On Sunday, Israel’s President Reuven Rivlin asked the Blue and White party’s Benny Gantz to try to form a governing coalition. A few days beforehand, Gantz had announced his interest in forming a unity government together with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, on the condition that it also include the bloc of Arab parties known as the Joint List. Haviv Rettig Gur explains the logic behind this gambit:
[Gantz] appears to have calculated that for the first time in their history, Israel’s Arab political factions, fresh from an unprecedented fifteen-seat win at the ballot box, had finally come to play ball in the hard-nosed game of Israeli coalition politics. No more mere complaints from the sidelines, posturing over symbols, or campaigns consumed by shows of defiance of the Jewish majority. The Joint List chairman, Ayman Odeh, yearns to make himself and his community a force to be reckoned with in the halls of the Knesset—and the deadlock among the Jews has given him the opportunity to do just that.
One signal of a political faction’s seriousness can be found in its sober willingness to prioritize its many goals and to sacrifice less-important ones for those that matter more. That may sound obvious, but a party like Balad, one of the four factions that make up the Joint List, had proved over the years that it could not look past its obeisance to radical Palestinian nationalism. Its members have joined the 2010 Turkish flotilla to Gaza, praised a murderer of Israeli children, and even spied for the Lebanese terror group Hizballah.
But [if Gantz] becomes prime minister, he remains dependent on those Arab votes, including from political factions that despise everything he stands for, to appoint ministers and approve budgets. . . . Odeh, of the formerly communist Ḥadash faction, could conceivably support Gantz’s government for the duration of a term—and hold him politically dependent the entire time. Balad, [by contrast], is a far less reliable partner. . . . A Balad-backed Gantz is a Gantz who by definition must quickly find new partners.
Read more on Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/how-the-supposedly-inept-benny-gantz-found-a-strategic-path-almost-to-the-top/