In advance of the March elections, Israeli political parties are being reshuffled, with new ones being created and old ones breaking up or merging. To Haviv Rettig Gur, it is the coming apart of the Religious Zionist factions—distinct from the ḥaredi parties—that is likely to prove the most important of these new arrangements:

There are three parties representing the religious right-wing camp that falls under the “religious Zionism” catch-all. Yamina, led by Naftali Bennett, is the most successful of these in polls. A January 11 poll . . . gave it fourteen seats [in the next Knesset]. Then comes the National Union party led by Betzalel Smotrich, which will run on election day as the Religious Zionism party. The same poll gave it four seats—edging past the electoral threshold for the first time. . . . And finally, there’s Jewish Home, whose beleaguered leader Rafi Peretz has announced his retirement from politics, sparking a primary battle to replace him.

Barring a surprising volte-face by parties now running on a commitment not to sit [in a government led by the incumbent prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, Netanyahu has no coalition without Yamina—and may not have one with it.

But Bennett also has the option of throwing in his lot with the Likud renegade Gideon Sa’ar—giving his New Hope party enough seats to form a governing coalition. Thus, come March, Bennett could play kingmaker. Gur continues:

Bennett could get more from Sa’ar, whose party won’t be all that much larger than his own, than from a 30-seat Netanyahu. Bennett will also have reason to trust Sa’ar to deliver on his promises in a way few in the political system now trust Netanyahu.

Bennett, as noted, would be pleased to see the end of Netanyahu’s political career. But Smotrich, who represents a more right-wing branch of the religious-Zionist world, the so-called “ḥaredi-nationalist” . . . subculture, would not. Smotrich views the option of a center-right coalition sans Netanyahu as distasteful, an unnecessary surrender of right-wing policy goals.

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.