Israeli lawmakers replace long-serving Netanyahu as prime minister

In an era-ending vote, Israeli lawmakers on Sunday approved a new government, sweeping aside the country’s longest-serving leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and installing a fellow right-wing nationalist, Naftali Bennett, as the country’s new prime minister.

The narrow vote by the 120member Knesset, or parliament, ushered in a ruling coalition that was cobbled together from wildly disparate political parties with little in common beyond a shared desire to expel Netanyahu from the office he had held for the last 12 years.

Bennett, the new prime minister, heads a small party determined to thwart Palestinian statehood and maintain Israeli control over most of the occupied West Bank. But his government includes parties from Israel’s left and centre, and also marks a historic first: participation in the ruling coalition by an Islamist party representing Palestinian citizens of Israel.

Because of fundamental disagreements over the potential creation of a Palestinian state alongside the Israeli one, the government is likely to try instead to concentrate on domestic issues, including passing a national budget and embarking on an economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Bennett is taking the top spot as part of an unusual agreement with the head of the coalition, centrist politician Yair Lapid, who would normally have assumed the country’s leadership. In order to woo Bennett into his camp, Lapid offered to split the four-year term as prime minister in half, with Bennett going first. Lapid will serve now as the foreign minister.

Netanyahu, who is on trial for corruption, first became prime minister for three years in the 1990s and had held the top office again since 2009. That has made him the longest-serving Israeli leader, surpassing the longevity even of the country’s first prime minister and primary founder, David Ben Gurion.

In recent years, many Israelis had become alarmed by an accelerating slide into autocracy by Netanyahu, who has denounced criminal court proceedings against him as a witch hunt and has tirelessly sought to undermine the legitimacy of judges, prosecutors and investigators.