Yesterday, eleven months of political stalemate in Israel appeared to have come to an end as the sitting prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his main rival, Benny Gantz, agreed to form a unity government together with some of the smaller parties. This development has fractured Gantz’s Blue and White party into its constituent factions. Meanwhile, the resignation of Yuli Edelstein as interim Knesset speaker—a position meant to be occupied for just a few hours, but which he has held for nearly a year—has allowed the Knesset to resume business as usual.

Although Edelstein’s parliamentary tactics are legally defensible, his opponents have decried them as violations of informal norms and traditions—even as these same opponents have been trying to exploit the unusual political circumstances to give themselves control over legislative committees, and to pass laws that would prevent Netanyahu from remaining prime minister. Haviv Rettig Gur explains:

While Blue and White rails at Edelstein’s “undemocratic” delays, it has proposed several sweeping and never-before-seen constitutional modifications, including legislation that would prevent the current Knesset from dissolving to new elections if it fails to form a government. It suggests passing these amendments using only the threadbare majority at its disposal. That, too—attempting to pass such significant constitutional changes in a newborn Knesset, one that has yet to negotiate a ruling coalition—is unprecedented.

[Yet] Edelstein has acted less nobly than he pretends. He claimed to be delaying the plenum votes in order to force Gantz and Netanyahu to compromise. Perhaps. Then again, his steps only weakened one side’s negotiating position.

Meanwhile, Blue and White, while decrying Likud’s “undemocratic” delays, is hard at work drafting constitutional changes that target a single individual, who also happens to be their chief political opponent. A longstanding but informal Knesset tradition once decreed that significant changes to electoral laws should be allowed to come into force only at a distance of an election cycle or two, to ensure that the rules of the game wouldn’t be altered merely to serve the political needs of the present majority.

Israel’s political system is deep into uncharted waters, and clear-cut answers are few and far between. But one thing became crystal clear on Wednesday: the old rules and longstanding customs that ensured respect across party lines and the smooth functioning of parliamentary politics [have fallen] prey to an unrelenting and debilitating political stalemate.

Whether the new coalition agreement will be able to gain formal approval, and what the legacy of this stalemate will be, remains to be seen.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.