Next Wednesday morning — or, if the accurate election results take a bit longer to emerge, hopefully by Thursday afternoon at the latest — there will be one of two outcomes. If the Netanyahu bloc wins 60 seats or less, political paralysis will continue. None of the three contenders, Yair Lapid, Benjamin Netanyahu or Benny Gantz, will be able to proclaim victory and instead, we’ll be treated to weeks of mad scrambling for defectors and presented with endless permutations of possible governments.
If the four parties supporting Mr Netanyahu do win the elusive 61 seats, things will happen much more swiftly. Contrary to what some have said, including Mr Netanyahu himself, he is not impervious to the warnings from within Israel and from capitals around the world (including on Wednesday in the White House in a meeting between presidents Joe Biden and Isaac Herzog) of the implications of forming a government relying on the far-right Religious Zionism party.
The last thing he wants is to return to office as the leader of a pariah government, welcome only in Moscow and Budapest. But he has one overriding priority and that is to retake the levers of power as soon as possible. For that, he is prepared to take whatever flak is coming. But the government he forms, assuming he has the majority to do so, is not the one he intends to continue with.
Once he has his feet under the table, the new-old prime minister will have two objectives. Religious Zionism is not just a liability because it is widely accused of harbouring supremacist views; assuming it wins a double-digit number of seats, it will be much too big for comfort. Mr Netanyahu does not want a partner with too many delusions of grandeur. He will strive to find an issue which will split Religious Zionism and allow him to eject the Jewish Power MKs, led by Itamar Ben Gvir, out of his coalition.
In their place, to ensure a majority, he hopes to bring in Benny Gantz, who by then will have spent a few demoralising months on the back benches of the opposition.
Just like in April 2020 when the first wave of Covid-19 served Mr Gantz as the perfect excuse to break his promise and sit with Mr Netanyahu in an ill-fated coalition, he will have the excuse this time of saving Israel from a government with Mr Ben Gvir and the threat of international pariahdom.
The plans is far from foolproof. It is not assured that the leader of Religious Zionism, Bezalel Smotrich, will gladly part with his partner rival. And even if he does, Mr Gantz may not fall for the same trick again. He insists he won’t.
But even if the plan doesn’t work, Mr Netanyahu has a fallback. He can simply find an excuse to fire the Religious Zionism ministers, bring down his own government and dissolve the Knesset, as he has in the past — and call a sixth election. It will be worth it since he will have replaced Mr Lapid as caretaker prime minister and made his way back to the office he considers his own.
Security Shifts
l “There’s a whole generation which hasn’t seen an Israeli tank in Manara Square,” said an IDF general this week. He was referring to the main square in Ramallah, the administrative capital of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and to the last time Israel conducted a wide-scale offensive in Palestinian cities back in the spring of 2002.
What the general wouldn’t say was whether that was a good or a bad thing.
Twenty years ago most members of the IDF General Staff fought as battalion commanders in Operation Defensive Shield. It was the first time they had led a large unit in combat and those weeks spent fighting through the streets and alleyways of the West Bank have stayed with them and have remained their term of reference when confronting the prospect of a major escalation there.
In recent months, first Jenin and then Nablus have descended into violent chaos. Armed gangs have taken over entire neighbourhoods and the Palestinian Authority’s security forces have given up on trying to restore control. When the two northern cities also became hubs for organising shooting attacks against Israeli civilians and soldiers, the IDF began going in on nightly raids, arresting and killing those responsible.
This isn’t similar to Operation Defensive Shield, so far. Israel isn’t taking control of the cities, not even temporarily, and the level of forces involved is much more limited — mainly special forces teams and nothing close to the scale of entire divisions deployed in 2002. And the threat that the armed gangs in Jenin and Nablus pose to Israel is of an entirely different order as well.
The gunmen, acting alone or in tiny groups of two and three, are nothing like the networks of Fatah, Hamas and other major Palestinian organisations that launched a campaign of bus and café bombings in 2002. It culminated in the Seder Night bombing of a hotel in Netanya where 30 Israelis were killed, which led to then-prime minister Ariel Sharon’s order to launch Defensive Shield.
So why are the generals reminiscing about that operation 20 years ago?
The old cliché of generals always fighting the previous war is a possible answer but it’s inadequate in this case. The truth is that IDF has changed radically. On Monday night, teams of the Yamam police counter-terror unit, backed up by snipers of Sayeret Matkal and the Givati recon battalion, took out a leader of the Lion’s Den gang in Nablus along with four other members. It was proof enough that you don’t have to send the entire Paratroopers Brigade into Nablus when you have pinpoint accurate intelligence and cover from drones.
Defensive Shield in destroyed the Fatah and Hamas networks and created a new reality. It would allow the Palestinian Authority security forces — once Mahmoud Abbas became president after Yasser Arafat’s death in 2004 — to take control and ushered in two decades of relative calm in the West Bank.
The generals’ concern is that the deterrence effect has waned and a new generation of young Palestinians who treat the Lions Den thugs as heroes have forgotten what chaos in their neighbourhoods can lead to.
