The former Israeli prime minister, and present leader of the country’s largest opposition party, is currently on trial for three charges of corruption, which have dogged him for the past five years. According to recent reports, his lawyers are negotiating a possible plea bargain, which would allow him to avoid jail time, but ban him from politics for seven years. While Shany Mor believes it unlikely that the sides will reach agreement, he nonetheless considers possible ramifications:

Israel’s current governing coalition . . . is a disparate mix of two right-wing parties, two centrist parties, two left-wing parties, and one Islamist party. This unlikely grouping joined forces in 2021 out of a desire to end Netanyahu’s twelve-year reign. Having done so, the coalition now holds together thanks only to a self-enforcing equilibrium. The coalition’s left-leaning elements are roughly equal in size to the right-leaning ones, and both sides have respected each other’s political red lines. Maintaining this arrangement has been easy because the only realistic alternative—partnering with Netanyahu—is unacceptable to all.

Removing Netanyahu from the political scene would end a key rift in Israeli politics. In four consecutive elections, roughly half the voters expressed a desire to see him remain in power, and roughly half the opposite. With the polarizing Netanyahu out of the picture, Israel’s conservative parties, which enjoy an enormous majority in the Knesset but have failed to form a coalition since 2015 because some factions refuse to work with Netanyahu, could partner together once more.

To be sure, Netanyahu’s departure might not necessarily trigger an immediate coalition collapse in favor of a new right-wing government. There is still deep animosity between the rightists who helped depose Netanyahu and those who remained loyal to him.

But Netanyahu’s absence would at least change the bargaining power of the various factions within the current governing coalition. The left-wing coalition partners would still have no leverage to forge a coalition of their own, and the conservative factions could demand a higher price for allowing them to remain in the government.

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.