Netanyahu Returns
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Lapid concedes setting the stage for Benjamin Netanyahu to become the next Prime Minister of Israel
Israel Prime Minister Yair Lapid on Thursday congratulated Benjamin Netanyahu on his election win as final results confirmed the former premier’s triumphant comeback at the head of a solidly right-wing alliance.
Netanyahu’s victory is set to end an unprecedented stalemate in Israel after five elections in less than four years.
This time around Netanyahu, the dominant Israeli politician of his generation, won a clear parliamentary majority, boosted by ultranationalist and religious parties.
Fear. A Palestinian vendor reads news about Israeli elections in a newspaper, in Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank November 2, 2022. REUTERS/Mussa Qawasma
Tuesday’s ballot saw out the centrist Lapid, and his rare alliance of conservatives, liberals and Arab politicians which, over 18 months in power, made diplomatic inroads with Turkey and Lebanon and kept the economy humming.
But with the conflict with the Palestinians surging anew and touching off Jewish-Arab tensions within Israel, Netanyahu’s rightist Likud and kindred parties took 64 of the Knesset’s 120 seats enough for a majority.
Netanyahu still has to be officially tasked by the president with forming a government, a process that could take weeks.
“The time has come to impose order here. The time has come for there to be a landlord,” tweeted Itamar Ben-Gvir of the far-right Religious Zionism party, Likud’s likely senior partner.
He was responding to a stabbing reported by Jerusalem police. In the West Bank, troops killed an Islamic Jihad militant and a 45-year-old man in a separate incident, medics said. Queried on the latter death, the army said it opened fire when Palestinians attacked them with rocks and petrol bombs.
A West Bank settler and former member of Kach, a Jewish militant group on Israeli and U.S. terrorist watchlists, Ben-Gvir wants to become police minister.
Israeli media, citing political sources, said the new government may be clinched by mid-month. Previous coalitions in recent years have had narrower parliamentary majorities that made them vulnerable to no-confidence motions.
With coalition building talks yet to officially begin, it was still unclear what position Ben-Gvir might hold in a future government. Since the election, both he and Netanyahu have pledged to serve all citizens.
But Ben-Gvir’s ascendancy has stirred alarm among the 21% Arab minority and centre-left Jews – and especially among Palestinians whose U.S.-sponsored statehood talks with Israel broke down in 2014.
During Netanyahu’s era, 3,500 Palestinians were killed in occupied West Bank and Gaza during Israeli military operations. Netayanhu’s surprising comeback to power has led to fear and loathing in occupied Palestine.
Netanyahu holds the record as the longest-serving leader in Israeli history, serving as prime minister between March 2009 and June 2021, and before that from June 1996 to July 1999.
Source Reuters/AP
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