite Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara’s warning against the “politicisation of law enforcement”.
On Monday, in a phone call to Netanyahu, armed forces chief Aviv Kochavi expressed his concerns regarding the creation of a second ministerial post in the defence ministry for Smotrich, who will oversee the management of civilian affairs in the West Bank.
Israel’s ally, the United States, has also spoken out. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned that Washington would oppose settlement expansion as well as any bid to annex the West Bank. But in a statement of policy priorities released on Wednesday, Netanyahu’s Likud party said the government will pursue settlement expansion.
About 475,000 Jewish settlers — among them Smotrich and Ben Gvir — live there now in settlements considered illegal under international law. Analysts said Netanyahu offered the extreme-right vast concessions in the hope he might obtain judicial immunity or cancellation of his corruption trial. He is charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust — allegations he denies.
Denis Charbit, professor of political science at Israel’s Open University, told media the government “is the addition of Netanyahu’s political weakness, linked to his age and his trial, and the fact that you have a new political family of the revolutionary right that we had never seen with this strength in Israel”. Smotrich and Ben Gvir “have a very strong thirst for power” and their priority remains the expansion of West Bank settlements, Charbit said.