Gaza War Shatters Israel’s New Internal Peace
A week ago, an Arab party was set to be kingmaker of Israel's new government. Now Jews and Arabs are battling in the streets.
Flare-up.
Photographer: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images
As Hamas’s deadly rockets fly into Israel and the Israeli military hits back with air strikes inside Gaza, it’s hard to remember that just a week ago, after two years of stalemate, it seemed that Israel might finally have a new government. And that the kingmaker, ironically, would be Raam, a small, Arab, anti-Zionist political party.
With Israel’s election results evenly divided between those supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and those seeking to unseat him (the “change bloc,” as they’re called), Raam’s four Knesset would have been enough to determine the balance. Netanyahu had been courting Raam, and its chair, Mansour Abbas, for months, but apparently to no avail. Abbas announced his intention to join with the centrist candidate Yair Lapid and right-of-center Naftali Bennett to put the change bloc in power. Israeli Arabs were about to determine the outcome of elections in the Jewish state.