Israeli coalition is left wobbling

Another member of Israel’s parliament said Thursday she was quitting the ruling coalition, leaving embattled Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in control of a crum- bling minority government.

Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi’s announcement further whit- tles away Bennett’s hold on Israel’s 120-seat parlia- ment, reducing the coalition to 59 seats. Two other legislators from his own party have already bolted.

Rinawie Zoabi’s departure further raises the possibil- ity of new parliamentary elections, less than a year after the government took office. While Bennett’s gov- ernment remains in power, it is now even more ham- strung in parliament and will likely struggle to func- tion. In a letter to Bennett, Rinawie Zoabi, who hails from the dovish Meretz party, said she was leaving the coalition because she said it too often adopted nation- alist positions on issues of importance to her constitu- ents, Palestinian citizens of Israel.

She cited Israel’s conduct at Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque, which in recent weeks has been the site of clashes between police and protesters, as well as con- tinued settlement building and the beating by police of pallbearers at the funeral of a well-known Al Jazeera journalist shot while covering confrontations between Israeli forces and Palestinians. “Enough. I cannot con- tinue to support a coalition that in such a shameful way hounds the society from which I came,” she wrote.

Bennett, who leads a small, hard-line nationalist par- ty, heads an unwieldy coalition of eight ideologically diverse factions — from dovish ones that support Pal- estinian statehood to nationalist parties and even, for the first time in Israeli history, an Islamist Arab party. They came together last June with little in common other than their drive to oust former leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who now heads the opposition.

As part of their union, the parties agreed to set aside divisive issues, like Palestinian statehood, and focus instead on topics such as the coronavirus pandemic and the economy. Despite the differences among the coalition, it has managed to pass a budget, navigate the pandemic and strengthen relations with both the Bi- den administration and Israel’s Arab allies.

But a wave of Israeli-Palestinian tensions, set off by several deadly Palestinian attacks against Israel and Israeli arrest raids in the occupied West Bank, and fuelled by repeated clashes between Israeli police and Palestinian protesters at Al-Aqsa, has shaken the coali- tion’s stability. Mansour Abbas, the head of the Islamist party, briefly suspended his faction’s membership in the coalition over the events, before rejoining shortly after.