https://www.jns.org/opinion/meretzs-pilgrimage-to-ramallah/
If anything illustrates the farcical nature of the current makeup of the government in Jerusalem, it’s the parley in Ramallah on Sunday evening between Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas and a delegation of Israel’s Meretz Party, headed by Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz.
Horowitz didn’t even bother to obscure his exit from a meeting of the ministerial committee on fighting the coronavirus, which hadn’t convened since the end of August, in order to make his appointment at the Muqata. But then, his role as the country’s most senior official charged with handling the pandemic is secondary to his true ambition: Palestinian statehood by way of an Israeli withdrawal to the 1947 armistice lines.
Ditto for the two Meretz members—Regional Cooperation Minister Esawi Frej and faction head Knesset member Michal Rozin—who accompanied him. The purpose of their little gathering was twofold.
Firstly, it was to show their voters that, despite their party’s sitting in a coalition with and under politicians traditionally from the right, it’s still committed to Israeli capitulation at all costs. Secondly, it was to signal to Abbas that he has the power to achieve their shared goal.
In one respect, he’s correct. Every party in the coalition possesses the leverage to cause it to fall.
But just like any of the strange bedfellows able to use this option as a threat, none has the desire to follow through with it. They all realize that in such an event, what awaits them on the “day after” is political exile.
In the meantime, each enjoys a degree of freedom from facing the electorate for a fifth time in two-and-a-half years. And Meretz is milking its ability to go against the wishes of Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and discuss policy with Holocaust denier Abbas—a “pay for slay” terrorism instigator who’s been refusing to engage in talks with Israel since 2014.