When the music’s over

With the Knesset about to swear in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government, the press reports Thursday on the game of musical chairs the Likud chief must play with his senior party members in doling out ministerial posts.

“Tension in the Likud [party] reaches its peak,” says Israel Hayom in reporting on the prime minister’s uphill battle to dole out a limited number of portfolios to a demanding group of senior MKs. The meetings Netanyahu held with Likud members took place Wednesday evening after the Knesset approved a measure allowing an additional four ministers in the government, which means more seats for Netanyahu’s musical chairs.

One upset individual may end up being Gilad Erdan, the party’s No. 2 behind Netanyahu. Israel Hayom reports that Erdan asked for the foreign minister portfolio, which is currently held by Netanyahu since Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman resigned last week and joined the opposition.

Erdan even offered to resign from the foreign minister post in case it needed to be given to the head of another party that joined the coalition, Israel Hayom reports, but Netanyahu rejected the proposal. Erdan compromised, suggesting merging the interior and public security portfolios and taking the merged position, but Netanyahu said no.

“Netanyahu took the interior portfolio from him, kicked him out of the committee for appointing judges, gave the education portfolio to [Jewish Home leader Naftali] Bennett and the foreign ministership he’s keeping for himself,” unnamed Likud sources tell Yedioth Ahronoth. “Instead of advancing him to fitting position, he wants to set him back. That’s not how to behave. Netanyahu led him to this place.”

Despite his disappointment, Erdan said behind closed doors which have ears that he doesn’t plan to rebel against Netanyahu if he isn’t in the government. The same anonymous sources in the Likud party tell Yedioth Ahronoth that “Gilad doesn’t disseminate threats and nonsense, he doesn’t have honor games.”

Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, meanwhile, tells Netanyahu that his appointment of Shas party leader Aryeh Deri as economics minister may encounter some legal opposition to which he has no defense, Haaretz reports.

While Weinstein says there’s was no legal restriction keeping Netanyahu from appointing the Shas leader a minister, “it’s a decision which raises legal problems, and that’s in light of his difficult criminal past and the damage to public confidence and the virtue and integrity of government activity, which could be drawn up due to Deri’s appointment as a minister,” Haaretz says, quoting Weinstein’s document published on Ynet.

Concerning other ministers, Haaretz reports that Tzachi Hanegbi will meet with Netanyahu today to hear what post he’ll get, and that Miri Regev, the ranking woman in the Likud party, “went to pray at the Kotel before her meeting with Netanyahu, [and] entered his office around midnight.” For now there’s no immediate word what she received, the paper says.

The pundits barely touch Netanyahu’s predicament to cobble things together at the last minute. Shockingly Israel Hayom, which is occasionally more commentary than reporting, has no punditry whatsoever in Thursday’s paper. Sima Kadmon writes in Yedioth Ahronoth that the procession of would-be ministers into the Prime Minister’s Office late Wednesday night was a march of shame and that inevitably someone’s going to be disappointed.

“It’s hard to see how this march of shame ends today with swearing-in a government,” she writes. “But the Knesset is already prepared for a ceremony and it would be embarrassing if it doesn’t happen. Netanyahu must ensure that everything is shut and nailed down. So that at the last minute some embittered, unsatisfied individual doesn’t jump ship and with a raise of a hand — or not raising of it — prevent [Netanyahu] from the premiership.”

Elsewhere in the news, the new government’s platform causes a stir in Haaretz by not mentioning its commitment to a two-state solution or the establishment of a Palestinian state. Instead, the document submitted to the Knesset says that “the government will advance the negotiation process and will strive for a peace agreement with the Palestinians and with all our neighbors.”

Yedioth Ahronoth reports that after the Knesset voted to expand the number of ministers, a no less important discussion was held on the rising unemployment in southern Israel, particularly the crisis in the city of Dimona. Of the 120 who were in the plenary for the government expansion vote, 113 left the hall for the unemployment discussion, the paper reports.

Labor Party MK Stav Shaffir initiated the debate and was joined by just Sharon Gal, Micki Levi, Dov Khenin, Naftali Bennett, Ofir Akunis and Deputy Knesset Speaker Nahman Shai.