Coalition impossible? 7 things to know for April 14

1. Avigdoor Keyberman: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a clear path to forming a right-wing coalition, but nobody thinks that means it will be easy to cobble together all the parts he needs.

• With Netanyahu banking on both the ultra-Orthodox and the secularist Yisrael Beytenu to put together his coalition, the biggest issue looming is seemingly the effort to legislate regulations concerning the military draft of Haredi conscripts.
• Walla’s Tal Shalev calls the issue, together with other state and religion issues where the two camps will butt heads, the main hurdle in talks: “This is a not-small challenge for Netanyahu and the Haredim before talks even begin.”
• She notes that while in the last government Liberman could (and did) leave and the government still survived with a seat to spare, now his party’s five seats are the difference between a governing coalition of 65 and a lame duck one of 60, making him the key to the whole megillah.
• According to Israel Hayom, Liberman plans on taking his demands even further and demand he be given control of the Interior Ministry, which has traditionally been held by the Shas party.

2. Talking tough: The Ynet news site says Netanyahu, who will kick off talks with the parties this week, plans on starting with Liberman because he is the toughest nut to crack.

• The problem, though, is that Liberman has other plans and is off in Vienna. “Liberman is not hurrying to deal with the issue, and as of now has not put together a negotiation team for talks with Likud,” the paper reports, citing political sources. Talks are thus expected to take time.
• However, Israel Hayom reports that MK Oded Forer is the head of the supposedly nonexistent Yisrael Beytenu negotiating team.
• Forer tells the paper that Liberman will be back on Monday and will convene the party for coalition negotiations right away.
• He tells the paper that Liberman’s demand of the defense minister post (yes, on top of everything else) is the easy part, but guaranteeing that he will have an open check to take down Hamas will be more difficult.
• “It’s going to be tough, and we have several core issues which we will have trouble compromising on,” he says, playing hardball.

3. Let’s get together? Given the potential roadblocks, perhaps it’s not surprising that a unity government test balloon went up in the form of a Channel 12 report claiming that Blue and White No. 2 Yair Lapid was negotiating, or readying to negotiate, with Liberman in Austria to join up with Likud for a three-party security hawk/centrist government that would leave the far-right and ultra-Orthodox in the cold.

• “There is a three-sided readiness” for “a real unity government,” Channel 12 TV’s political analyst Amnon Abramovich claimed.
• According to the TV report, the coalition would advance widely popular legislation, including Liberman’s secular agenda, and take a less hawkish stance on the imminent Israeli-Palestinian peace proposal from US President Donald Trump. It would also be able to maintain better relations with non-Orthodox Diaspora Jews than a right-wing/ultra-Orthodox coalition.
• The unsourced TV report seems highly improbable, although the very idea that Netanyahu might contemplate a unity government could help him negotiate a right-wing coalition from a stronger position if the ultra-Orthodox parties and URWP believe there is even a remote prospect that he might opt for the unity course.
• Both Lapid and Forer deny the report, and Ynet notes that Lapid wasn’t even in Vienna, but rather Paris.

4. No unity necessary: Yedioth Ahronoth columnist Sever Plotzker rejects the idea that a unity government is even possible, saying it would be a Netanyahu government that Blue and White sits in.

• And anyway, who needs unity when everything is going so swimmingly.
• “There’s no need for a unity government to heal the rifts. The 2019 campaign was indeed stormy, but it was carried out almost perfectly, without violence, hateful protests or ethnic or nationalistic incitement,” he writes, apparently forgetting the election that just happened.

5. Opposition opportunities: At the same time, Haaretz’s Amos Harel isn’t very positive about Blue and White leader Benny Gantz’s chances at leading a real opposition, with an emphasis on lead.

• “The coming months will pull Gantz far away from his comfort zone. Lapid has promised to make Prime Minster Benjamin Netanyahu’s life miserable from the opposition benches, but Gantz, despite his military past, isn’t gung-ho about spearheading political battles, on the one hand, or very good at imposing authority, on the other hand,” he writes.
• He may already be facing a challenge from lower down the opposition ranks, with the real left-wing possibly planning to gang up.
• Meretz leader Tamar Zandberg tells the paper that she wants to merge her party with Labor and an Arab party or senior figure from that community.
• “This is the time when there is a chance for things and I intend to help them happen. We need to begin to do this now. Israeli elections are called by surprise and now is a good time to take a step,” she tells the paper.

6. The Labor-Meretz merger isn’t the only failed gambit being tried again: Just days after his $100 million boondoggle unceremoniously smashed into the moon, SpaceIL funder Morris Kahn announced Saturday night that he would be trying again.

• Appearing on Channel 12’s “Meet the Press,” South African-born billionaire Kahn says work on the successor to Beresheet would start Sunday.
  “We started something and we need to finish it. We’ll put our flag on the moon,” he says.
• The craft will be named the paradoxical Beresheet 2, or as Yedioth puts it “Beresheet, Chapter 2,” referring to the biblical book that gave the spacecraft its name.

7. We were like dreamers: Some are still mourning the loss of the first Beresheet though, and waxing poetic on what the moonshot meant for Israel.

• SpaceIL’s Yoav Landsman tweets asking people to let him know how the spacecraft affected them, and many of the replies are touching.

• “Perhaps the lesson we should take from Beresheet is not the fact that it failed, but the fact that we tried at all,” writes ToI’s Melanie Lidman. “That for a moment, we widened our horizons beyond our tiny lives, expanding the diameter of our world to a point 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles) away, joining with millions of people to follow the trajectory of a crazy dream.”
• Haaretz’s Noa Landau, meanwhile, thanks the spacecraft for giving the nation a moment in which Netanyahu and President Reuven Rivlin, in the midst of a bruising political dispute, each tried to soften the blow and promise to forge ahead.
• “How human was this small moment in which two warring leaders each comforted, in their own way, the despondent Israelis,” she writes. “If only this moment had stayed with us for just a little bit longer.”