At the time this column was written, it was still unclear whether Israel would match Britain’s record of having three prime ministers in 2022. The swearing-in of Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government could take place on December 29 or January 2.
If the latter, 2022 will have been the first year since 2008 in which Mr Netanyahu was not in office. But even if that is the case, it will still be the year of Mr Netanyahu’s triumph. Perhaps his last big one.
It’s an outcome that was almost unimaginable at the start of 2022. The improbable government of eight diverse parties that had come into being five months earlier seemed, against all odds, to have stabilised.
It had passed its first state budget and prime minister Naftali Bennett was even cutting a swathe on the international stage, from Washington to Moscow.
When war began in Ukraine, there was even a moment when it seemed he may be in a position to broker a ceasefire.
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Naftali Bennett (Photo: Flash 90)
Covid-19 was still causing disruption and yet another variant was scything its way through Israel’s population, but a gamble by Mr Bennett to not send the country into another lockdown and rely instead on a third vaccination shot proved successful. As 2022 began, he seemed to have bolstered his position — but it was not enough.
By forming a government with left-wing and Islamist parties, Mr Bennett burned his bridges with much of the right wing and failed to win the support of new constituencies.
The first six months of the 2022 saw a steady erosion of the government’s ability to govern as, one after the other, fractious members of the coalition foiled key votes.
This led to his inevitable announcement with Yair Lapid on June 20 that the attempts to hold the coalition together had failed and there would be no choice but to hold yet another election.
Ten days later, Mr Bennett was replaced by Mr Lapid. The man who had promised to revolutionise Israeli politics and bring the warring tribes of Israel together had become Israel’s shortest-serving prime minister. The only question remaining was whether Mr Lapid would soon break that record.
But let’s stay with Mr Bennett for a moment. Where did he go wrong?
By most accounts, he had done a decent job as prime minister, delivering a much-needed budget, taking a proactive approach on Covid-19, quietly ramping up Israel’s clandestine campaign against Iran in the region, while working to block a return to the nuclear agreement.
He had proven that Israel could still be a significant player in global affairs without its elder statesman, Mr Netanyahu. So why had it gone wrong so quickly?
His conclusion was that he “failed to realise how powerful the poison machine constantly working against this government was”.
Since taking a break from frontline politics in this year’s election campaign, the man who just six months ago was Israel’s prime minister is now pursuing a personal campaign against outspoken Netanyahu-supporters who defamed him and his family online, targeting them with libel suits and forcing them to apologise, delete their posts and give considerable sums to charity.
Whether Mr Bennett’s new crusade will do anything to turn down the vitriolic nature of online political discourse remains to be seen, but the reasons for his failure as prime minister run much deeper than the campaign to delegitimise his government.
Despite having started his political career 15 years ago as Mr Netanyahu’s chief of staff and being a keen student of his one-time mentor’s methods, Mr Bennett failed to learn one of the most fundamental lessons.
It is that while an Israeli prime minister has many serious duties safeguarding Israel’s security, he can’t allow himself to forget at any point that he remains a politician, at the mercy of his own back-benchers.
Mr Bennett’s Yamina entered the Knesset in 2021 with seven members. It was his failure to ensure the loyalty of the other six Yamina MKs that ultimately cost him his second year as prime minister.
Over the course of a year, three of them refused to support his government and defected. If he could have kept just one of those three, he could have remained in office.
Mr Netanyahu, on the other hand, despite not having a prime minister’s powers, managed to keep every member of the opposition in line, while enticing defectors away from the coalition.
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Yair Lapid
Mr Lapid, the prime minister of the second half of 2022, is a better political operator than Mr Bennett and was the architect of the improbable government.
His party, Yesh Atid, remained loyal throughout, but he also failed to implement another key lesson from the Netanyahu playbook. It was an unforced error.
After all, he had proven in 2021 that he had learned that lesson: to attain power, growing your own party and maintaining its loyalty is key, but sometimes the other members of the coalition take priority over your own party, because one party is never enough for a majority.
That’s why he gave Mr Bennett the first half of the term as prime minister, even though Yesh Atid was more than double the size of Yamina.
But in 2022, Mr Lapid failed to see the importance of preserving the entire bloc, if necessary at the expense of his own party. The list of culprits among the parties of the outgoing coalition is long, but the shekel stops with the man at the top.
He failed to cajole Labour and Meretz into merging their lists and, on his watch, the Arab Joint List split. If he had worked harder to enforce unity within the anti-Netanyahu bloc and if Yesh Atid had not done so well in this election, at the expense of its partners, Meretz and Balad would not have run separately and failed to cross the threshold.
The election result would have been another tie enabling him to remain in office and perhaps even forming another coalition.
He would not have broken Mr Bennett’s record and become the shortest-serving prime minister. Israel would not be about to get its most right-wing government ever.
This year of three prime ministers was once again a year in which Mr Netanyahu proved that no one plays the game of Israeli politics as ruthlessly as he does, breaking and rewriting the rules to serve his purpose.
He began 2022 as a dispirited leader of the opposition writing his memoirs. Many within Likud were predicting that he would soon take a plea bargain and leave politics. That almost happened.
His lawyers were negotiating a deal with former attorney-general Avichai Mandelblit.
But at the same time, his other people were at work incessantly sniping at the weakest members of the coalition, and when Yamina’s Idit Silman broke, he knew he had his way back in.
At that point it didn’t matter how vile some of the partners in his camp were. Whatever promises he had to make to an outcast such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, with his multiple indictments for violence and incitement, or to Avi Maoz, leader of a proudly homophobic splinter party, he made.
As long as he made sure that not one vote would be wasted.
Against a deeply divided centre-left, the Netanyahu camp ran in the election in four compact and tightly coordinated lists.
While Mr Lapid ran a low-key “rose-garden campaign”, relying on what his pollsters told him was the voters’ yearning for “normalcy”,
Mr Netanyahu left nothing to chance. It was his 11th election campaign as Likud leader. During the campaign he marked his 73rd birthday, and yet he was out there, crisscrossing the country, holding two or three rallies every night, drumming up support in the most far-flung of Likud strongholds.
Say what you will for his methods, and there’s a hell of a lot to say, Mr Netanyahu deserved his victory. After years of a public career, there still is no one who works as hard, tries everything and simply wants it more.
And yet, as he prepares at the end of 2022 to return to the office he knows so well, there is a heavy price to pay. The naturally risk-averse and cautious prime minister will now have to handle a cabinet of pyromaniacs he has enabled and empowered.
The balancing act between statesman and politician of which he is the undisputed master is about to become much more difficult.
And he has only one safety net when the high-wire starts to shake uncontrollably. No one in this new government is ruling out a scenario in which Mr Netanyahu finds he has no choice but to fire some of his new ministers and once again go back to the nation.
Don’t bet on 2023 being the first year in five which is not an election year in Israel.
