At midnight on Tuesday, the deadline for Prime Minister Netanyahu to form a governing coalition expired, and now President Reuven Rivlin has given the mandate to Yair Lapid, whose Yesh Atid party received the second-largest number of Knesset seats in the recent election. Netanyahu’s Likud won that election by a substantial margin—30 seats as opposed to Yesh Atid’s 17—but not one large enough to maintain his hold on the premiership. Haviv Rettig Gur notes that this blow

came in the immediate aftermath of some of [Netanyahu’s] most spectacular successes as prime minister, including four peace agreements with the Arab world and a trailblazing vaccination campaign. It came, too, despite a steep drop in Arab turnout and last year’s shattering of the center-left Blue and White coalition. So how did [these four factors] fail to move the needle in Netanyahu’s favor?

The answer is simple: Likud shed huge numbers of voters, dropping from over 1,352,000 votes in March 2020 to just 1,067,000 a year later, a 21 percent decline. Netanyahu’s most reliable allies, the ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism, also declined, shedding over 10 percent of their voters. An Israel Democracy Institute analysis of the turnout data brings Likud’s problem into sharp relief. Put simply, Likud voters stayed home.

[But Netanyahu’s] opponents . . . are no better positioned to form a coalition than he was. If Lapid and [the Yamina party leader Naftali] Bennett manage to cobble together their broad-based unity coalition, Netanyahu will have almost limitless chances to try to destabilize it from the opposition. In a coalition stretching from deep-right Yamina to progressive Meretz, there’s hardly a policy issue that won’t spark internal opposition from one party or another.

Netanyahu failed to win the first three elections because he faced a unified center-left and a mobilized Arab electorate. He failed to win the fourth one because his own voters no longer felt a need to turn out for him.

For some time, opponents of U.S support for Israel have been urging the White House to end the war in Gaza, or simply calling for a ceasefire. Douglas Feith and Lewis Libby consider what such a result would actually entail:

Ending the war immediately would allow Hamas to survive and retain military and governing power. Leaving it in the area containing the Sinai-Gaza smuggling routes would ensure that Hamas can rearm. This is why Hamas leaders now plead for a ceasefire. A ceasefire will provide some relief for Gazans today, but a prolonged ceasefire will preserve Hamas’s bloody oppression of Gaza and make future wars with Israel inevitable.

For most Gazans, even when there is no hot war, Hamas’s dictatorship is a nightmarish tyranny. Hamas rule features the torture and murder of regime opponents, official corruption, extremist indoctrination of children, and misery for the population in general. Hamas diverts foreign aid and other resources from proper uses; instead of improving life for the mass of the people, it uses the funds to fight against Palestinians and Israelis.

Moreover, a Hamas-affiliated website warned Gazans last month against cooperating with Israel in securing and delivering the truckloads of aid flowing into the Strip. It promised to deal with those who do with “an iron fist.” In other words, if Hamas remains in power, it will begin torturing, imprisoning, or murdering those it deems collaborators the moment the war ends. Thereafter, Hamas will begin planning its next attack on Israel:

Hamas’s goals are to overshadow the Palestinian Authority, win control of the West Bank, and establish Hamas leadership over the Palestinian revolution. Hamas’s ultimate aim is to spark a regional war to obliterate Israel and, as Hamas leaders steadfastly maintain, fulfill a Quranic vision of killing all Jews.

Hamas planned for corpses of Palestinian babies and mothers to serve as the mainspring of its October 7 war plan. Hamas calculated it could survive a war against a superior Israeli force and energize enemies of Israel around the world. The key to both aims was arranging for grievous Palestinian civilian losses. . . . That element of Hamas’s war plan is working impressively.