ISRAEL APPROVES NEW COALITION

NETANYAHU OUT Former ally Bennett becomes PM

JERUSALEM • For the first time in 12 years, Israeli lawmakers voted Sunday to install a government led by someone other than Benjamin Netanyahu, breaking a two-year electoral deadlock, marking a likely shift toward the political centre and ending — for now — the reign of the country’s longest-serving prime minister, and one of its most consequential.

A raucous parliament, interrupted frequently by shouts of “shame” and “liar” from outgoing conservative lawmakers, voted by a single vote — 60 to 59 — to give power to an unlikely coalition of parties from the right, centre and left of Israel’s spectrum.

The votes elevated Naftali Bennett, an Orthodox leader of Israel’s religious-nationalist movement and a former Netanyahu ally, as the country’s new prime minister.

“We are incapable of sitting together — what is happening to us?” Bennett pleaded before the vote over boos and catcalls as his own children flashed him heart symbols from the visitors’ gallery. “I am proud of sitting with people with who have very different opinions. We have decided to take responsibility.”

Several conservative members were ejected from the session. They included extremist right-wing lawmaker Itamar Ben-gvir, a disciple of the banned Kahane Party who was elected to the Knesset with help from Netanyahu.

Under the coalition’s power-sharing deal, Bennett is to be replaced in the top job after two years by Yair Lapid, a centrist politician and former TV news anchor who clinched the second largest number of votes after Netanyahu’s Likud Party in March.

Lapid brokered the power-sharing deal among eight parties with little in common beyond a determination to end the contentious rule of Netanyahu, who has clung to power despite being on trial for corruption and failing to secure a majority after four inconclusive elections in two years.

Lapid scrapped his own speech and instead apologized to his 86-year-old mother for the heckling.

“I assumed you would be able to get over yourselves,” Lapid told his fellow lawmakers. “Instead, she and every other Israeli citizen is ashamed of you and reminded why it’s time for you to be replaced.”

The government breaks new ground by including the first independent Arab party to sign on to an Israeli governing coalition. The Islamist Ra’am party, which was courted by both Netanyahu and Lapid, has demanded new programs and spending for Arab citizens of Israel, who account for about 20 per cent of the population.

Meanwhile, ultra-orthodox parties will not be part of the government for the first time, with two brief exceptions, since 1977. Their absence, after forming an unshakable foundation for Netanyahu’s governments, could endanger the controversial grip of ultra-orthodox rabbis on religious and family law and the community’s exemption from compulsory military service.

Netanyahu delivered a bellicose parting shot to Bennett and his allies, belittling the coalition as incapable of maintaining his record of economic growth, relative peace and standing up to U.S. pressure to acquiesce to a renewed nuclear deal with Iran.

“I’ll be back,” Netanyahu told lawmakers. “Try to ruin our wonderful economy as little as possible so we can fix it as quickly as possible when we return.”

Netanyahu compared the Biden administration’s push to renew the Iran deal to the U.S. failure during the Second World War to bomb the Nazi trains that took European Jews to the gas chambers.

“Bennett hasn’t got the international standing, the integrity, the capability, the knowledge and he hasn’t got the government to oppose the nuclear agreement,” Netanyahu said. “An Israeli prime minister needs to be able to say no to the leader of the world’s superpower.”

President Joe Biden congratulated Bennett and Lapid immediately in a statement.

“My administration is fully committed to working with the new Israeli government to advance security, stability, and peace for Israelis, Palestinians, and people throughout the broader region,” Biden said in a statement that didn’t mention Netanyahu.

The government ends 12 consecutive years of Netanyahu rule, a period during which Israel has enjoyed a flourishing tech boom, relative quiet on the country’s periodically explosive fronts from Lebanon to Gaza, and no return of a general Intifada among Palestinians of the West Bank.