As part of the revamping and broadening of the Likud-led coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman and his right-leaning political party Yisrael Beiteinu will join the coalition with Lieberman becoming Defense Minister.

Talks are expected to continue on Thursday morning and an official involved in the negotiations said only the technical details remained, and the agreement should be signed either by the end of the day or on Friday.

Lieberman, 57, a former Foreign Minister, accepted the position after Netanyahu offered it Wednesday during talks aimed at broadening the coalition. He will replace current Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon. Reports said Yaalon might be offered the post of Foreign Minister which is currently held by Netanyahu.

Netanyahu’s current coalition has only one seat majority in the 120-member Knesset, Israel’s parliament, which convenes its summer session next Monday. Lieberman will bring the eight Knesset seats of his pary.

Israeli opposition leader Isaac Herzog, leader of the center-left Zionist Union party, said after the news broke on Lieberman that “Israeli citizens will now have to deal with a government whose policies are borderline crazy.”

Before Lieberman’s appointment, the Zionist Union itself had been under consideration to form a unity government with the Likud-led coalition.

But when Herzog learned that Netanyahu was also talking with Lieberman, he announced that he would not continue talks while Lieberman was also in talks with the Prime Minister. Herzog made clear that “We won’t negotiate in parallel with Lieberman” and said that Netanyahu faced “a historic choice” to “either embark on a journey of war and funerals” with Lieberman or choose a path of “hope for all”.

Reports said that Herzog's attempts to join the government were seen as a threat by the right wing, mostly because of the Labor leader's demand to receive an assurance in writing from the Prime Minister that he would have veto privileges over decisions on construction in the settlements.

Lieberman had said that his party has “no intention of whitewashing the Labor party’s entry into the government. We’re the true national camp. We have clear positions, primarily in the fields of security, immigration and absorption. If those issues are indeed on the table, and they’re willing to talk to us—not just over the defense portfolio but also defense policy, death sentence, pension reforms—I don’t see why not have these talks directly, instead of in the dead of night and through mediators and leaks to the press.”

Lieberman, whose party will receive the Immigration Absorption Ministry as well, , told Yedioth Ahronoth's Russian-language publication Vesti that "receiving the Defense Ministry is, to me, an important stage in shattering the glass ceiling that we, the community of emigrants from the former Soviet Union, have been facing over the years."

Lieberman also obtained a promise from the Prime Minister that the work on current Immigration Absorption Minister Ze'ev Elkin's pensions reform will continue and be completed, a central issue for Yisrael Beytenu. The reform seeks to ensure that immigrants would receive a proper pension regardless of the number of years of service. In addition, Yisrael Beiteinu's initiative to impose the death penalty on terrorist will also receive the coalition's support.

‘’A disaster? It’s better to wait and see,” wrote pundit Ben Dror-Yemini in the Yedioth Ahronoth tabloid about the appointment of Lieberman. “True, here and there the Yisrael Beiteinu head has been heard saying things that would make one shudder. But the truth is there are two of them. One is Ivet, the scary politician, who teeters between the right and far-right, and then there is Lieberman, a serious and responsible politician.”

The leader of Yisrael Beiteinu had already held prestigious ministerial positions such as Foreign Minister, Minister of Strategic Affairs and Vice-Prime Minister,. But it is the office of Minister of Defense that has been his longtime dream.

Born in Kishinev, Moldova in 1958, he immigrated to Israel in 1978.