Netanyahu and Kahlon meet, fail to end broadcaster spat

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon failed to reach a deal Tuesday evening to break the impasse over a new broadcasting authority that has swelled into a public face off threatening the future of the government coalition.

It was the third time in three days the two men have met in an effort to resolve the standoff.

Tourism Minister Yariv Levin also attended the meeting, along with senior officials from the finance and communications ministries.

An official in the Prime Minister’s Office said Netanyahu and Kahlon did agree to continue discussing the matter.

While Kahlon and the premier tried ironing out differences to keep the coalition together, Interior Minister Aryeh Deri wrote on Twitter that he met with Opposition Leader Isaac Herzog at the bar mitzvah of the son of the director of his ministry. Deri said that “in light of the challenges facing the country, Herzog and his party need to join the government.”

Herzog replied to Deri’s tweet, saying that Deri and his Shas party should join a government headed by the Zionist Union. “This is the right solution for Israel.”

Kahlon was spotted talking with Herzog at the same bar mitzvah party, after his meeting with Netanyahu.

The long-simmering crisis escalated last week when Netanyahu backtracked on an agreement with Kahlon to launch the new public broadcasting corporation — set up through a law passed by his previous government in 2014 and slated to replace the old Israel Broadcasting Authority.

Netanyahu has threatened to call early elections if the coalition refuses to cancel reforms advanced by his own Likud party that would shutter the Israel Broadcasting Authority and launch the replacement broadcaster, called “Kan,” by April 30.

The prime minister is reportedly demanding that more of the employees of the existing broadcast authority be given jobs in the new corporation and that there be a delay of one month until the new body begins to operate.

Netanyahu is widely believed to be opposed to the new body because he perceives it as being too left-wing. Netanyahu has long complained of a media hostile to him.

Following the weekly cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office on Sunday, Netanyahu and Kahlon sat down together and spoke to each other for the first time in a week. They met again Sunday evening, but an agreement remained elusive.

If Kahlon refused to scrap the new broadcaster, “we’ll go to elections,” Netanyahu was reported to have told Likud ministers at his home earlier this month.

Kahlon does not want to nix the new corporation, saying such a move would waste massive funds.

Other coalition members have balked at the idea of going to elections, with Deri saying last week that such a move would be “unforgivable.”

At the opening of a coalition meeting on Sunday, Health Minister Yaakov Litzman and MK Moshe Gafni of United Torah Judaism, along with Deri, told the prime minister that they do not want him to hold early elections, according to Hebrew media reports.

In a subsequent public statement that distanced the ultra-Orthodox parties from any unilateral moves by Netanyahu to dissolve the government, the three said, “We will not agree to advance [the date of the elections], and we will have no hand in it.”

The last elections were held in March 2015 and the next elections are not scheduled until late 2019.