In lockstep with his return to health, Bibi emerged from the political crisis with a reinforced coalition

PHOTO: CHAIM GOLDBERG/FLASH90

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The two men who were jointly managing the war just two months ago were in very different places last Friday, geographically and health-wise. Dismissed defense minister Yoav Gallant, who resigned from the Knesset last week, was sipping wine in his moshav of Zichron Yaakov, per his old Friday night tradition.

A world away from Gallant’s tranquility, Prime Minister Netanyahu was being discharged from the hospital after recovering from a difficult surgery the previous Sunday. Having been forced to leave the hospital with a double dose of pain killers on the third day of recovery to quell a revolt in the Knesset, Netanyahu took a few days off to rest before the next crisis. In lockstep with his return to health, Bibi emerged from the political crisis with a reinforced coalition.

After locking Foreign Minister Gideon Saar into the right-wing coalition last week, with the signing of the agreement to bring him back into the Likud, Netanyahu received another Knesset vote as a gift, with the swearing-in of Druze Likud MK Afif Abed following Gallant’s resignation from the Knesset.

In addition, Netanyahu was successful in getting maverick Otzma Yehudit MK Almog Cohen to cross the Bibicon and vote in favor of the budget last week, against his party’s position.

Almog Cohen has long stood out as an independent-minded Knesset member willing to defy his party’s chairman, Itamar Ben-Gvir. But with his vote for the budget last week in defiance of his party leader, Almog Cohen, a hero who battled terrorists in the streets of Netivot on October 7, has officially left Ben-Gvir’s orbit, reducing the confrontational Otzma Yehudit leader’s bargaining power.

A quick calculation shows that after Gallant’s resignation and Almog Cohen’s defection, Netanyahu now controls 63 Knesset votes, not counting Itamar Ben-Gvir. That’s two more than the required majority of 61. A majority of that size is hard, but not impossible, to work with — not unlike the prime minister’s health situation.

Ben-Gvir’s public apology to Netanyahu on Motzaei Shabbos, after spending Shabbos in Eilat, proved for the umpteenth time that even under the fog of anesthesia, Netanyahu still has a better grasp of the political situation than any other Israeli politician.

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Back to Yoav Gallant, the former defense minister is a study in political pipe dreams. He still sees himself as a potential Likud leader after Netanyahu steps down… sometime after the end of Trump’s second term.

His decision to resign from the Knesset, after two months of almost complete absence from the chamber since his dismissal, was first and foremost one of personal expediency. Had he remained in the Knesset, he might have met the left’s hopes of blocking the draft law and the state budget, but would have opened himself to being declared a defector by the Likud.

The Knesset has passed a series of anti-defection measures over the years, preventing a rebellious MK who’s been declared a defector by his faction from running for the next Knesset on a different party’s list. Gallant realized that every second he remained in the Knesset jeopardized his future.

But even so, the future of the man who was seen as a potential successor to Netanyahu at the start of the term is very much up in the air. The media only whitewashed his performance as head of the defense department on October 7 due to his open revolt against Netanyahu and opposition to the draft law.

Gallant believes that there are enough non-Bibi-ist Likudniks willing to buy in to his brand of moderate conservatism, but it is unlikely that he’ll be able to replicate his past primary results in today’s Likud.

Gallant isn’t the first Likud defense minister to fall out with Netanyahu. Before him came Itzik Mordechai in 1999 and Moshe (Bogi) Yaalon in 2016, whose relations with Netanyahu ended in an ugly divorce. The latter’s subsequent defection to centrist parties has left him in political oblivion.

If incoming defense minister Yisrael Katz breaks the curse on Likud defense ministers under Netanyahu, it will be because unlike his predecessors, Mordechai, Yaalon, and Gallant, who came from the ranks of the army and identified with the general staff, Katz comes from civilian life.

Like defense minister Moshe Arens, who replaced Mordechai, albeit briefly, but didn’t leave the Kiryah with a door slam, Katz also stands a chance to survive the role intact. Such a conclusion, for a change, would be good not only for Yisrael Katz the man, but for Medinat Yisrael as a whole.

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“The toughest period for chareidim” — that’s how the chairman of Shas recently described the state of chareidi influence under a fully right-wing government, in private conversations.

There is no area in which the chareidi community isn’t taking serious blows against the backdrop of the failure to pass a law regulating the status of yeshivah students. And so, even as Finance Minister Smotrich directs cash to the yishuvim of Yehudah and Shomron, whose number, according to official figures published last week, now exceeds half a million, and even as Ben-Gvir transforms the police, the chareidim are the ones bearing the brunt of the deep state’s ire.

Egging on the bureaucrats who are combing through every budgetary allocation to the chareidi community is Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, who sees herself as leading a rearguard action against the right-wing government’s judicial reform. And what better way to keep the government in check than to strike at the chareidi community, a move guaranteed to receive public support and media plaudits?

The coalition crisis vis-à-vis the chareidim intensified last week, two weeks after the ouster of Gallant, whom Bibi blamed for the failure to pass a draft law. It turns out that under Defense Minister Katz as well, the process will be as slow and tortuous as Netanyahu’s trial.

Netanyahu spent his health break from his testimony last week not resting, but conducting intensive talks with Yisrael Katz and chareidi representatives, in a last-ditch attempt to pass a draft law and lift the chareidi threat to dissolve the government.

Bibi thinks he can handle a weakened Ben-Gvir on his own, but he can’t accept a situation where Ben-Gvir coordinates with Minister Yitzchak Goldknopf of Agudas Yisrael. Over Chanukah he was able to neutralize the threat, but Netanyahu knows that going forward, counting on miracles isn’t a plan of action.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1044)