(Al Jazeera) Now a year into its existence, Israel’s coalition government is struggling to survive.
The heterogeneous alliance, made up of parties from the Israeli left and right, is essentially united in its antipathy for Prime Minister Naftali Bennett’s predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, and does not even hold a majority in parliament any more.
The eight-party coalition witnessed yet another defeat in the Israeli parliament last week, when it could not muster the votes to pass a bill that would extend Israeli law to Jewish settlers living in the occupied West Bank – normally a routine procedure for the overwhelmingly pro-settler parliament, which it has done on a yearly basis.
However, sensing that anti-settler members of the coalition – including a party representing Palestinian citizens of Israel – would not vote with the government, Netanyahu sank the settler bill, putting aside his own pro-settler views with the aim of pushing the government further to collapse.
Last week’s vote showed how paralysed and partisan politics in Israel has become. It was particularly interesting that the opposition around Netanyahu voted unanimously against an extension of the law – and thus against its own electorate.
