With Israelis going to the polls next week, Haviv Rettig Gur comments on the predicament party leaders now find themselves in:

If Prime Minister Netanyahu manages to eke out a slim majority, it will likely be so slim that he will find himself forced to cater to the whims of the most right-wing lawmakers on the ballot. Netanyahu’s opponents, meanwhile, theoretically led by Yair Lapid of [the secular, center-left] Yesh Atid, may well be too divided and diverse to produce a manageable coalition.

Many . . . factions are trying to take advantage of the standoff in the hope of playing kingmaker after election day. The Islamist party Ra’am, for example, has detached from the Arab-majority Joint List to mount its own run, promising to deal with anyone who wins the election, even the disliked Netanyahu, in order to deliver budgets and government attention to its marginalized Bedouin and Arab constituents.

This competition at the margins has caused mudslinging between parties who are by no means competing for the same voters: the ḥaredi United Torah Judaism, led by Moshe Gafni, and the right-wing and anti-ḥaredi Yisrael Beytenu, led by Avigdor Lieberman. Each has found in the other the perfect enemy with which to rally voters:

Lieberman and . . . Gafni face the same problem. Their respective parties and broader political camps seem close to victory; nevertheless, they have each remained maddeningly far from it for two long years. Each is threatened from within his own camp—Lieberman, from secularist challengers like Yesh Atid and others, UTJ by frustrated ḥaredi voters streaming toward the religious Zionist parties. Each badly needed a nemesis, a threat to his respective constituents’ way of life, to rally the ranks and draw the apathetic out to the polls.

Over the past few days, with . . . accusations of “anti-Semitism” and “fundamentalism,” they have found in each other the answer to their troubles.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.