Israeli Elections May Be on Their Way, but Not as Soon as One Might Think

Yesterday the Knesset, elected in April of this year, voted in favor of two separate bills calling for new elections in March. Underlying the vote is the rivalry between the present government’s two major figures: Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud and Benny Gantz of Blue and White. The current coalition agreement stipulates that Netanyahu will serve as prime minister until October 21, at which point Gantz will take the job, but Gantz expects—not without reason—that Netanyahu will find a way out of his side of the bargain. Haviv Rettig Gur explains what is likely to happen next:

The two successful bills [dissolving the Knesset] now go to the Knesset House Committee—where its chairman, Blue and White’s MK Eitan Ginsburg, can delay the legislation for weeks. That is, Gantz and his party voted Wednesday for legislation he can now freeze indefinitely. If Ginsburg lets the legislation out of committee, it returns to the plenum for a first reading, and must again win a majority of votes before heading to the Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee, where it will pass out of opposition control and into the hands of the Netanyahu-allied United Torah Judaism party, [which] can, like Ginsburg, delay it for additional weeks.

[To] put another way: Blue and White has made the decision this week to announce it is seeking an election. That’s it.

The opposition, and Gantz with it, wants an election as soon as possible, while Netanyahu is struggling in the polls from widespread dissatisfaction with his government’s handling of the pandemic. Netanyahu, meanwhile, wants to delay elections at least until the summer, by which time vaccines should become available to Israelis and he might reasonably expect many of his wayward supporters to return to his camp.

The fight isn’t over whether an election looms; all sides believe it is now inevitable. The fight is over the timing. . . . No matter that the Knesset on Wednesday voted to go back to the polls, it’s a long way yet until election day.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Israeli politics, Knesset

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF