Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's close confidant and former aide MK Nir Orbach told him in a meeting on Monday that he does not see himself as part of Bennett's governing coalition and would not vote with it until the Judea and Samaria emergency bill is passed.
Orbach released a statement criticizing the government and saying that he reached the conclusion that "the coalition cannot continue to exist as it is currently led." He said it was wrong of the government to rely on the votes of Ra'am (United Arab List)
Yamina sources who spoke to him on Monday said Orbach committed to them to not vote for the Knesset's dispersal for more than just one week. They said that in effect, nothing had changed.
Orbach left the Knesset after meeting Bennett and did not participate in votes.
Death bed
Opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu told his faction in the Knesset on Monday, the one-year anniversary since the government was sworn in, that it "is on its death bed, receiving artificial resuscitation."
Netanyahu will face off against Bennett in a special session of the Knesset on Monday night after voting on key legislation was pushed off, because the coalition lacks a majority to pass it.
"The government is going through one of the longest funerals in history," Netanyahu said. "The time has come to return to having a real government. This government is not serious, professional or successful. Just because you sit in a cockpit doesn't make you a pilot. This government must go home."
Israel as divided today as when gov't was sworn in a year ago - analysis
The Bennett-Lapid government’s Knesset swearing-in ceremony exactly one year ago was a harbinger of things to come. That Knesset session was a circus.
As incoming Prime Minister Naftali Bennett strode to the lectern to give his maiden address, he was heckled mercilessly and called a “liar” and a “criminal.” And that was tame. The real “action” – the real taunting and jeering and disruptions – began when he started to speak.
The text of Bennett’s speech included gracious words of conciliation, but it took him 45 minutes to deliver those words – which could have been done in a quarter of the time – because of the nonstop heckling from MKs just about to join the opposition.
They were indignant that a man who won but seven seats in the last elections, and someone who went back on several key campaign promises, would be the head of a government of eight parties spanning the hard Left to the hard Right, including – for the first time – an Arab Islamist party as well.
That opening spectacle should have disabused anyone of the notion that the formation of a government without Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, the first such government in more than 12 years, would somehow herald a softer, gentler period in Israeli political history.
...things began to fray in February, and the coalition started to lose sight of what it was set up to do: provide a stable government that could lead the country for more than a year through a pandemic, trying economic times, deep domestic divisions and tremendous security challenges.
The commitment that the heads of the coalition parties made to each other and to the country – to look at the bigger picture of what was good for the country and be willing to set aside ideological issues for another day – wore thin.
Suddenly the various factions – beginning with Ra’am, and then including Benny Gantz’s Blue and White Party, Yamina and Meretz – prioritized what was good for their constituencies, rather than what was good for the collective good.
A pattern was set, and the situation went steadily downhill from there.
Is the country any less divided now than it was a year ago? Hardly.
The same strident tones are being sounded now, as was the case then. The same ugly epithets are being slung now, as then. It’s just that this time the targets of the epithets like “scoundrel,” “criminal,” “liar” and “thief” were not Netanyahu and his family, but rather Bennett and his.
Today, a year after the formation of the government, the country is no more united, the rhetoric no less caustic and the political discourse no less toxic than it was at the swearing-in ceremony. All that has changed are the sides in power. If back then it was the anti-Netanyahu forces who were propelled by a belief that everything was legitimate in trying to dethrone a leader they did not feel was legitimately in power, today it is the anti-Bennett forces who are doing the same.
The political hatred and infighting have not let up, and “quarrels between people who are supposed to be running the country” continue to lead to paralysis.
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