On Tuesday—as the Israeli government scrambled to achieve a cease-fire with Hamas—a runoff mayoral election took place in Jerusalem, which resulted in Moshe Lion beating Ofer Berkovitch by a margin of less than 2 percent. Driving the outcome of the election was a split within the ultra-Orthodox parties that could have serious implications for Israel’s next national elections. And if Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition breaks up, these might happen quite soon. Michael Koplow writes:

Lion was backed by [the Sephardi ḥaredi party] Shas, Degel ha-Torah (the non-ḥasidic Ashkenazi ḥaredi party), Bayit Yehudi [the religious Zionist party], and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu [which is made up of staunchly secular, right-wing, Russian immigrants]. . . . This would ordinarily mean an electoral cakewalk in Jerusalem, but Berkovitch—who was the secular candidate—was the beneficiary of a split within the ḥaredi world, where the ḥasidic Ashkenazi Agudat Yisrael party decided to tell its voters that they were free to vote for whomever they wanted as revenge for Degel ha-Torah’s decision not to support the ḥasidic candidate in the first round. . . .

[T]he biggest takeaway is not that Lion ultimately won; it is rather that his win was relatively close, and that it is a harbinger of a potential earthquake in ḥaredi politics. The split between the ḥasidic and non-ḥasidic Ashkenazi Ḥaredim has been festering for some time over competition for resources and which wing should have a greater say than the other. It has also been magnified by a general weakening of rabbinic authority in political matters among ḥaredi voters, who can no longer be relied upon to vote in seamless blocs.

If the split in the Jerusalem municipal elections between Degel ha-Torah and Agudat Yisrael—which have run together on a joint ticket in national elections since 1992—ends up replicating itself on a national level, while ḥaredi voters in larger numbers generally decide that they will go their own way, it will transform Israeli coalition politics even more than the competition among Likud, Bayit Yehudi, and Yisrael Beiteinu over who can capture the largest share of right-wing voters.

The ḥaredi parties have been Netanyahu’s most stalwart and in some ways easiest political partners, and if a split into multiple parties and more independent voting means that not all of them make the [electoral] threshold necessary for representation in the Knesset, then Netanyahu is going to have a far bigger headache in constructing his next government than [the one he faces now].

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.