Ahmed Tibi
Ahmed TibiKobi Richter/TPS

Leaders from the predominantly Arab Joint List party voted Sunday to recommend Blue and White party chairman Benny Gantz as prime minister.

The party, which is made up of four independent factions – the Arab nationalist Balad faction; the communist Hadash party; Ta’al, and the Islamist United Arab List [Ra’am] – voted to accept chairman Ayman Odeh’s recommendation that the Joint List recommend to President Reuven Rivlin that Benny Gantz be given the mandate to form a new government.

“We will make history today, we will do what is needed to oust Netanyahu,” said MK Ahmed Tibi, noting that the decision to recommend Gantz broke with a long standing precedent among Arab parties not to recommend Zionist party leaders for prime minister. No Arab party has explicitly endorsed a candidate for the premiership since 1992.

The decision ensures that Gantz, whose Blue and White party will be the largest in the 22nd Knesset, with 33 seats, has the largest number of MKs recommending him as premier. Gantz is expected to secure the support of 44 left-wing and center-left MKs, and with the support of the Joint List will have the recommendations of 57 lawmakers in the next Knesset.

Incumbent Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, by comparison, whose Likud party is expected to receive 31 seats when the final results for last week’s election are submitted this Wednesday to the president, has the support of just 55 MKs-elect; six short of the 61-seat majority needed to rule.

Earlier on Sunday, MK and former Defense Minister Avidgor Liberman, chairman of the Yisrael Beytenu party, said that his party would not recommend either Gantz or Netanyahu as premier, and expressed concern Gantz could try to form a government with the Joint List.

“The Joint List [MKs] are enemies,” said Liberman. “They aren’t political rivals,’ the former Defense Minister continued, contrasting the Joint List with haredi lawmakers, whom he described as ‘rivals’, but not ‘enemies’.

“Wherever they will be, we will be on the other side. I don’t want to waste words, but I remember how this same Ayman Odeh,” the chairman of the Joint List, “boycotted Shimon Peres’ funeral, and that same week visited Yasser Arafat’s grave in Ramallah. There is in the Israeli Knesset a party which wants to destroy us from within, and as far as I’m concerned, they’d be better off in the parliament in Ramallah, not in the Israeli Knesset.”

Even with the Joint List, Benny Gantz will be unable to reach the 61 MKs needed for a majority without Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party, or at least one of the right-wing or religious parties currently backing Netanyahu.