Blue and White chairman Benny Gantz told the media on Tuesday morning that “he felt terrific” about receiving the mandate to form the government and is optimistic about succeeding.

Following Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s return of the mandate to form a government to President Reuven Rivlin on Monday night, Rivlin gave the mandate to Gantz, who will now have 28 days to form a coalition.

According to reports, Blue and White will first invite Likud representatives for coalition negotiations for a rotational unity government in which Gantz will serve first as prime minister. This plan is unlikely to succeed and Gantz’s next step will be to invite the members of all parties for coalition negotiations including the Arab Joint List, according to a report on Kan Reshet Bet on Tuesday. This will be the first time that the Joint List will be invited for coalition negotiations in about 20 years.

Reshet Bet also reported on Tuesday that Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party is not ruling out cooperating with the Joint List in coalition negotiations, which is contrary to Liberman’s controversial statements in the past about the Arab parties. Liberman is known to have called Arab members of the Knesset “terror collaborators” and said that “disloyal Israeli Arabs should be beheaded.”

However, Yisrael Beyteinu’s MK Oded Forer told Reshet Bet in an interview on Tuesday that cooperating with the Joint List is a possibility and the important question is what the basic principles of the government are.

Despite the talk about the Joint List, some political commentators say that the possibility of Blue and White forming a minority government with support from the Joint List is slim and that Blue and White has not even mentioned the possibility.

The Chareidi parties, Yahadus HaTorah and Shas, have announced that they will not cooperate with Blue and White’s coalition negotiations. According to news reports on Tuesday, Yahadus Hatorah will not show up at all to coalition negotiations with Blue and White if they’re invited. Shas has not yet decided how they would respond but a senior party official said that even if they attend the meeting, they have no intention of entering a government without Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

According to a report on Kikar Hashabbat, a senior official from a Chareidi party said on Monday that “the chances of Gantz forming a government are slim but if he does succeed, we – the Charedim – will go to the opposition. It will be impossible for us to sit in a government with the principles of Yair Lapid and Avigdor Liberman, even if Netanyahu is a partner in it.”

(YWN Israel Desk – Jerusalem)