Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is attempting to head off new and recurring difficulties in his governing coalition, according to reports on Saturday, and is holding various meetings to dispel threats from his ultranationalist allies over the Gaza ceasefire and hostage deal negotiations, and from his Haredi partners over ultra-Orthodox conscription legislation.
On one front, the premier reportedly expects National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir to once again pull his ultranationalist Otzma Yehudit party out of the government if another ceasefire and hostage release deal is signed with Hamas, the Kan public broadcaster reported on Saturday.
Ben Gvir has been a vocal opponent of Israel signing any deal with Hamas to recover the remaining hostages and end the fighting in Gaza, even temporarily, after more than 640 days of war. Earlier this month, he was said to have attempted to persuade his far-right ally, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, to form a united bloc within the government against any such agreement.
Both of the ministers have threatened to collapse the government if Israel agrees to any deal that would leave Hamas in power in Gaza, and claim to have foiled other deals that would have come to pass.
Ben Gvir has pulled Otzma Yehudit from the government once already, after a ceasefire agreement was signed between Israel and Hamas in January of this year. The party returned to the coalition when fighting resumed some two months later.
But now, with furious negotiations for a 60-day truce underway in Doha, Kan reported on Saturday night that Netanyahu expects him to quit again, and is trying to ensure that this won’t threaten the stability of his coalition government.
To that end, both Kan and Channel 12 reported on Saturday evening that the premier had summoned Ben Gvir and Smotrich to meet with him, likely in an attempt to persuade the former to remain in government, and to dissuade the latter from following his lead if he resigns anyway.
Ben Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit and Smotrich’s Religious Zionism together have 13 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, where the ruling coalition fields a majority of 67 seats. Should the members of Otzma Yehudit resign, Netanyahu would retain a slim majority, but if Religious Zionism were to go with it, he would be left attempting to run the country with a minority government.
The reports of Netanyahu’s efforts to keep his far-right allies on his side come amid reports that the intense negotiations in Doha for the 60-day truce and the return of 18 hostages to Israel — 10 living and 18 dead — are on the verge of collapse.
Sources familiar with the negotiations told the Times of Israel that this was due to Israeli demands regarding the redeployment and withdrawal of IDF troops during the ceasefire.
While Israel has agreed to ease some of its demands regarding troop redeployment, sources said the new series of maps depicting the partial withdrawal of IDF troops was not sufficient to satisfy Hamas, the two sources said.
The matter of his ultranationalist ministers and their ultimatums is far from the only coalition crisis that Netanyahu is facing, as Kan reported on Saturday evening that he is slated to meet with Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee chairman Yuli Edelstein this week to discuss the long-stalled ultra-Orthodox conscription legislation.
Members of the committee have yet to be presented with a draft of the revised legislation, whose sanctions on draft dodgers were reportedly watered down by Edelstein last month as part of a last-ditch effort to prevent the Haredim from voting in favor of dissolving the Knesset.
The new version of the bill had been scheduled to come to a vote in the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee this coming week but was removed from the agenda, further angering Netanyahu’s Haredi coalition partners in Shas and United Torah Judaism, who have been boycotting votes on coalition legislation over the failure to exempt yeshiva students from military service.
According to Kan, before it can come to a vote in the committee, the updated legislation is likely to be presented to the military in the coming days, during which time the Haredi United Torah Judaism and Shas parties’ legislative boycott, intended to pressure Edelstein to advance the bill, will continue.
UTJ demanded on Thursday that Netanyahu “immediately” pass a bill broadly exempting Haredi men from IDF conscription, calling on him to honor his coalition agreements and “complete the settlement of the status of Torah students in the Land of Israel.”
The removal of the bill from the committee’s agenda this week is a further delay to the bill’s advancement, just weeks ahead of the end of the Knesset summer session.
A source familiar with the matter told the Times of Israel that it was removed from the agenda because “at the last minute, there were disagreements.”
The vote would have allowed the bill to be referred to the plenum for the final two readings necessary before becoming law.