Deri says hes pushing for PMs alternative role in post court

Deri says he’s pushing for PM’s alternative role in post-court talks with Netanyahu

Shas leader Aryeh Deri is pushing for the nomination as deputy prime minister in ongoing talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, days after the ultra-Orthodox party leader was barred from serving as cabinet minister by the Supreme Court over his repeated criminal convictions.

According to a Channel 12 report on Thursday, Deri and Netanyahu have been holding talks and pondering their next move, hoping to find an alternative senior role for the Shas leader, who had been appointed health and home secretary in the new government, first sworn in last month. According to the report, Netantahyu and Deri want to have a plan before Deri officially resigns, as requested by Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara earlier on Thursday, or is fired, but disagreements between the two remain over the best way forward.

Public broadcaster Kan reported that Netanyahu plans to fire Deri sometime over the weekend and must announce a replacement.

According to Channel 12’s report, Deri has asked to be appointed deputy prime minister and insisted on his continued participation in the security cabinet, while Netanyahu has proposed a number of other avenues, including the role of speaker of the Knesset, which Deri is said to have turned down. According to the TV report, the prime minister has also offered to pass legislation that would limit the Supreme Court’s right to intervene in ministerial appointments – a move the court could also block – while the coalition scrambles to find a way to to circumvent the court’s decision on Wednesday and give Deri a senior position.

Making Deri Deputy Prime Minister is also a long way off, and implementing it would be complex and risky, as it could result in Deri even being disqualified as a member of the Knesset.

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Appointing Deri as deputy prime minister would require the government to table a motion of no confidence in itself and form a new power-sharing government. However, since the High Court has never ruled on whether a convicted felon can be appointed to the role, the matter will likely come before the judges.

The court could make the appointment subject to a decision by the Central Elections Committee on whether Deri’s conviction for tax offenses last year – which earned him a suspended plea bargain – contained “moral reproach”. Such a designation would mean that he cannot hold public office for seven years.

In such a scenario, which is not unlikely, Deri would automatically cease to be a member of the Knesset and be demoted even further.

The Deputy Prime Minister role was created in 2020 by Netanyahu and Benny Gantz for their short-lived power-sharing government and was also used by the subsequent government led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, which was replaced last month. Netanyahu and his new hard-line government have vowed to scrap the legal option of an alternative prime minister, arguing that there should be only one national leader.

Deri is a key coalition partner in Netanyahu’s hard-line government and a longtime confidante of the prime minister.

According to reports in the Hebrew-language press, if all else fails, Netanyahu is said to be considering the possibility of having Deri as an “observer” in the Security Cabinet, a body of senior ministers tasked with making decisions about Israel’s military stance, diplomatic relations and others Matters of vital government importance.

Netanyahu may also consider convening a so-called “kitchen cabinet,” a small internal security cabinet that Deri would attend, Channel 12 reported to deal with sensitive intelligence matters. Before its creation in 2001, prime ministers convened ad hoc war cabinets in national emergencies, including Golda Meir’s famous kitchen cabinet during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled 10-1 that Deri’s dual appointments as health and home secretary was “extremely unreasonable” given his recent and past financial crimes and that Deri misled a magistrates’ court into believing he was retiring from political life in order to avoid finding that his recent conviction for tax fraud contained “moral depravity”.

Deri was also convicted and imprisoned for taking bribes during a previous tenure as Home Secretary in the 1990s.

Although Shas and coalition partners anticipated the verdict, government officials said they were unprepared for its severity and expected judges to rely only on the “reasonableness” test to disqualify Deri from a ministerial post. This allows courts to rule that certain acts or decisions are void because they are grossly inappropriate.

However, in addition to examining “reasonableness,” the court also noted that Deri could not retract his claim that he would leave the Knesset and allegedly leave politics as part of his plea, due to the legal principle of estoppel, which prohibits parties to a litigation from making claims change in different ways.

Using the Estoppel argument can prevent the decision from being overruled by the government as it pushes legislation to overturn the “adequacy” consideration and try to keep Deri in cabinet.

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