Let’s get it on: 12 things to know for April 17

1. Getting the nod, again: President Reuven Rivlin is set to task Likud head Benjamin Netanyahu with forming a new government later Wednesday, setting him on the path for a record fifth term.

• After Netanyahu gained the backing of 65 MKs, Rivlin said he had no choice but to nominate him.
• The coalition seems all but set with Netanyahu gaining the support of all the right-wing parties he had been counting on, including Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party.
• The two party heads met for the first time since the election Tuesday. In a statement, Yisrael Beytenu says the meeting was held in a “good atmosphere.”

2. The Haredi and the secular can be friends: The Kikar Hashabbat ultra-Orthodox news website reports that Liberman’s people are also holding talks with Haredi politicians. The two sides are diametrically opposed on the military draft law and other issues of state and religion, and are expected to be uneasy bedfellows — if bedfellows at all — in the governing coalition.,

• With coalition talks expected to kick off Thursday, both Yisrael Beytenu and UTJ are posturing to look as tough as possible, threatening that they are fine going to elections again if the other side refuses to cave.
• Meanwhile, Liberman’s people told the ultra-Orthodox party that “if you don’t make us Haredi, we won’t make you secular,” according to the Kan public broadcaster.
• Yedioth’s Ben Dror Yemini writes that with the IDF draft law, at least, most of the public is behind Liberman and not the ultra-Orthodox: “He has a historic opportunity to bring about a change that most support. One hopes he keeps to his word.”
• Israel Hayom columnist Yehuda Shlesinger writes that the negotiations are more a literary novel than a thriller, predicting the sides will come together with little friction.
• “There’s no real tension between the sides, only romance. A classic love story in which one side grabs the other’s pigtails, and then puts on a big kippa and goes to visit his rabbis.”

3. Not just Liberman: Channel 13’s Raviv Drucker calls Liberman the biggest problem Netanyahu has in coalition negotiations, but there are other issues to be ironed out as well.

• Drucker says the easiest party to mollify will be the United Right-Wing Parties, which is demanding the education and justice portfolios: “A reasonable solution will be that URWP will get education and justice will stay with Likud.”
• He also claims that Kulanu will demand the Economy Ministry (which is different from the Finance Ministry, which it holds in the outgoing government), and will likely get it as part of a merger with Likud.

4. Fake blues: At a celebration Tuesday night, Netanyahu continued to lash out at the media, specifically Channel 12 reporter Amnon Abramovich who said over the weekend that the prime minister would be punished with another year in jail if he makes Likud apparatchik Yariv Levin justice minister.

• “Over the weekend I watched TV and thought I misheard. Scholarly analysts were sitting in the studios and making explicit threats against me, that I will pay a personal price. I’m not afraid of threats,” he said.
• Abramovich has since said he was joking and the supposed “threat” has failed to gather any traction outside of right-wing media.
• Netanyahu earlier called a Ynet report that justice officials were looking into opening a probe against him over a decade-old stock sale “fake news,” and police as well issued a rare statement denying the report.

5. New Right, no fight: Tuesday also saw Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked give up their recount appeals and bow out.

• Israel Hayom reports that Shaked told those gathered at a pre-Passover toast Wednesday that she is taking a break from politics.
• In a post on Facebook, Bennett takes the blame for the loss. “ I did the best I could,” he says.
• That excuse might not hold water with the loan guarantors now holding the bag for some NIS 3 million in campaign spending that won’t be recouped from state coffers (candidates get money back based on how well they do), according to Haaretz.
• “New Right stated that the party made the risks clear to its guarantors in advance, and said that this money accounted for the bulk of the party’s campaign financing,” the paper reports.
• In Yedioth, columnist Amichai Etieli says the real losers are the public, who he thinks could have benefited from the two right-wing politicians: “Bennett and Shaked will do fine on the outside. They and their families won’t lose a thing if they decide to go into the private sector and make money for themselves. The problem is that they had brought an important and rare energy into public life, and Israelis will now miss out.”

6. Aid, we don’t need no stinking aid: Netanyahu’s reelection has some in the US, particularly the left wing of the Democratic party (ok, really just Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes), are talking about cutting off aid to Israel as a result.

• While the Americans may see it as a punishment, some in Israel also think it’s time for a weaning.
• “The political price of accepting US aid remains onerous. It limits Israel’s options and flexibility with respect to defense procurement, especially when it comes to its own industries,” Jonathan Tobin writes for Israel Hayom. “It also creates the impression that Israel is a beggar that requires Washington’s assistance in order to defend itself. That encourages resentment of Israel on the part of Americans who don’t like foreign aid even when, as in Israel’s case, the United States gets a great deal in return.”
• On Twitter, Haaretz’s Anshel Pfeffer surmises that US defense contractors sucking at the teat of the aid will be loath to lose that money no matter what Netanyahu’s politics are.

