Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a long-standing tradition. On Sundays, after the weekly Cabinet meeting, he holds a meeting with the heads of the coalition parties for political “maintenance work.” It’s a very small forum, because Netanyahu’s coalition is so narrow, 61 out of 120 Knesset seats. Apart from him, as chairman of the Likud, the forum has just three other party leaders.
On Nov. 22, just three days after the state budget for 2015-2016 passed, the mood at this meeting was decidedly different. There was a sense that the government was entering a new phase. By making it past the budget test, the Netanyahu coalition seemed to have ensured its survival until late 2016 at least. According to most political scenarios raised over the past few months, this should have been when the process of expanding the coalition to include the Zionist Camp began, possibly at the expense of HaBayit HaYehudi. But conditions for this are not yet in place. Netanyahu has made every effort to ensure that forming a unity government remains a viable option ever since he formed his cobbled together coalition, but on Nov. 22 he ostensibly put an end to all the rumors that this was on the horizon. At his weekly meeting of coalition leaders, he assured HaBayit HaYehudi chair Naftali Bennett that he has no plans to drop the party from his coalition.
Why “ostensibly”? Because a promise like that, coming from Netanyahu, isn’t worth much, especially when it comes to Bennett. The prime minister will have no qualms about getting rid of HaBayit HaYehudi the first political chance he gets, and Bennett is well aware of that.
Nevertheless, this particular promise at this particular juncture is, in fact, important. It tells us something about Netanyahu’s political constraints and his plans for the future. Netanyahu realizes that bringing the Zionist Camp into the coalition is impossible at the moment. Internal struggles within the Labor Party, the main partner of the Zionist Camp, are only intensifying; also, there is no assurance that his partner for such a move, Labor Party Chairman and Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog, will remain in power for long.
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