Earlier this month, the senior Knesset member Gideon Sa’ar left the ruling Likud party to establish a new one, called New Hope. Last week, Ze’ev Elkin—an immigrant from the USSR with unimpeachable right-wing credentials and a reputation as a gifted political tactician—announced that he is joining Sa’ar in the upcoming March elections. Elkin, until now a loyal supporter of Prime Minister Netanyahu, has thus sacrificed a guarantee of a cabinet position in a Likud government for the uncertain prospects of a new political venture. Haviv Rettig Gur observes:

Elkin earned his reputation [as a savvy political operator] the hard way, in legislative sausage-making in Israel’s cutthroat parliament. He is famously the only coalition chairman never to have lost a plenum vote. Or, rather, he lost one vote—the one that took place after he’d rushed out of the parliament building to join his wife in the hospital for the birth of their son.

There’s no magic or mystery to Elkin’s success as coalition chair. He believes in negotiations, loves the cut and thrust of parliamentary wrangling, and has never been afraid to be seen in the Knesset cafeteria hammering out agreements with lawmakers from far-left to far-right, secularist to ḥaredi, Jew and Arab alike. He exchanged jokes happily with the likes of Ahmad Tibi, a far reach across multiple political aisles for both men.

[But] Elkin’s decision reflects more than a single man’s political calculations. The ground is shifting within Likud. The mood has changed. Whether the growing disquiet eventually topples Netanyahu or is soon extinguished in the mobilizing fury of the coming race is anyone’s guess. But it’s there, it’s real, and it’s strong enough to drive some hard choices even among loyal party members.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.