On Tuesday, leaders of the Jewish state’s largest political parties, Blue and White and Likud, met to negotiate the terms of a coalition agreement—and failed to come to an agreement. If none of the parties in the Knesset succeeds in forming a governing coalition, there will be a third election, with no guarantee that it will be more conclusive than those that preceded it. Identifying six moves by key politicians that have created the deadlock, Shmuel Rosner speculates as to whether they can be circumvented or undone:

The last batch of Israeli polls are depressing. What we see in them is, well, nothing. . . . If elections were held today, the outcome would be much like the ones of last April and September: no majority for the bloc of the right; no majority for any feasible coalition of the center-left. That is, unless someone is willing to undo one of the six decisions that brought us to where we are.

It might be Avigdor Liberman, [leader of the staunchly secular Yisrael Beytenu party], deciding to join the religious-right bloc or supporting a narrow coalition that relies on the Arab parties. It could be [the Blue and White leader] Benny Gantz deciding to enter a coalition with Prime Minister Netanyahu. It could be the ḥaredi parties deciding to abandon Likud. It could be Likud leaders deciding to throw Netanyahu under the bus [and choose a new leader more amenable to potential coalition partners].

Most of these scenarios seem like flights of fancy.

This means another election in March and another attempt to form a coalition with numbers that don’t match the prerequisite. This means more months without a functioning government to pass a budget, more months without important decisions being made, more months of bickering and political fatigue.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].