TEL AVIV — There’s little joy in witnessing one of the most intriguing political experiments of Israel’s recent history come to an end.
It took one year and one week for the leaders of Israel’s ruling coalition — Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and his senior coalition partner, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid — to announce they could no longer see a way to govern effectively and would dissolve their government. What allowed for the creation of the government in the first place, a decision by ideologically opposed political parties to compromise on their strong ideologies, ultimately led to the government’s undoing.
In Israel, of course, all ruling coalitions have several parties, often with incompatible ideologies. But one feature made this attempt especially bold: The leaders of the country’s most ideologically divergent parties united to keep Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, out of power. That desire brought a Jewish-Arab political partnership and, for the first time in Israel’s history, an independent Islamist Arab party, Raam, into a coalition government.
Raam’s inclusion in that coalition was audacious and eventually fatal, but the precedent it has set is critical. Whether Mr. Netanyahu and the right-religious bloc win the next election or another near tie forces Israel to accept another awkward political arrangement, the option of Arab participation is on the table: One Arab party has shown itself ready and willing to have an active and constructive role in governing Israel. We’ve already seen what can come out of such cooperation: a new political reality of surprising political alliances that forces both Jews and Arabs to consider the coalition’s successes and reconsider their previously long-held positions.
Despite Israel’s traditional political gridlock, this government did manage to get some work done. For starters, it passed a budget, the first in over three years. The government also invested resources…