Shaking up the Israeli election this week, centrist former military chief Benny Gantz and centrist former TV personality Yair Lapid formed a coalition to defeat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling coalition.
The alliance, which retains support from Netanyahu’s former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon, dramatically increases the probability of an opposition victory in the April election. Still, the coalition is a rather odd one. Considering Israel’s parliamentary term of five years, Gantz and Lapid would rotate as prime minister were they to win. Gantz would take the first two and a half years, Lapid the second half.
But the key point here is that this alliance puts Netanyahu under real pressure. While the Likud leader is popular with many Israelis, his coalition alliance is increasingly dependent on more extreme elements in Israeli politics. Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party is now the more moderate of these, with Netanyahu newly expanding his coalition to include the fanatical Jewish Strength party, and another far-right party. While this support would appear to give Netanyahu a narrow advantage in the polls with regards to winning a majority in the Knesset and returning as prime minister, it also risks Netanyahu’s more moderate supporters flipping for the Gantz-Lapid coalition.
From an American-interest perspective, Netanyahu’s new extremist allies make his victory less obviously beneficial. For one, their arrival almost certainly marks a pre-emptive death blow to President Trump’s long-awaited, albeit overly optimistic peace plan.
But such is the nature of always vibrant Israeli coalition building. When election day comes, who becomes prime minister will depend on the balance of two factors: can Netanyahu get out the unified right-wing vote, or can Gantz and Lapid bring enough moderate conservatives into their corner.
