U.S. President Donald Trump, an unconditional ally of Israel, had harsh words to say about the dramatic dissolution of the Knesset last week, which has forced the holding of new general elections in September.
“Israel is all messed up with their election. I mean, that came out of the blue three days ago. So that’s all messed up. They ought to get their act together” Trump said.
These harsh words come after his reaction last week when he said; “Well, it’s too bad what happened in Israel. It looked like a total win for Netanyahu, who’s a great guy, he’s a great guy. And now they’re back… in the election stage. That is too bad. Because they don’t need this. I mean they’ve got enough turmoil over there, it’s a tough place.”
Political pundits are speculating that Washington may postpone again from revealing its peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians.
The Trump Administration has yet to reveal the details of its peace plan but plans to unveil the economic side of its proposal at a conference in Bahrain’s capital of Manama, on June 25-26th.
Israels 21st Knesset was dissolved last week, and new elections were called after the deadline of forming a ruling coalition on March 29th passed, without Netanyahu collecting enough seats to form a right-wing coalition.
Avigdor Lieberman, the president of the political party Israel Beiteinu held back the 5 seats that his party won 5 in this years election. Without them, Netanyahu did not have a majority to properly run a Knesset.
Lieberman’s refusal was because he did want to compromise on a stricter draft law that would increase the number of Orthodox males to serve in the army.
Despite outside pressure by the rest of the Likud parties to join, Lieberman still held his ground by saying ”during the elections, we promised to back Netanyahu as prime minister, and alongside this, we presented a very clear platform: security, immigration, and absorption, religion, and state. The draft of yeshiva students is one of the central issues for Yisrael Beytenu.”
“After the elections, as we promised, we recommended to the president Binyamin Netanyahu as the candidate to form the government. That being said, we did not obligate ourselves to give in to the Likud or to surrender our basic principles. At every appearance, I made before the elections, during the elections, and after the elections, I made it very clear that we won’t make any concessions on the issue of the draft, which was already brought up for the first vote as a compromise,” Liberman said.