Scraping through with a razor thin majority vote of 60-59, in the 120-member Knesset—Israel’s parliament—a strange new coalition is set to form the government in West Jerusalem. The 49-year-old Naftali Bennet, the incoming PM, is a millionaire businessman in the high-technology sector. He is the extreme right-wing leader of Yamina—which literally means rightwards in Hebrew—the political party that won just 7 seats in the Knesset.
Though Israel is no stranger to coalition governments since its independence in 1948, the coalition which Naftali will lead is surely one of the strangest in Israel’s history. Politically, the coalition stretches across the political spectrum, with deep ideological differences between its eight constituent parties.