What will Israel’s new government look like?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

The Hard Shoulder, with Ciara Kelly and Shane Colman, on Newstalk, with Kiya.

Ciara Kelly (0:08)

Now, Israel's former military chief, Gadi Eisenkot, has begun the tough task of forming a government in Israel, reaching out to Benjamin Netanyahu's allies, as he warns that the veteran prime minister has brought the country to an historic crisis. And joining me now to discuss this is Adam Parsons, Sky News Middle East correspondent. Adam, explain to people what is going on here, because Netanyahu's bloc got more votes than the Eisenkot bloc in the elections. But that's not reflected in who is trying to form a government now. It's more complicated than that.

Adam Parsons (0:43)

Yeah, I think for those of us who are used to sort of rapid government creation, this is the absolute reverse. So what has happened is that we had an election where nobody got an overall majority. I'm not talking about parties, I'm talking about government blocs, one of them led by Benjamin Netanyahu, the existing Prime Minister, the other led by a man called Gadi Eisenkot, he was former head of the military, now head of a party called Yasha. Now, Netanyahu and Likud, they got the most seats in the parliament, but their bloc didn't get the most seats in total, or certainly didn't get enough in order to push through a majority. So, it came down to the president, Isaac Herzog, who looked at the different coalitions, at the different permutations, listened to the parties involved, all of them sent representatives, said who they recommended to be Prime Minister, and it's then down to Isaac Herzog to say, who's got the best chance of putting together a coalition that might get to that magic 61 that gives you a majority, and he's decided to go for Gadi Eisenkot, the opposition leader.

So now, Eisenkot's got six weeks to try and put together a ruling coalition, and, spoiler alert, it's going to be very, very hard for him to do that, because within the parties, it's almost this sort of Gaudian knot of, if I get those people on board, that's going to annoy these people, and so on and so forth. But he got six weeks to try and put together something that would allow him to take over as the Prime Minister of Israel.

Ciara Kelly (2:20)

Is it very simplistic, and forgive me if it is, Adam, to say that all that can really happen is either a unity government, the two big blocs, the Eisenkot and Netanyahu blocs, come together in some way and rotate, that the Eisenkot bloc go with the Arab bloc of 19, or with people that they pull from the Netanyahu bloc, or the Netanyahu bloc end up back in power with people that they have pulled from the Eisenkot bloc. Is that all that can happen without another election?

Adam Parsons (2:50)

First of all, believe me, there are no silly questions. There are no simplistic questions here. Everything is up for grabs. Now, first of all, I think that the first move that Netanyahu made was to try to push through a unity government with Eisenkot. Eisenkot seems to be resisting that.

He seems to be trying to put together his own bloc. The problem is that if he could blend in that the Arab parties will go to the parties that represent the Palestinian citizens of Israel, they got 19 seats, so they have a huge chunk of the of the parliament. If Eisenkot could put together a coalition between his existing supporters and embrace those Arab parties, he'd get across the line. The problem is he's reluctant to do that. So are other members of his bloc. They're reluctant to rely on Arab parties to form a governing majority.

He has reached down and said he's open to anyone in the parliament. So he's basically saying even members of Likud, Netanyahu's party, or religious Zionist party, support us from people like Betimaal Smatrach. But it's going to be really hard because the Palestinian parties have got so many seats, that makes any permutations of the remainder, and including by the way, a couple of parties based on Haredi's, the ultra-orthodox Jews. It's such a patchwork of relatively small numbers of seats having to be knitted together. It is actually really hard to work out how anything can be done that doesn't involve, as you said, either a unity government between Netanyahu and Eisenkot, that would probably work, but certainly Eisenkot doesn't want to do it, or having a coalition that involves having the Arab parties as part of it, which plenty of partners find unpalatable. So there are no silly questions here. It's really complicated.

Ciara Kelly (4:53)

The ultra-Orthodox group in which you mentioned, there have been issues there in terms of what other politicians in Israel are saying, because they obviously have an exemption from military service, and there are many in Israel who don't like that.