What a difference two weeks make. The first flush of election victory and confident predictions that a stable government would be formed in the space of a few days, at the latest by the inauguration of the new Knesset, have now evaporated.

On Tuesday the 120 newly-elected MKs were sworn in with Yair Lapid’s cabinet still sitting on the government benches.

On Wednesday the scheduled coalition talks between Likud and its prospective partners were called off, with at least one media proxy of Benjamin Netanyahu already accusing Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich of being “the new [Naftali] Bennett” for having the temerity to delay the new government’s formation with his demand to be appointed defence minister.

Ostensibly this is just about a ministerial position. Mr Netanyahu originally thought that dividing the seats around the cabinet table would be the relatively simple stage of the coalition talks.

Bezalel Smotrich (Photo by Flash90)

Bezalel Smotrich (Flash90)

He urged partners to hurry up and agree on those, swear in the new government and then get down to the nitty-gritty of actual policies. But they said no and presented long shopping lists of policy, legislation and funding. And then it turned out there was no agreement on the ministries either.

Mr Smotrich’s demand to be the second most powerful man in the new government caught Likud’s negotiators entirely unprepared. His reasoning — that as leader of the second-largest list in the coalition, with 14 MKs, it would only be fair — failed to impress them.

Mr Smotrich is actually the leader of a smaller party of seven, with the other half of Religious Zionism’s members belonging to Jewish Power and Noam.

To make things worse, by that reckoning Aryeh Deri, leader of Shas with 11 seats, deserves one of the top cabinet jobs — a claim he was eager to press, demanding the finance ministry, though he was originally prepared to return to his old stomping-grounds at the interior ministry.

In other words, Likud now stands to lose the two most powerful ministries, which would be unthinkable.

After the Knesset’s opening on Wednesday evening, Mr Netanyahu met Mr Smotrich alone to reason with him. Pay attention to what has just happened in Washington, he said.

President Joe Biden has just emerged nearly unscathed from the midterm elections which means we have at least another two years of a strong Democratic administration that is not about to indulge a right-wing Israeli government.

If he needed any proof for that argument, the news that the FBI is about to investigate the killing back in May of Al Jazeera journalist Shirin Abu Akleh served his point. But Mr Netanyahu had chosen the wrong argument.

Mr Smotrich is a religious settler and has no patience with warnings of American displeasure. As he sees things, the entire settlement enterprise in the West Bank was built despite American pressure. So US pressure won’t make him give up his demand to become the man who holds the ultimate power over the occupied area.

But neither is Mr Netanyahu about to back down. It’s not just about his fear of angering President Biden and risking the US deciding that the Pentagon won’t work with his new defence minister. This is, at root, about who is going to run his new government.

Likud already view Mr Smotrich as a troublemaker. He has his own ideological agenda, which is not about making Mr Netanyahu prime minister.

After last years’s election he kiboshed Mr Netanyahu’s attempt to form a coalition with the votes of Mansour Abbas’s Ra’am party.

Likud are far more worried about him than they are about his co-leader, Jewish Power’s Itamar Ben-Gvir, who owes Mr Netanyahu his very legitimacy.

Ultimately Mr Smotrich will likely back down and accept a different beefed-up portfolio. He can’t afford to foil yet another right-wing coalition. But he is already positioning himself as the internal opposition within the government and will be quick to criticise its security policies, especially when it comes to the West Bank.

Likudniks were already muttering darkly this week that once Mr Netanyahu is back in office, there may just be need of another election in 2023, if only to cut Religious Zionism down to size.

After all, it was Naftali Bennett, another national-religious politician who used to portray himself as being to the right of Mr Netanyahu, who dared replace him.
from bad to worse .

If the new coalition is still finding it hard to coalesce, the soon-to-be-opposition is in an even worse state.

Merav Michaeli F221115OF78

Merav Michaeli

On Tuesday, before the Knesset’s opening, party leaders held a tense meeting (without the leaders of Hadash-Ta’al, who are considered beyond the pale) and failed to agree to coordinate their steps.

The next day, Defence Minister (for now) Benny Gantz’s National Unity agreed with Likud separately on the temporary makeup of Knesset committees, to the anger of (still) Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid.

The message was clear. Mr Lapid will soon be the official Leader of the Opposition by dint of being leader of the second-largest party in the Knesset, but that doesn’t mean the rest of the opposition is necessarily going to accept his leadership.

Meanwhile, as Messrs Lapid and Gantz continue their squabbling, Labour Leader Merav Michaeli is on her way to London.

She is scheduled to attend the annual lunch of Labour Friends of Israel, alongside Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves.

She is to meet other major Labour figures including Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy.

Having led her party to a dismal result with only four members in the new Knesset and being blamed by many for refusing before the election to merge lists with Meretz, which subsequently fell beneath the threshold, she will be seeking to learn from a sister party that has staged a remarkable comeback in the polls after succumbing to a historic defeat of its own less than three years ago.

Ms Michaeli’s problem is that the one main lesson that British Labour has to teach her is that the first and crucial step toward its rehabilitation was replacing the party’s leader and all he stood for.

Bloodthirsty

Israeli defence experts were not surprised on Tuesday night when it transpired that the missile that hit near the Polish village of Przewodow, killing two, was probably not fired by Russia but was almost certainly an S-300 air-defence missile fired by the Ukrainians in an attempt to intercept a salvo of Russian missiles targeting power stations in their territory.

On numerous occasions over the past decade-plus of fighting in Syria, it has often been the missiles launched in defence which caused unintended damage.

In a number of cases it was debris from Israeli interceptors, launched against Syrian rockets that landed in strange locations in Israel, the West Bank and Jordan, in others it was Syrian and Russian S-200s and S-300s which were wildly off the mark.

One of the most notable cases was when the Syrians fired missiles wildly against Israeli fighter jets which were well on their way back to base after striking Iranians operating on Syrian soil — and managed to shoot down an Ilyushin spy-plane of their Russian protectors, killing all 15 crew members onboard.

Rather than acknowledge their allies’ ineptitude, the Russian military blamed Israel and then-prime minister Netanyahu sent Israeli Air-Force commander Major-General Amichai Norkin to Moscow in an attempt to appease his counterparts.

The Russian Air Force commander at the time was General Sergey Surovikin, who is now the overall commander of Russia’s forces in Ukraine.

Sergey Surovikin

Sergey Surovikin

General Surovikin has a bloodthirsty reputation, which includes having ordered his soldiers to shoot and kill civilian protesters back in the anti-Gorbachev coup in 1991 and his ruthless bombing of Syrian civilians during his stint as Russian commander there.

Well aware of this, General Norkin decided to take no risks on the trip to Moscow and rather than fly there on an Israeli Air Force jet, which might just have been “mistakenly” targeted by an errant missile, booked seats on an Aeroflot flight.