The dependence on subsidized US weapons system is bad both for Israel's economy and military but it won't end because Lockheed and Boeing will fight for their $3.8 billion subsidy per annum and the US armed forces for the testing, R&D and glitch-fixing provided by the IDF

— Anshel Pfeffer אנשיל פפר (@AnshelPfeffer) April 16, 2019

7. Keeping Israel safe from critics: Americans are getting a fresh look at Israel’s unfriendliest face thanks to two high profile cases of the country booting, or giving the runaround to, activists.

• In one case, a court upholds the deportation of Human Rights Watch Israel/Palestine director Omar Shakir, over what it says is his support for a boycott of Israel.
• “The decision sends the chilling message that those who criticize the involvement of businesses in serious abuses in Israeli settlements risk being barred from Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank,” says Tom Porteous, deputy program director at Human Rights Watch, in a statement.
• The New York Times writes that Shakir’s deportation “comes as part of a broader Israeli clampdown against the international movement to boycott Israel, a campaign that the government, empowered by the staunch support of President Trump, says delegitimizes the country and smacks of anti-Semitism.”
• Laura Mandel, who works for the Abraham Fund promoting coexistence between Jews and Arabs, and not seen as controversial at all in mainstream Israeli conversation, is also interrogated at the airport, with her belongings confiscated as she left the country.
• According to Haaretz, security agents asked her, “Why would an American Jew be interested in relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel?”
• “There must be an end to the thought police and the abuse of people entering and leaving the country,” the paper urges in its lead editorial.

8. Hopeless and angry in Gaza: After weeks of quiet, Gaza is back in the spotlight, with new focus on the humanitarian crisis there and threats of more violence.

• Ynet reports that Israel military officials briefed security coordinators of towns near the border on the increasingly dire situation in the Strip, including “prostitution, an increase in suicides, and youth leaving.”
• Several Israeli news sites reported on a video going around Palestinian social media threatening an attack on the Eurovision song contest if the blockade on Gaza is not eased. It’s not clear who the threat originated with and if it is being treated seriously.

9. I wanna jam with you: In the Washington Post, human rights attorney Noura Erakat writes that Palestinian youth are actually hopeful despite all the problems.

• “Far from destitution, the grim status quo is fueling a politics of hope among Palestinian youths in particular,” she writes.
• “Netanyahu’s electoral victory is without doubt another painful turn in the chapter of the Palestinian struggle for freedom. But if current trends in the United States and Palestine are an indicator, a new generation of activists and young people is offering grounds for hope,” she writes.
• Haaretz’s Amos Harel notes that both Israel and Hamas are managing to keep things on a low flame with a prison hunger strike, the latest possible powderkeg, defused.
• He reports that the solution to the strike, over cellphone jammers, was reached under pressure from Egypt, which saw it imperiling the larger drive for a long-term ceasefire.
• “The bottom line is that the agreement achieved does not look like any special achievement for Israel, more like a compromise that the sides were forced to reach under Egyptian pressure and the threat that the strike would prevent the main goal from being achieved: quiet in the Strip,” he writes.

10. Fiscal shock: A report by the World Bank Wednesday calls on Israel to curb restrictions on the enclave and also warns that funds withheld by Israel over payments to attackers and their families has the Palestinian economy “facing a severe fiscal shock.”

• According to Channel 12, a senior Palestinian Authority figure is raising fears that the economic situation could aid Hamas in taking over the West Bank.
• “We fear that Hamas will exploit the deteriorating economic situation of our officers and members of the security forces, and pay money to buy them off,” the official is quoted saying at a closed meeting this week.

11. 2 Beresheet 2 fast: Less than a week after its first lander crashed into the moon, SpaceIL is forging ahead into the final frontier, setting a two-year timetable for its terribly named Beresheet 2 lander to land where no Israeli hunk of metal has landed (in one piece) before.

• The non-profit also gives some preliminary data on what went wrong, confirming that a sensor malfunctioned, setting off a chain reaction that shut off the main engine. By the time it fired back up again, the lander was too close to the ground to land softly.
• “We still don’t have an assessment as to why the malfunction happened,” SpaceIL CEO Ido Anteby tells reporters at a briefing. “We still haven’t examined the decision-making, just the sequence of events. The spacecraft tried to turn on the engine and it was shut down again. We can see five or six attempts to turn on the engine.”

12. Fourth estate, Pop. 4,024: The Seventh Eye reports on some numbers released by the Government Press Office on the thousands of press-card holding journalists working in Israel.

• The organization with the most journalists is Yedioth and its various daughter websites and publications, with 471 press card holders. Kan runs second with 402.
• Israel Hayom, which is the most read Israeli publication, has just 147 journalists, according to the report.
• A total of 4,024 people held press cards in 2018, down sharply from the 5,472 counted in 2010.
• “The numbers tell an unmistakable story,” the site notes. “The media industry is continuing to be consolidated.”