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Netanyahu Ousted After 12 Years As Israel’s Prime Minister

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Twelve years of Benjamin Netanyahu ended on a single vote in the Knesset — 60 to 59.

Israel swore in a new government on Sunday, June 13, 2021, closing the book on Benjamin Netanyahu’s consecutive 12-year run as prime minister — 15 years total counting his first term in the late 1990s. The man taking his place, 49-year-old Naftali Bennett of the right-wing Yamina party, is a former Netanyahu chief of staff and defense minister who built an eight-party coalition unlike anything the country has seen before. Netanyahu, now heading to the opposition benches while standing trial on corruption charges, promised he’d be back.

• The Knesset confirmed the new government by a margin of just 60 to 59, with one abstention in the 120-seat chamber.
• Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am party became the first independent Arab party to join an Israeli governing coalition.
• Under a rotation deal, Bennett holds the premiership until 2023, when Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid — currently alternate prime minister and foreign minister — takes over through 2025.

A Vote Decided by One Seat

The final tally left no room for error: 60 votes for the incoming coalition, 59 against, and a single abstention. That was enough. Once the count was read, Netanyahu crossed the Knesset floor to shake Bennett’s hand before walking to the opposition side of the chamber for the first time in over a decade. It was a small, almost formal gesture that closed out a political era defined by four inconclusive elections in two years.

Bennett’s swearing-in as Israel’s 13th prime minister didn’t go smoothly. His opening address was repeatedly interrupted by hecklers from Likud and allied ultra-Orthodox factions, forcing Knesset security to physically remove several lawmakers from the chamber before he could finish speaking.

An Eight-Party Coalition Built on Compromise

What Bennett assembled is, by any Israeli standard, an odd coalition — eight parties spanning right-wing nationalists to the left-wing Labor and Meretz factions, held together mostly by a shared desire to end Netanyahu’s rule. The centrist glue came from Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid, who brokered the rotation agreement that put Bennett in the top job first, with Lapid serving as alternate prime minister and foreign minister before taking over the premiership himself in 2023, running through 2025.

The most historically significant piece of the coalition wasn’t ideological at all — it was Ra’am, led by Mansour Abbas, becoming the first independent Arab party to sit inside an Israeli governing coalition. That inclusion alone reshapes what governing majorities in the Knesset can look like going forward.

Netanyahu’s Combative Farewell

Netanyahu did not go quietly. Facing trial on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, and having failed to convert four separate national elections into a governing majority, he used his final address as prime minister to signal he views this as an interruption rather than an ending.

“If it is destined for us to be in the opposition, we will do it with our backs straight until we topple this dangerous government and return to lead the country in our way.”

It was the kind of line that framed the transition less as a concession and more as an opening salvo — a preview of how aggressively Likud plans to challenge a government that survived its first vote by a single seat.

The Stability Question

A coalition this wide, holding together on a 60-59 margin, has little cushion. Any defection from within the eight parties, or any Likud-led push to peel off a single lawmaker, could collapse the government before Bennett’s two years are up. That fragility is precisely what Netanyahu invoked in his farewell remarks, betting that ideological friction between Yamina’s right flank and Labor and Meretz on the left will eventually crack the arrangement from the inside.

Bennett now runs a government that exists almost entirely because Netanyahu’s opponents united against him, not because they agree on much else — and the rotation clock is already ticking toward 2023, when Lapid is due to take the premiership himself.