The agreement, confirmed by Tourism Minister Yariv Levin to public radio and Lieberman’s spokesman to AFP, will expand Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition to 66 lawmakers and make Lieberman defence minister.
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Lieberman had been critical of Netanyahu’s efforts to patch up relations with Turkey after a deadly 2010 Israeli raid on a Turkish-flagged ship that was protesting against Israel’s Gaza blockade and said the prime minister had lacked a clear strategy on the Iran nuclear issue.
“This raises legitimate questions about the direction it may be heading in and what kind of policies it may adopt”, Toner told reporters.
Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has offered the post of minister of defence to Avigdor Lieberman, leader of Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is our Home), in order to bolster his fragile Likud-led coalition of ultra-orthodox and nationalist parties.
Lieberman, a controversial and deeply divisive figure, replaces the popular former chief of staff Moshe Yaalon, who was pushed out last week as Netanyahu moved to expand his wafer-thin majority. Lieberman himself was born in the former Soviet republic of Moldova and speaks Hebrew with a strong Russian accent. Instead, he talked of a decades-long intermediate period and proposed shifting regional borders to rid Israel of its Arab citizens and incorporate West Bank settlements into Israel.
Religious nationalists from the Jewish Home party already hold key cabinet positions in the government.
Before agreeing to bring in Yisrael Beitenu, Mr Netanyahu had engaged in negotiations with the centre-left Zionist Union, amid global pressure to resume peace talks with the Palestinians.
“Adding Lieberman to the government… threatens to destroy the two-state solution”, warned Saeb Erekat, a senior Palestinian official.
Palestinian officials said that with Lieberman, who lives in a settlement in the occupied West Bank, back in the cabinet prospects for reviving statehood negotiations that collapsed in 2014 had grown dimmer. Yaalon had said that Netanyahu’s government was being overrun by extremists.
Netanyahu vowed to “pursue every avenue for peace”, while Lieberman promised a “reasonable policy”.
The intense backlash thrown Israel’s way is a result of the country’s “desire to destroy itself” as evidenced by “Netanyahu’s steady elimination of any possibility that Israel will separate itself from the Palestinians in the West Bank”. “We do not call for war, but we will fight if it is imposed on us”, Fathi Hammad, a former Hamas interior minister, said in a statement. In the past he has threatened Egypt (saying he would bomb the Aswan Dam on the Nile) and called for the beheading of “traitors” among Arab citizens of Israel. But in the end, the right-wing Netanyahu opted for Lieberman with whom he is more ideologically aligned.
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“I welcome [Mr. Lieberman] and his party members”, the Israeli leader said at a joint news conference.
