OCCUPIED
JERUSALEM — The leaders of Israel’s governing
coalition said Monday that they will submit a bill next week to dissolve
parliament, legislation that would force new elections if approved.
اضافة اعلان
The move comes only a year after the ideologically
disparate government came into being, and brings closer to reality a fifth
election in less than four years with no guarantee of a viable new
administration.
“After exhausting all efforts to stabilize the coalition,
Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and ... (Foreign Minister) Yair Lapid have
decided to submit a bill” dissolving parliament, the two leading coalition
partners said in a statement.
The bill will be submitted next week, and if it is
approved, Lapid will take over as premier of a caretaker government, they
added.
Under that scenario, it would be Lapid who would
host US President Joe Biden during his scheduled visit to Israel next month.
Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported the election
would be held on October 25.
Bennett’s ideologically divided eight-party
coalition was aimed at bringing Israel out of an unprecedented era of political
gridlock.
After former premier Benjamin Netanyahu, a veteran
right-winger, failed to secure a parliamentary majority in four consecutive
votes, an alliance of his rivals agreed to govern together, united primarily by
a desire to end his divisive era.
The coalition — formed of religious nationalists,
like Bennett, Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid party, left-wingers, and, for the
first time in Israeli history, lawmakers from an Arab Islamist party — was
under threat from its inception.
It lost its majority in Israel’s 120-seat
parliament, the Knesset, in April when a member of Bennett’s Yamina party
announced her departure.
Recent divisions over the renewal of a measure that
allows Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank to live under Israeli law
caused fresh friction, with some Arab lawmakers refusing to back it.
That was anathema to hawks in the alliance, notably
Justice Minister Gideon Saar, who reject any notion that West Bank settlers
live outside Israel.
“As I warned, the lack of responsibility of certain
members of the Knesset in the coalition brought this inevitable result,” Saar
said Monday in an apparent jab at Arab lawmakers who voted against the West
Bank law.
But Saar, a former Netanyahu ally who turned on the
ex-premier, said his political goals were unchanged.
“The goal in the near elections is clear: preventing
the return of Netanyahu to the premiership, and enslaving the state to his
personal interests,” Saar tweeted.
The Netanyahu-led opposition had warned it would submit its
own bill to dissolve parliament on Wednesday but Bennett and Lapid appear to
have moved to pre-empt that opposition bill.
Read more Region and World
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
