After Benjamin Netanyahu failed to assemble a governing coalition by the deadline last Tuesday, President Reuven Rivlin passed the mandate to Yair Lapid, the leader of the Knesset’s second largest party. Lapid, a politician of the center-left, has now joined forces with Naftali Bennet, of the right-wing Yamina, to put together a seven- or eight-party coalition ranging from the far-left Meretz to the secular right Yisrael Beytenu. As of Sunday night, the two seem to have gained the support of the conservative Islamic party Ra’am. But, explains Haviv Rettig Gur, it’s still not clear if they will succeed:

Yamina’s Amiḥai Chikli declared last week he wouldn’t support such a coalition. Remove Chikli and add the four-seat Ra’am to the mix and you reach precisely 61 [seats], with not a vote to spare. It’s a terribly difficult puzzle to piece together. Each new part Lapid or Bennett might try to add seems to compromise another.

Some in [the center-right] New Hope and Yamina are working hard to bring ḥaredi parties on board in a bid to stabilize the government and, no less important for Bennett and New Hope’s Gideon Sa’ar, strengthen its conservative wing. But ḥaredi support (Shas’s nine seats and/or United Torah Judaism’s seven) would almost certainly mean the loss of Yisrael Beytenu’s seven and likely also progressive Meretz’s six.

The Arab Joint List quietly suggested to Lapid last week to drop right-wing Bennett (six seats without Chikli) . . . in exchange for the support of their six seats. But without Bennett, Lapid loses Sa’ar’s six seats as well. And therein lies the rub. It’s not at all clear that what Bennett and Lapid are trying to do is actually possible. Nothing quite like it has ever been done in Israeli politics.

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.