TEL AVIV, Israel — After years in Israel’s political wilderness, small dovish parties that support Palestinian statehood are back in government. But they are finding their influence is limited, with coalition partners who support Jewish West Bank settlement showing little appetite for compromise and the country’s decades-long occupation churning on.
The parties are having to rein themselves in as hopes for a Palestinian state slip further away under their watch, with settlement construction booming and peace talks a distant memory. Nonetheless, the left-leaning lawmakers say their presence in the coalition is important and that the alternative is worse.
“Unfortunately, this is not the government that will sign a peace agreement with the Palestinians,” said Mossi Raz, a lawmaker from the dovish Meretz party, which is part of the coalition. “We are not a fig leaf. We are making our voices heard. But our power is meager.”
Israel’s coalition government, formed in June after a lengthy political crisis, is a fractious collage of parties from across the political spectrum bound by the goal of keeping former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out of power. The parties agreed to put aside contentious issues like the country’s 50-plus-year occupation of territories that Palestinians want for their state, choosing instead to focus on less divisive issues like the pandemic, the economy and the environment.
Yet the occupation grinds on. Under the current government, Israel has moved ahead on building thousands of homes for settlers in the West Bank. Its defense minister has outlawed six Palestinian rights groups, alleging links to a militant faction. Radical settlers have stepped up violent attacks on Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, as Israeli soldiers stand by or assist the settlers. Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who once headed the country’s main settler lobbying group, rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, and Palestinians remain pessimistic about the future.
Israel’s two center-left parties, Labor and Meretz, spent years in the opposition. It’s been a decade for Labor and more than twice that long for Meretz.
Labor had made resolving the conflict with the Palestinians a core issue when it was in power in the 1990s — even as settlement construction continued, as it has under all Israeli governments for the past 54 years.
In the mid-1990s, a Labor-led government that also included Meretz signed interim peace agreements with the Palestinians known as the Oslo Accords.
But moving ahead with the agreements stalled when a right-wing government took over in 1996 after a wave of attacks by Palestinian militants, followed by failed peace talks under another short-lived Labor government in 2000 and the outbreak of a Palestinian uprising later that year.
The Israeli electorate shifted to the right, and the political base of Labor and Meretz shrank. Labor, home to Israel’s founding leaders and the country’s ruling party for the first two decades, won just a handful of seats in Israel’s 120-member parliament in recent elections. Meretz dropped from a high of 12 seats in the 1990s to six seats.
Some Labor and Meretz voters bolted to the centrist Yesh Atid, which focuses on economic issues and is the second-largest party in parliament.
Following elections in March, Meretz and Labor agreed to put aside ideological differences to form a coalition led by Yesh Atid, with centrist and right-wing parties, along with one Islamist party, opposed to Netanyahu’s rule. But in the negotiations to forge the coalition, nationalist parties blocked the dovish factions from positions that help set policy on the Palestinians.
