Praising his “extraordinary abilities and vast experience” and denouncing the “severe personal injustice” of the court decision, the statement said Mr. Deri would continue to play “a central and significant role,” without elaborating.
“We will act in any legal way that is available to us and without delay to correct the injustice and the severe damage caused to the democratic decision and the sovereignty of the people,” the statement added.
Mr. Deri, the leader of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, was appointed to the powerful positions of interior minister and health minister in the government that was sworn in barely three weeks ago. The outcome of Israel’s fifth election in under four years, it is the most far-right and religiously conservative ruling coalition in Israel’s history. Though Mr. Netanyahu promised a full, four-year term of stable government, its first weeks are proving tumultuous.
“If Prime Minister Netanyahu disobeys the court order and does not terminate Deri’s term in government — though I can hardly imagine such a scenario — then we are in a constitutional crisis of a sort we have never encountered before,” said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research center in Jerusalem.
If Mr. Netanyahu complies with the court’s decision and terminates Deri’s term as minister, Mr. Plesner said, “then we are entering a new political chapter in the short life of this new government, with a political complication that could perhaps serve as a destabilizing factor.”
Shas is the second-largest party in the coalition led by Mr. Netanyahu’s conservative Likud and a key partner for its survival, making any decision on the party and Mr. Deri fraught for Mr. Netanyahu. The 11 seats that Shas won in the November elections make up a crucial part of the government’s majority of 64 in the 120-seat Parliament.
Another Shas minister, Yaakov Margi, told Israel’s public radio hours before the court ruling on Wednesday that “Netanyahu knows that if Deri is not in the government, there is no government.” He later softened the threat, saying that he personally would recommend that Shas withdraw from the government if Mr. Deri could not be a minister.
Isabel Kershner
Source link
