{"id":192503,"date":"2009-03-24T17:40:00","date_gmt":"2009-03-24T22:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/03\/24\/labor-joins-israeli-coalition\/"},"modified":"2009-03-24T17:40:00","modified_gmt":"2009-03-24T22:40:00","slug":"labor-joins-israeli-coalition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2009\/03\/24\/labor-joins-israeli-coalition\/","title":{"rendered":"Labor Joins Israeli Coalition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Benyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak have <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reuters.com\/article\/worldNews\/idUSTRE52N19T20090324?feedType=RSS&amp;feedName=worldNews\">come to an agreement for a coalition government<\/a>, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.jpost.com\/servlet\/Satellite?cid=1237727528096&amp;pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull\">the Labor Party central committee voted to approve the deal<\/a>, so it appears that there is now a governing coalition is Israel.<\/p>\n<p>It appears that Netanyahu <a href=\"http:\/\/www.haaretz.com\/hasen\/spages\/1073530.html\">gave labor much more than just the Defense portfolio<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>5 Cabinet posts, including the Defense and Trade and Industry Ministries.<\/li>\n<li>2 Deputy ministry positions.<\/li>\n<li>A fairly liberal economic policy, which includes:<\/li>\n<ul>\n<li>Money for retraining workers<\/li>\n<li>Funding for child care <\/li>\n<li>A commitment not to cut salaries in the public sector<\/li>\n<li>A commitment to increases in benefits for pensioners<\/li>\n<li>An increased political role for the Histadrut, Israel&#8217;s organization of trade unions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s clear from this deal that Netanyahu was desperate to have this, given Labor&#8217;s poor showing (only 13 seats), and it also represents a return by the Labor Party to the interests of, well, (small l) labor, which may go a long way towards distinguishing themselves from Kadima.<\/p>\n<p>I think that Netanyahu could have gone right for the coalition, but the idea of actually having to follow up on his hard line rhetoric during the campaign scares him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Benyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak have come to an agreement for a coalition government, and the Labor Party central committee voted to approve the deal, so it appears that there is now a governing coalition is Israel. It appears that Netanyahu gave labor much more than just the Defense portfolio: 5 Cabinet posts, including the &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1000,1159,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-192503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elections","category-israel","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192503"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=192503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/192503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=192503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=192503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}