Under the agreement, Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beitenu party will join Netanyahu’s coalition, adding five lawmakers to his previously wafer-thin parliamentary majority. A government official confirmed both sides have reached an agreement. As Israel’s defense minister, he will be responsible for overseeing military policy and handling delicate security matters with global allies whom he has antagonized in the past.
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Netanyahu’s coalition now includes all of the right-wing parties and excludes the left-wing parties.
Moshe Leon, a representative for Lieberman, said the deal will be signed later in the day.
Lieberman has held a number of senior Cabinet posts, including stints in the inner Security Cabinet, but he has little military experience, reaching the low rank of corporal during a brief military career decades ago.
Such statements have prompted critics to describe him as a “loose cannon”, a label which makes many people in Israel and overseas nervous when it comes to the sensitive post of defense minister.
Palestinian officials said that with Lieberman, who lives in a settlement in the occupied West Bank, back in the cabinet as defence minister prospects for reviving statehood negotiations that collapsed in 2014 had grown dimmer.
Netanyahu said that “we are joining hands now to march Israel forward”. “We need to pick up an ax and cut off his head”, he said, speaking before the most recent elections.
In 2001, the former nightclub bouncer advocated bombing the Aswan Dam in Egypt, accusing Israel’s Arab neighbour of supporting a Palestinian uprising. He has said that, if named defence minister, he would order the killing of the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, within 48 hours if he did not accept Israel’s demands for the return of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers killed in Gaza in 2014.
Former Prime Minister and Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Channel 10, “What has happened is a hostile takeover of the Israeli government by unsafe elements”. He is Mr. Zigzag. But it is the office of Minister of Defense that has been his longtime dream.
He split with Netanyahu a year later, starting the Yisrael Beiteinu party in 1999. He has twice served as Netanyahu’s foreign minister, in one instance embarrassing Netanyahu by arguing against the establishment of a Palestinian state in a speech at the United Nations.
The defence portfolio is an important one in Israel and for the occupied Palestinian territories, as it runs civilian affairs in the West Bank.
Hanan Ashrawi, a PLO Executive Committee member, has criticized the addition of Liberman to the government.
Even with this shift further to the right, Netanyahu insists his support for a two-state solution has not waned. “Israel should learn the true lesson from making peace because there can be no peace and no stability in the region unless the Palestinian cause is resolved”.
“I am committed to peace with the Palestinians, my policy hasn’t changed”, he said Wednesday.
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Netanyahu vowed that his new government will “pursue peace with Palestinians”, whilst “ensuring the security of Israeli citizens”.
