Yashar and Likud end first unity talks with no progress but agree to keep talking

Negotiating teams from Yashar! and Likud met for talks on a possible unity government and parted without any progress, Israeli media reported. The Times of Israel reported that the session wrapped up after about an hour, a length also given by the Hebrew news channel News.co.il, while Ynet's alerts service put it at an hour and a quarter.

Shortly after the meeting broke up, a person familiar with the details told Ynet that the two sides had not moved closer to a unity arrangement. The parties then issued a short joint statement describing the meeting as businesslike and saying the conversation between them would go on. The Times of Israel described the session as the first round of unity talks and highlighted the agreement to continue discussions.

Who was at the table

Likud is the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yashar! is the party associated with Gadi Eisenkot, and the political grouping around him is referred to in the reports as the Eisenkot bloc. A unity government, in Israeli usage, is a coalition that brings rival camps together rather than one built from a single bloc of allied parties.

Ynet reported that Ofir Katz and Hili Tropper, speaking as they left the negotiations, said the conversation had been to the point. According to the same report, the negotiating teams separated without advancing, but with an understanding that the dialogue would carry on.

Political commentator Amit Segal, writing on his Telegram channel, named one more participant: Guy Gutman, whom he described as a close associate of Tropper. Segal also wrote that nothing dramatic happened in the meeting beyond what was already known about the parties' positions from media coverage.

The joint statement

The only on-the-record account of the substance of the talks is the joint statement from the two parties, which Segal posted in full. In it, Likud and Yashar! said the meeting took place in a matter-of-fact atmosphere and that they had agreed the dialogue between the sides would continue. The statement did not mention any specific issues discussed, any proposals exchanged or a date for a further meeting.

Eisenkot's partners and the wider picture

The Likud meeting was only one strand of the day's contacts. Ynet reported that Eisenkot's senior partners are, for now, ruling out a unity government with Netanyahu. That position sits uneasily with the decision to hold formal talks with Likud at all, and the reports do not explain how the two fit together.

According to Ynet, representatives of Yashar! also held separate meetings with teams from Yisrael Beytenu, the party led by Avigdor Lieberman, and from the Democrats. In a further meeting reported by Ynet, opposition figures Yair Lapid and Yair Golan met and said they had dealt with coordinating steps toward forming what they called a good government.

The Times of Israel, in a separate report on the talks, said the Eisenkot bloc was moving to assert control over the Knesset, Israel's parliament. Its headline did not set out the details of those moves in the material available to us.

How to read a meeting like this

Israeli coalition negotiations typically run through several rounds between appointed teams, and first meetings often end with exactly this kind of statement: an agreement to keep talking, without commitments. The parties' own description, together with the unnamed source's account to Ynet and Segal's comment that the meeting broke no new ground, all point in the same direction: the gap between the two sides was not narrowed in this session.

There is a small discrepancy in the reported length of the meeting. Ynet's alert said it lasted an hour and a quarter, while The Times of Israel and News.co.il said about an hour. The difference does not change the substance of what was reported.

What the reports do not say

None of the reports say what each side proposed or demanded in the room, what issues blocked progress, or when the teams will meet again. The claim that there was no progress comes from an unnamed person cited by Ynet rather than from either party on the record. The reports also do not describe what came out of Yashar!'s separate meetings with Yisrael Beytenu and the Democrats, and Likud has not been reported responding to the position of Eisenkot's partners ruling out a government with Netanyahu.