Even though it has faltered in the last two months, and nearly collapsed just before the finish line, the government made it through the longest Knesset session since it was founded intact. Shaky, but still on its legs. The problem is that its biggest problems are apparently still to come. The Opposition is already champing at the bit for the start of the next Knesset session, which it expects will be this government's last one.
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Despite the rivalries and conflict, the Likud has so far been unable to put together a plan that will take the battles in the coalition and turn them into a political success that will bring down the government. The despair was so deep that for a while, Benjamin Netanyahu was pinning his hopes on Benny Gantz taking the role of prime minister and bringing the Likud and the other right-wing parties into the coalition. According to many in the Likud, if Gantz were to approach Netanyahu and offer to work with him to topple the government, the Opposition leader would agree to a proposal that would make him alternate prime minister, even without a specific date for a rotation. The latest change is that Netanyahu is no longer trying to convince Gantz and isn't hoping for anything from him. This week, Netanyahu even criticized Gantz harshly for the first time since the government was formed.
Everything has changed in the last week or two. The Opposition realized that the coalition is nearly catatonic and on its way to falling apart sooner than anyone thought, and the expectation is that the government won't survive for long after the next Knesset session begins some two months from now. For the first time since the government was formed, Netanyahu and the Likud leadership have a strategy to bring down the government and hold an election. No one knows what the likelihood is that it will succeed, but leaders of Opposition parties think their chances aren't bad.
In the next few months Netanyahu, Yariv Levin, and a few Haredi and religious Zionist party leaders will try to find one coalition MK who will agree to switch sides for a guaranteed place on one of their party lists. They think this is doable, since they only need to find one out of 61 MKs who would prefer an election and a guaranteed place to sticking it out with the current government and an unclear future. According to the plan, the moment the coalition and Opposition are split 60:60, it will only be weeks before the government is forced to dissolve the Knesset on its own.
The new strategy evolved not only out of a sense that everything was already falling apart, but mostly because a few working assumptions that were the foundations of the government fell apart.
The first and possibly most important is the crumbling of the safety net that the Joint Arab List granted the government when it was first starting out. Then, everyone knew that the 61 coalition members weren't really 61. At the moment of truth, the coalition would have a few more votes that would save it to avoid putting Netanyahu back in power. Even during the vote that preceded the swearing-in of the government two Joint Arab List MKs hid and came out to vote nay in the second round only when it was clear that there was a majority in favor of the government even without them.
When the state budget was being passed, Joint Arab List MKs created the impression that if difficulties emerged, they were open to negotiation and for the right price, would vote in favor of it and prevent the government from coming down because it couldn't pass a budget.
These days are long gone. Now it looks like the mission of toppling the government is shared by all the Opposition parties, including the Joint Arab List. Coalition party leaders avoided bringing the largest Arab party into the "anyone but Bibi" campaign for too long, and the more time passed, the closer they cooperated with the Likud and the other Opposition parties. Apart from clearly right-wing bills, the Joint Arab List supports all the Opposition's legislation, and even proposes plenty of its own bills, which the Right supports. The Joint Arab List, which is bitterly opposed to Ra'am, realized – if belatedly – that if Ra'am gained ground in the government at its expense, in the next election Ra'am leader Mansour Abbas would be elevated and leave them far behind.
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For now, the budgets and promises Abbas received are still on spreadsheets in the Treasury. Nothing has happened on the ground. No local authority head, school principal, or resident of the Bedouin population feels any change as a result of Ra'am joining the government. The one thing the Joint Arab List would like to see happen most of all would be for the government to collapse before the Arab sector enjoys any benefits.
The sense in the Opposition is that the Joint Arab List is as committed to bringing down the government as Likud or Shas is. A right-wing government won't threaten them as much as the current one, in which their bitterest enemy – Ra'am – is a member.
The second belief that has fallen apart in the last few weeks is that the Opposition was the side that would eventually fall apart. Surprisingly, the Opposition remained intact, and so has the Likud, none of whose members are showing signs of wavering.
The third working assumption when the government was first formed was that even if the Likud didn't fall apart and the coalition did not expand, the Opposition's fighting spirit would wane. Months have passed, but the Opposition is still fighting. The many parliamentary victories are putting wind in the sails of the Opposition MKs, who are wearing down the coalition and handing it painful losses.
Yet another widely-held belief when the government was formed was the Naftali Bennett, like his predecessor, would leverage the prime minister's position to rack up personal popularity and build a reputation as a leader in the mind of the Israeli public. Until Bennett, every person who stepped into the big shoes of the prime minister of Israel managed to reinvent themselves. It was reasonable to assume that Bennett, too, despite the underhanded way he secured the job, would grow into his public status, just like his predecessors did. But for some reason, he didn't, and since he was elected Bennett hasn't gained a smidgen of popularity.
