Member Newsletter
It’s been clear for some weeks that there is growing division in the Israeli war cabinet. Now it appears to be breaking into the open, with indications that a new election could come sooner than later.
First a bit of stage-setting and context to explain the moving pieces and what this all might or might not mean.
On October 7th, the day of the Hamas massacres in southern Israel, Israel was led by a narrow and very right-wing coalition government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel had been embroiled for most of the previous year in a highly polarized fight over the government’s effort to dramatically curtail the power of the country’s Supreme Court. The massacres shattered the public’s confidence in Netanyahu, which had kept him in power since 2009 with only one intermission in 2021 and 2022. Soon after the outbreak of the current war, Netanyahu was able to bring one of the two main opposition parties, National Union, into his government.