After 12 years in office, Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, was deposed on Sunday.
This comes as the country’s parliament gave its support to a shaky coalition government cobbled together by widely disparate anti-Netanyahu forces.
The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, voted by a single vote — 60-59, with one abstention — to install the new government.
In a speech before the confidence vote, Netanyahu’s former aide, Naftali Bennett, who succeeded Netanyahu, hailed his unlikely coalition as an essential antidote to an intractable stalemate.
“We stopped the train before the abyss,” Bennett said. “The time has come for different leaders, from all parts of the people, to stop, to stop this madness.”
The new coalition proposes putting some of the most difficult issues aside in order to focus on rebuilding the economy. But it remains to be seen whether the new government will avoid another stalemate or collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
“The administration in Washington asked me not to discuss our disagreement on Iran publicly, but with all due respect, I can’t do that,” Netanyahu said in his final speech.
He compared the United States’ return to the Iran deal to former US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s refusal to bomb the train tracks leading to Auschwitz when he had the opportunity.
According to Netanyahu, the Jewish people “did not have a voice, a country, or an army” at the time, but they now do”.
Meanwhile, Naftali Bennett, who was sworn in as Israel’s new Prime Minister on Sunday, vowed to maintain former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s policies toward Iran in his address to the Knesset, which came immediately before Netanyahu’s, ahead of a vote to approve a new government under his leadership.
Bennett stated that “returning to the Iran Deal is a mistake that will once again give legitimacy to one of the world’s most violent and dark regimes.
“Israel will not permit Iran to obtain nuclear weapons. Israel is not a party to the agreement and will retain complete freedom of action, he concluded.”
