Perhaps it can be said that the Coronavirus crisis has claimed its first triumph over a government in apparently causing Kahol-Lavon (Blue and White) party leader Benny Gantz to accede to a coalition agreement with Likud, without forcing the retirement of Israel’s criminally-indicted Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Gantz has declared this a necessity to meet the public health emergency, but this sudden decision has prompted about half of his slate, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party and Moshe Ya’alon’s Telem, to split from Blue and White and go into opposition.
A Times of Israel article reports upon Lapid’s blistering condemnation of Gantz’s act of “fraud” that insulates Netanyahu from the consequences of “corruption,” capitulates to ultra-Orthodox “coercion,” and endangers Israel’s peace treaty with Jordan by permitting the likely annexation of parts of the West Bank. Here’s a sample:
“There is no connection between this government and the word emergency,” Lapid claimed. “Three weeks of negotiations and they talked about rotation [of the prime ministership], about jobs, about another official residence [for the acting prime minister] at the taxpayers’ expense. Instead of fighting the coronavirus, they’re fighting the Supreme Court. Instead of a compensation mechanism to save small businesses, they’re saving Netanyahu from his legal troubles.”