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.

Here at Mosaic, we’ve published quite a lot about many Arab states, but one that’s barely received mention is Oman, located at the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. The sultanate has stayed out of the recent conflicts of the Midde East, and is known to have sub-rosa relations with Israel; high-ranking Israeli officials have visited the country clandestinely, or at least with little fanfare. For precisely this reason, Oman has held itself out as an intermediary and host for negotiations. The then-secret talks that proceeded the Obama administration’s fateful nuclear negotiations with Iran took place in Oman. Ari Heistein explains the similar, and troubling, role Muscat is playing with regard to the Houthis in neighboring Yemen:

For more than three decades, Oman has served in the role of mediator for the resolution of disputes in Yemen. . . . Oman allows for a Houthi office in the capital, Muscat, reportedly numbering around 100 personnel, to operate from its territory for the purported function of diplomatic engagement. It is worth asking why the Houthis require such a large delegation for such limited engagement and whether there is any real value to engaging with the Houthis.

Thus far, efforts to negotiate with the Houthis have yielded very limited outcomes, primarily resulting in concessions from the Saudi-led coalition and partial de-escalation when it has served the terror group’s interests. Rarely, if ever, have the Houthis fully abided by their commitments after signing off on international agreements. Presumably, such meager results could have been achieved through other constellations that are less beneficial to the recently redesignated foreign terrorist organization.

In contrast, the malign and destabilizing Houthi activities in Oman are significant. They include: shipment of Iranian and Chinese weapons components [and] military-grade communications equipment via Oman to the Houthis; the smuggling of senior officials in and out of Houthi-controlled areas via Oman; and financial activities conducted by Houthi shell corporations to consolidate the regime’s control over Yemen’s economy and subsidize the regime.

With this in mind, there is good reason to suspect that the Houthi presence in Oman does more harm than good.