Israel’s PM resigns, sparking new round of elections

Israel’s most diverse government in history, formed for the first time with an Arab political party, dissolves over a disagreement over the future of Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank.

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett says he will resign after lawmakers hold a vote to dissolve parliament next week, with centrist Foreign Minister Yair Lapid taking over as prime minister. Elections are likely to be held in October.

It will be Israel’s fifth round of elections in just over three years, and the country’s polarizing former leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, will attempt to return to power once again.

“We did everything we could to preserve this government,” Bennett said in a live televised speech Monday. “Believe me, we turned every stone.”

In the middle of Bennett’s speech, the room suddenly went dark as the lights dimmed for a moment.

“How symbolic,” Lapid said into the microphone.

Bennett’s government collapsed after several lawmakers, mostly his own right-wing Jewish nationalist allies, withdrew their support for the ideologically mixed coalition that included a secular Jewish party and pro-Palestinian politicians.

The final straw came when Bennett lost his parliamentary majority and failed to win enough votes to extend legal protections, renewed every five years, that gave Jewish settlers in the West Bank rights that Palestinians in the territory do not have: the ability to to receive Israeli national rights. health insurance and practice law and stand trial in Israeli civil courts.

Major human rights groups say this two-tier legal system for Israeli settlers and Palestinians amounts to apartheid.

Without renewing legal protections for settlers, Bennett said, “Israel will suffer severe security damage and constitutional chaos. I cannot allow that.”

By dissolving parliament, protections will be frozen for up to three months after a new parliament is elected. Bennett said there was “urgency” in the move to avoid “the chaos that comes with it.”

President Biden will be received by future Prime Minister Yair Lapid on his visit to Israel next month. “Our working assumption remains that the trip will go ahead as planned,” the US Embassy in Israel told NPR in a statement.

The upcoming elections will likely focus on the question of Netanyahu’s possible return to power and the possibility of a future Arab-Jewish political partnership.

“While this government was one of the shortest in Israel to hold office, it played a historic role in including an Arab party in the coalition and in the decisions made by the national leadership and thereby paving the way for the possibility of greater inclusion by the Arabs. minority in the political process and Israeli society as a whole,” said Yohanan Plesner of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan organization.

In a video statement, Netanyahu denounced the outgoing government as dependent on “supporters of terrorism,” an insult directed at the Arab Islamist party that participated in the government.

The head of that party, Mansour Abbas, said he too wanted to be a kingmaker in the next coalition.

“This is a historic step. It is still on the way. We have only started,” Abbas said. “We show that it is possible.”