In taking on Amona bill, Kulanu emerges as a vocal paper tiger

When Israel’s 34th government was sworn in on May 14, 2015, observers of national politics saw it as one of the most nationalistic and hawkish in recent memory.

Due to the absence of center-left parties to offset the coalition’s center-right and far-right elements, the new coalition offered no prospect of progress in negotiations with the Palestinians, pundits here and abroad argued. In fact, the government was the first in 20 years in which the prospect of peace talks got no mention at all in any of the coalition agreements.

In addition to the ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud was joined by the Orthodox-nationalist Jewish Home party, the Knesset’s strongest proponent of expanded settlement building.

In the absence of left-wing or center-left factions, observers looked toward the coalition’s second-largest party, Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu, as the only centrist voice — and perhaps moderating force — within the combative coalition.

But if Kulanu was a fig leaf, it was at best a small one, and in the days following the end of the polarized 2015 election campaign, it was unclear whether it could provide any foliage at all to camouflage the new government’s right-wing policies.

First elected to the Knesset on the Likud ticket in 2003, Kahlon became communications minister in 2009, spearheading a reform to drastically cut cellphone service rates before replacing Isaac Herzog (Labor) in January 2011 at the helm of the Welfare and Social Services Ministry, where he continued his consumer crusade and fought the banks to lower their tariffs for customers.

In 2012, Kahlon surprised the political establishment when he announced he would not run in the national elections in 2013, neither as part of Likud nor with any other party, in order to take a break from politics.

Formed in 2014, during the election campaign, his Kulanu party initially focused nearly exclusively on socioeconomic issues, largely shying away from discussing the peace process. As a former Likudnik, Kahlon opposed the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, and, in the rare reference he made to the peace process, said that while he favored a two-state solution in principle, there was no one to talk to on the Palestinian side, so negotiations were a nonstarter.

Throwing down the gauntlet

 

Prior to the coalition’s swearing in last year, and even before its roster was finalized, party representatives were out in full force to position their factions and ensure that the issues they had campaigned on became core principles of the new government.

For Kulanu, that meant guaranteeing its proposed reforms for lowering housing prices and the cost of living became part of the coalition’s fundamental written policy guidelines.

The ultra-Orthodox parties wanted promises that the universal draft bill passed in the last Knesset would be weakened or overturned.

Jewish Home chairman Naftali Bennett was bent on making sure that the coalition supported a resolution to land ownership claims related to some West Bank settlements built on land of questionable provenance.

Foreshadowing the story that has dominated Israeli politics over the past month, the Jewish Home’s Bezalel Smotrich preemptively threatened to “explode” and break apart the coalition within a year and a half if the state acceded to a Supreme Court demand that it demolish a number of structures built on private Palestinian land in the West Bank outpost of Amona.

“The evacuation of the Amona [outpost] and the demolition of houses in Ofra will be the landmine that, if stepped on, will lead to our explosion out of the coalition,” Smotrich said at the time, referring to the Jewish settlement and a nearby outpost 20 kilometers north of Jerusalem.

“I don’t see the Jewish Home party sitting in [government] and partaking in the destruction… of an entire community and the expulsion of its residents,” he said.

But in what for most at the time seemed like a far-off hazard that would only become an issue in a political eon, the Jewish Home had laid down the gauntlet for what this week would become a battle not only for the future of the coalition but also for Israel’s High Court and, some claim, the country’s democratic principles.

‘Protecting the rule of law’

In December 2014, four months before the government was sworn in, then-Supreme Court president Asher Grunis ordered the government to evacuate Amona, the largest outpost in the West Bank and the center of years of legal battles.

The verdict was given in response to an appeal submitted by a group of Palestinians who said they owned the land seized by settlers to build the outpost. “Because the structures were built on private lands, it is impossible to authorize them, even retroactively,” Grunis stated in his ruling, giving the government two years to carry out the order.

On Monday, during a celebratory faction meeting, Kahlon, now finance minister, took credit for blocking a move that sought to retroactively legalize all West Bank outposts, saying it would have harmed the High Court by circumventing that final order to evacuate Amona.

“You cannot protect the settlers without protecting the rule of law,” he told his ebullient fellow party members, hailing an alternative deal reached with the other coalition parties as a “significant step.”

At issue was a clause in the so-called Regulation Bill — which seeks to prevent settlements built on private land from being demolished if they were built with state assistance — that left open the possibility of overruling past court decisions.

Kahlon said he was “proud and happy” that Kulanu had thwarted the efforts, adding that if the courts had been compromised, Israel would not retain a single institution that it can “both fear and respect.”

While the statements certainly exuded a whiff of political opportunism, the fact that Kahlon was actively gloating about his role as the coalition insurgent signified that Kulanu was happy to promote itself as the moderate force some had hoped it would become.

It was true, too. The Jewish Home, bolstered by rightist elements in Likud and fired up by ideological conviction, fought tooth and nail to prevent the demolition order. Had it not been for Kulanu’s opposition, it seems likely that the bill, including the controversial clause, would have gone into law.

Liberal limits

Rather than save Amona from the bulldozers, the 11th-hour compromise reached among coalition members will instead see settlers moved to a nearby parcel of land held by the state under the Absentee Ownership Law.

But Kahlon’s self-styled role as fierce guardian of the rule of law does not yet make him the leading liberal light that some hoped for. While he may roar, on that score he’s still a paper tiger.

He will still support the stripped-down Regulation Bill to legalize outposts built on private Palestinian land, even as Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit said he would oppose the measure as legally indefensible.

Despite the fact that the bill will not save Amona, its original raison d’etre, the Jewish Home party and others in the government still praised the legislation as it passed a preliminary reading on Monday.

Bennett told reporters it was a “historic day,” comparing it to the 1977 election of Menachem Begin’s right-wing Likud after decades of hegemony by the dovish Mapai party.

“Today, the Israeli Knesset shifted from a path to establish a Palestinian state, to a path of extending sovereignty to Judea and Samaria. Let there be no doubt: The regulation bill is what will spearhead the extension of [Israeli] sovereignty,” he said.

Bennett still has his victories to claim. He may have lost the battle with Kahlon over Amona, but it seems he’s won the larger war for the outposts. At least until the High Court steps back in.

Meanwhile, in the year and a half since elections, other than the occasional rumor of a unity government or the distant murmur of some foreign effort to restart the peace talks, there has been no progress toward restarting negotiations, let alone implementing a two-state solution. And that, even with Kulanu’s newly bleeding heart, doesn’t look likely to change.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.