Likud joins with defunct party to sidestep legal challenges to Jewish Home deal
Jewish Home MK Eli Ben Dahan, now technically a member of expired platform Achi, will temporarily run with Likud before rejoining his own party after elections
Raoul Wootliff is a former Times of Israel political correspondent and Daily Briefing podcast producer.
Presenting its Knesset slate to the Central Elections Committee on Thursday evening, the Likud party revealed a creative solution to potential legal problems created by a political deal it made a day earlier with the Jewish Home party.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s promise to give Jewish Home the 28th spot on Likud’s slate has faced legal challenges from both inside and outside his party, with activists and legal experts questioning the legitimacy of a political party promising to hand over its votes to a candidate of a different party.
In an effort to sidestep such challenges, Likud announced that it will run on a joint ticket with the defunct Achi party, which was founded in the 1990s by former minister Effie Eitam and has been out of the Knesset since 2009. Jewish Home MK Eli Ben Dahan, who is to be given the 28th spot on Likud’s slate, will now run as the solitary member of the party, alongside Likud.
A Likud party official told The Times of Israel that Netanyahu was behind the move. “He’s the magician, no?” the official said, referring to a nickname for the prime minister based on his political craftiness.
It was not clear whether the move would be enough to defeat the petitions filed in Likud’s internal courts and in the Central Elections Committee.
According to the agreement signed Wednesday, Jewish Home’s appointee for the Likud number 28 spot — reserved by the ruling party for a Netanyahu appointee — will be Ben Dahan. In exchange for that sweetener, and a promise of two ministerial posts in a Netanyahu-led coalition, Jewish Home agreed to Netanyahu’s request that it join forces with the extremist Otzma Yehudit party in order to prevent lost votes on the right.
The Likud Secretariat, a powerful party committee that oversees its operations and manages its campaign, formally approved the deal on Thursday evening, despite the appeals against it.
A group of Likud Central Committee members appealed against the agreement to the party’s internal court earlier on Thursday, railing against the “Trojan horse” who would reduce Likud’s parliamentary strength.
The appeal argues that “Netanyahu promised in the agreement [with Jewish Home] that one of the members of Knesset that will be included in the Likud list will be, in fact, a ‘Trojan horse,’ who is not a member of Likud and not bound to Likud’s values. In addition, immediately after the elections, that same ‘Trojan horse’ would be allowed to abandon the faction’s ranks in favor of another faction.”
It asked the court, made up of influential party members, to forbid the move.
A similar appeal was made Thursday to the chair of the Central Elections Committee, Supreme Court Justice Hanan Melcer, by a group of top legal officials. Signed by leading experts on constitutional law, the appeal argues that allowing one party’s lawmaker to run in another party should be seen as a form of election fraud, as it constitutes an agreement between politicians to use votes for one party and artificially deliver them to another.
The appeal argues that the agreement raises “very real concerns that such a commitment is illegal, violating basic principles of elections law and the integrity of election procedures, which is the ‘holy of holies’ of our democracy.”
Netanyahu also promised Jewish Home two ministerial positions in his next coalition if it merged with Otzma Yehudit, whose leaders are self-declared disciples of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, who was banned from the Knesset after one term in the 1980s for racism.
