Likud and Israel Beitenu will join forces
An ideal merging of forces is now taking place between two parties in the Knesset:
In a surprise move that caught even Knesset members from their own parties unawares, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman agreed that their respective Knesset factions, Likud and Yisrael Beytenu, will form a new right-wing super-faction to contest January’s general elections.I'd say they're right, and it symbolizes the importance of unity.
Netanyahu and Liberman formally announced the partnership to the media at Jerusalem’s Dan Panorama Hotel at 8:00 p.m.
“The merger initiative brings us much closer to victory in the elections,” Netanyahu was quoted by Channel 10 News as saying. “It will [also] greatly increase the Israeli prime minister’s ability to govern. In effect, the changing of [Israel’s] system of government begins today.” [...]
Liberman served as the director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office during Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister in the late 1990s, but then set out on his own to form Yisrael Beytenu, a party with particular appeal to voters from the former Soviet Union. Himself an immigrant from Moldova in the late 1970s, Lieberman lives in the West Bank settlement of Nokdim and has charted a political course a little to the right of Netanyahu’s Likud in recent years.
“This move will sharpen the differences between right and left, and it will boost our capacity to govern, and to grapple with the challenges facing Israel,” the Likud’s Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar said Thursday evening, welcoming the news and pledging to support the partnership. Sa’ar clarified that the parties were not merging but, rather, would run together on a joint list for the January 22 elections. “Rather than forming a coalition partnership after the elections,” he said, the parties were “forming an alliance before the elections.”
Such unity, he said, was “good for the State of Israel.”
