Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is planning to form a unity government with the Labor party and leave the Jewish Home in the opposition, a source familiar with the coalition talks told Arutz Sheva on Wednesday.
According to the source, Netanyahu is planning a political trick on the Jewish Home. “Something smells wrong,” the source said, adding that Netanyahu invited Bennett to a meeting this week but beat around the bush and only spoke about marginal issues, choosing to avoid subjects as ministerial portfolios and how to include the Jewish Home in the coalition.
The same source told Arutz Sheva that he updated the members of the Jewish Home on the goings on and asked them, in secret, to be prepared for the possibility that they will be in the opposition and not in the coalition as Netanyahu had promised.
He further said that in the coming hours, Netanyahu will try to be clever with the Jewish Home in order to look like “he was the one who proposed that they be partners in the coalition but was refused. Over the next few hours or few days Netanyahu will make a decision in the case of the Jewish Home.”
A source in the Jewish Home responded by saying, “Netanyahu’s tricks are known and recognized both in Israel and abroad, and we will not be surprised if this time he will again try to keep the Jewish Home out of the coalition, but we will work for our voters also from [the opposition].”
The revelation comes amid tensions between the Likud and the Jewish Home, which began earlier Wednesday when Jewish Home MK Ayelet Shaked charged that Likud is not keeping its promises to approach Jewish Home first as a coalition partner.
“Right now, the Likud is not keeping its word, its word to the electorate and all of Israel was that Jewish Home ‘will be the first partner’ to which it would turn for coalition negotiations,” Shaked told Army Radio. “I am explaining that this is not happening.”
“I think that, ultimately, it is Likud’s responsibility to make that happen,” she added.
While Bennett and Netanyhau met for the first time since elections just two days ago, on Tuesday evening it was reported that Kulanu chairman Moshe Kahlon was the first to be brought into the government and had been guaranteed the Finance Ministry.
Likud MK Yariv Levin responded to Shaked’s criticism later on Wednesday, saying that Bennett would be a “senior minister” in the new government, but that was because Netanyahu wanted him in the government – and not because Likud “owed” Jewish Home anything.
