Arab List Currently Undecided on Gantz

After meeting Sunday afternoon, the United Arab List did not come to a decision on whether or not to recommend to President Reuven Rivlin that Blue and White head Benny Gantz be chosen by him to form a new government. The party will make its decision later Sunday afternoon or evening. The UAL is set to meet with Rivlin tonight to make its recommendation.

The party was widely expected to recommend Gantz for the job, but numerous MKs in the UAL are opposed to the idea – or at least want to ensure they get real “value” for their decision. In a social media post, party MK Aida Toma-Saliman wrote that Sunday was “the moment of truth for Gantz. Either he is an alternative to Binyamin Netanyahu, or he is a double of Netanyahu. Blue and White is going to have make some significant changes and turn itself in another direction” if it wants the UAL’s support, she wrote.

At a rally featuring Blue and White and other opposition parties several months ago, Toma-Saliman wrote that Blue and White “tried to keep us out. It was only after very heavy pressure by the left that they agreed to allow Ayman Odeh to speak at that rally. In the April campaign he talked about us as the ‘non-Jews,’ and he spoke of how proud he was to return Gaza to the ‘stone age.’” UAL’s voters “did not send us to the Knesset for that kind of government. We and our voters have the same priorities we have always had – the end of the occupation, peace, justice, and true equality. This is what brought a half million voters to the polls – many of them Jews – to vote for us. We are as far away from Netanyahu as you can get,” she wrote.

Earlier, reports said that Gantz had promised the UAL changes in a series of laws in exchange for their recommendation to suggest him for the Prime Minister’s job. Among them is the Kamenitz Law, passed in 2017, which makes it easi