By Enyichukwu Enemanna
Benjamin Netanyahu who holds the record of Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister on Thursday said he has successfully formed his next government, which is expected to be the most rightwing administration in the history of the Jewish state.
“I have a government in hand,” Netanyahu said in a call with President Isaac Herzog, which comes barely an an hour before the expiration of midnight deadline for him to establish a government.
The new government will be sworn in late next week or in the beginning of the new year, returning Netanyahu to power after 18 months in opposition.
It will be his sixth term as prime minister, extending his more than decade-long dominance over Israeli politics after the country went through five elections in three and half years.
According to coalition agreements already made public, Netanyahu will appoint Bezalel Smotrich, an ardent supporter of Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory, as his finance minister. He will also grant Smotrich’s far-right Religious Zionism group a second ministerial post in the defence ministry, which will give him sweeping administrative controls in the occupied West Bank.
Smotrich is a proponent of the annexation of Palestinian territories and a self-declared homophobe. Most of the international community considers Israeli settlements in occupied territory to be illegal.
Netanyahu is still on trial for charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. He has always maintained his innocence, but legal and political analysts speculate that he may try to halt the trial or have the indictments thrown out entirely, via parliamentary legislation.
Netanyahu has tried to soothe domestic and international fears about his new government, saying that the “status quo” governing religion and state will be upheld and that he, as the longest-serving leader in the country’s history, will be dictating policy.
But others believe he will be constrained by the politics of his coalition.
“He can’t force his will on everything — he has a coalition to maintain and a cabinet to manage,” said Tal Schneider, political correspondent for the Times of Israel. “People like Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are methodical and the direction they want to lead Israel in is clear. I’m also not convinced that Netanyahu necessarily wants to block all these steps either.”
Last month’s poll returned an unexpectedly clear majority for Netanyahu’s Likud party and its Jewish ultra-Orthodox and far-right allies. The result came after Netanyahu brokered the deal that brought Ben-Gvir and Smotrich into an alliance, propelling the pair from the extremist fringe to the mainstream.
