It’s a miracle that Bennett’s coalition lasted so long
Here we go again. The collapse of Israel’s latest coalition means a fifth election in less than four years. Disastrous as that would be for any country, it shows how the fact that Naftali Bennett’s government lasted a year was something of a minor triumph (although the word minor is doing a lot of work here). The now former PM did well to hold such a disparate coalition together for as long as he did. The current state of Israeli politics — fractious, divided and unstable — combined with a proportional electoral system which necessitates coalitions, means that no government can easily be stable because no coalition can be confident of lasting. At some point, a member or a party involved will always feel the need to take a stand, to play up to their electoral base. The only unknowns are whether that stand will happen sooner or later, and whether it collapses the coalition. Which is what has happened now, with two of the ArabIsraeli members voting against a routine vote to extend Israeli regulations to the West Bank.
Just as Bennett’s did and Netanyahu’s did before, so the next Israeli coalition is likely to collapse
Anyone looking to the next election for some sort of clarity will be disappointed because nothing has really changed for years. Even in opposition, even in the midst of a trial, Benjamin Netanyahu remains the towering figure in Israeli politics — and the entire landscape is shaped around him. Elections, parties and politicians come and go, sometimes rising and often falling, but whatever name they have or form they take, the equation is always the same: neither those who would work with him, or those who seek to remove him, have enough electoral strength to defeat the other. All they can do is try, on the basis of any new assignment of seats after an election, to cobble a coalition together. And so, just as Bennett’s did this week and Netanyahu’s did before, the next government is also likely to collapse. As some have wryly observed, perhaps Israel’s problem is too much democracy.