@Alon What could Barak have offered that would have made him win the elections beginning of 2001?
A Likud government would have found a way to render any agreement meaningless. 2 months after Taba Sharon was prime minister.
@claralistensprechen3rd Gantz threw lifelines to a ton of disgruntled ex-Likudniks, two of whom then were so spooked by the idea of a coalition with the Joint List that in 2020 they refused to support it and then Gantz crawled into Bibi's coalition.
@claralistensprechen3rd Gantz has been singularly bad at playing any kind of politics, yeah. Not for nothing, he entered the war coalition whereas Lapid stayed out, demanding the removal of Ben Gvir from the cabinet as a precondition.
@Alon When Bibi repeats statements like how it's necessary to not change government in the middle of a war...and...this war could last for months, for years...any reasonable person would suspect he's got an extra card or two up his sleeve.
@claralistensprechen3rd He certainly thinks he has extra cards. He's also polling at 44 seats out of 120, in a country that has a track record of not forgiving military disasters. Most likely, if the protesters and Change Coalition can't persuade Likud moderates to back elections now, Bibi will end up like the British Tories since 2022, doing nothing but delaying the inevitable wipeout.
@claralistensprechen3rd Yep. There's Yoav Gallant, who Gantz could credibly throw a lifeline to, but Gallant's incentive is to wait for someone else to eliminate Bibi and then take over Likud; there are a handful of opportunists who can see a post-Bibi Israel, like Nir Barkat, but their incentives too are to wait it out, I think.
Thank you for posting this. It's very educational for people like me who want to understand Israeli politics better.
Barak writes "Eisenkot, Gantz, and Lapid should... demand general elections..." As a practical matter, who can actually cause elections to occur? I think it has to be the Knesset? I'm a bit confused regarding why any government would choose to hold elections that might remove it from power. Other than for the good of the country, of course, which is not on Bibi's agenda.
@barney A majority in the Knesset is required for early elections. Netanyahu has a 64-seat coalition, so five members of the coalition have to defect. This is called "five fingers" in internal Israeli discourse, going back to the protests against the judicial reform. The hope is that there are five Likud moderates who would do it; the difficulty is, nobody within the coalition has any incentive to do so - they'll be shut out of the next government either way, so they behave like the UK Tories.
If five Likud moderates never emerge, will there be regularly scheduled elections, at some point? And could Bibi invoke some sort of war emergency power to postpone them?
@paninid@barney The Kahanists would like that, yes. Netanyahu would like to just stretch the status quo until forever and hope for a miracle that keeps him out of prison; he's indecisive as all fuck and delayed the ground ops in Gaza by almost three weeks just out of fear IDF casualties would be too high (as it is, they're far below projections).
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