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Is Netanyahu Trying to Keep Power?

By Catalina Clarke

Israel voted. The 26th Knesset was sworn in today, and President Herzog has given Gadi Eisenkot the mandate to form a government. By the ordinary rules of a democracy, the story from here is coalition arithmetic — hard, slow, and legitimate.

But another story is running underneath it, and it deserves to be asked aloud: is Benjamin Netanyahu, now a caretaker prime minister, attempting to remain in power?

Consider only what is on the record. The election result is being challenged — after Israel’s own security service, Shin Bet, examined the interference question and found no evidence of it. The caretaker government continues while the challenge and the formation clock run in parallel. And today, on the new Knesset’s first day, President Herzog warned publicly against a repeat election — a warning a president does not issue unless the possibility is real enough to name. A repeat election is, not incidentally, the one outcome under which a caretaker prime minister stays in office longest without winning anything.

Layer onto this the two facts that frame every decision Netanyahu makes. He is a defendant: his corruption trial awaits him on the far side of power, and talk of a presidential pardon has never quite left the room. And the United States has announced that military aid to Israel ends this year — a cliff edge that rewards incumbency, relationships, and delay, and punishes transition.

None of this proves intent. Every lever available to him is a lawful lever, and forming a government in Israel is genuinely difficult: Eisenkot’s prospective coalition is not closed, his partners’ demands on military service are in open conflict, and failure to form a government is a normal democratic event. A fair reader holds all of that.

But democracies rarely lose the thread in a single dramatic grab. They lose it in procedure — in challenges that outlast their evidence, in clocks that run without conclusions, in interim arrangements that quietly become the arrangement. The question is not whether Netanyahu is breaking the rules. The question is whether the process is being worked, patiently and lawfully, toward the one result in which nothing changes.

Is that the best path forward for Israel? We do not believe a country is served by limbo. Israel’s voters delivered a result; the best path is the one where that result produces a government — Eisenkot’s, if he can build it, or the next mandate if he cannot — promptly, openly, and without the result itself being litigated into fog. A prime minister who believes the voters were wrong has a remedy: win the next election. Holding the chair while arguing the last one shouldn’t count is not that remedy.

The coming days will answer the question better than any editorial can. Watch the challenge. Watch the clock. Watch whether the formation process is treated as the main event — or as an interval to be survived.

— Catalina Clarke, Editor-in-Chief, The Library Media
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