The ruling coalition in Israel has become a minority in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, after the departure, Thursday, May 19, of an elected Arab Israeli from the center-left Meretz party, further weakening Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.

With the departure of Israeli Arab MP Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi, a member of the Meretz ("Energy") party, a socialist and secular party, the government coalition in power now has only 59 seats out of the 120 in the Knesset.

Ghaida Rinawie Zoabi explains in a letter addressed to Naftali Bennett and made public on Twitter that she is leaving this coalition because of the "unbearable" violence of recent weeks, referring in particular to the regular clashes between Israeli security forces and Palestinians on the Esplanade des Mosques during Ramadan, or the death of the Palestinian journalist of Al-Jazeera Shireen Abu Akleh, while she was reporting during an Israeli army raid in Jenin, in the West Bank.

>> To read also: "Funeral of Shireen Abu Akleh: investigation into the Israeli police after an international outcry"

"A coalition that harasses the community from which I come"

“I can no longer bear the existence of a coalition that shamefully harasses the community from which I come,” she observes in this letter.

The fragile coalition set up in June 2021 by the ultranationalist Naftali Bennett and the centrist Yaïr Lapid was mainly formed around the desire to put an end to more than twelve consecutive years of reign of Benjamin Netanyahu at the head of the government.

>> To see: "Death of Shireen Abu Akleh: the treatment of journalists in question"

The alliance for this purpose between the religious nationalist right and the center resulted in a motley government coalition bringing together parties of the left, centre-left, right and, for the first time in the history of Israel, a party representing the Arab minority.

This coalition had already lost its narrow majority last month, dropping from 61 to 60 seats after the departure of a member of Yamina, Naftali Bennett's radical right-wing party, due to a controversy over religious issues, judging that the government was not preserving Israel's Jewish identity.

With Reuters

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