Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a country with as many enemies as Israel cannot afford a weak ruling party, after polls ahead of Tuesday's elections showed a slide in his support.
Two polls on Friday showed the right-wing bloc winning a slim parliamentary majority of 63 out of 120 seats, with Netanyahu's Likud-Beitenu group on course to be the largest party in the Knesset, albeit with eroding support.
Iran, Hezbollah and the Islamist Hamas movement, which controls the Palestinian Gaza Strip, were all following the election, Netanyahu said.
"(They) want to know one thing, whether the ruling party has grown or shrunk. They want a weak Israel, a divided one and the most challenged country in the world must not be divided," he told Israeli Channel Two television.
He said dealing with Iran's nuclear ambitions will be his priority.
Latest Polls showed Netanyahu's party winning between 32 and 35 seats. Labour is poised to win 16 or 17 seats and Jewish Home 12 to 15.
Under Israel's system, parties win a number of seats based on the percentage of votes they receive. No party has ever won an outright majority in the 120-seat Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The leader of the party with the best chance of cobbling together a majority is tapped by the President as Prime Minister and gets the first chance to form a coalition.
The winner of Tuesday's election will have six weeks to put together his coalition. Netanyahu has sent mixed signals in interviews, saying that he wants a broad government to ensure stability but also saying that partners will have to accept his policies.
Netanyahu's government would have to rely on smaller parties for its survival.
Those parties are likely to include Netanyahu's natural allies, the pro-settlers Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home), led by Naftali Bennett, , which has been surging in the polls and the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism.
But according to commentators, Netanyahu might seek a partnership with at least one centrist party. The likely candidates would be former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni's new party Hatnuah (The Movement) and Yesh Atid (There is a Future), another newcomer led by former TV talk-show host Yair Lapid.
Both candidates have promised to drive a hard bargain. Livni said she would join Netanyahu only if there are serious peace efforts and she is given a key role.
"I will not sit in a government that will continue the stalemate," she said.
Lapid has indicated more flexibility, focusing his campaign primarily on the plight of Israel's struggling middle class. But he said that he would not be a "fig leaf" for an extremist government.
In interviews on Friday, the 63- year-old Netanyahu said he would not give in to calls to halt or reverse his settlement drive and said a strong ruling party would be better able to deal with international pressure.
“I think that many recognize that while there are differences inside Israel, there is a common acceptance that the so-called settlement blocs will remain part of Israel in any settlement, and that’s where the majority of construction is taking place, » he told The Jerusalem Post.
Asked whether immediately after the elections he would put a diplomatic initiative on the table, and what he knew of any initiative by the Europeans to present a new peace plan, Netanyahu talked more about explaining Israel’s position to the world than presenting any proposal of his own.
There would surely be “many initiatives,” and “we’ll have an important task in trying to tell the truth to the world,” he said. That truth, he explained, was that the settlement issue was not the core of the PalestinianIsraeli conflict, nor was the Palestinian issue the core of instability in the Middle East.
“The core of the conflict is the persistent refusal of the Palestinians to recognize the Jewish state in any boundary,” he said.
He responded to sharp criticism attributed to US President Barack Obama this week by US columnist Jeffrey Goldberg by telling that he and Obama “have our differences, especially on the best way to achieve and advance a defensible peace with the Palestinians.
“By the way, these differences between American presidents and Israeli prime ministers are not new,” he said. “They go back to the founding of the state.”
“I am confident that President Obama understands that only a sovereign Israeli government can determine what Israel’s interests are,” he said, referring to the quotation attributed to Obama that Israel under Netanyahu doesn’t know what its own best interests are.
by: Maureen Shamee
EJP
