According to multiple recent polls, support for Benjamin Netanyahu and his government has declined significantly since the most recent election. Haviv Rettig Gur observes, based on more specific survey data, that the prime minister’s problem isn’t that his voters aren’t happy with his government’s stalled attempt at judicial reform, but that his voters care about other issues more:

“What do you think should be the priority of the government?” a Channel 12 poll asked last week. It asked respondents to choose between just two options: the looming “economic crisis”—rising food and gas prices, inflation, etc.—and the “judicial reform.” Nearly three-quarters, 74 percent, said the economy and just 19 percent the judicial reform—a whopping 55-point gap. And when Likud voters were [isolated] from the larger sample, the gap was almost as huge: 69 percent economy, 27 percent judicial reform—a 42-point gap. . . . This doesn’t mean judicial reform isn’t important to right-wing voters, only that it’s deemed less urgent than other issues.

It matters, then, that the government has very publicly neglected nearly every other issue in the four months since the coalition was formed. Entire ministries and vital agencies—welfare, labor, the National Insurance Institute—are still without chief executives. Dozens of important decisions are waiting in the Justice Ministry for minister Yariv Levin’s signature, unable to move forward because his attention is elsewhere.

With less than a month to the deadline for passing a state budget, the budget bill has barely been dealt with in the Knesset. It’s now advancing with major and long-promised reforms—including a streamlining of import regulations that Netanyahu promised in the election campaign would dramatically lower the cost of living—having been removed. The government and the Knesset simply don’t have the time or political bandwidth to deal with them before the budget deadline.

[For a government to collapse], it only takes one coalition party concluding that the government is irredeemably floundering, that it won’t be able to turn things around, and that it’s therefore in its political interest to jump ship and position itself as a critic of the flailing coalition. Everything then unravels very quickly.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.