The road has all but run out for Netanyahu’s government. Beset by internal crisis and desperate to avoid losing power, his record suggests a major provocation might be around the corner.
Ever since the Trump administration imposed a “ceasefire” in Gaza in September, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been tying himself in knots looking for a reason not to head for elections. His holding the office of Prime Minister has been the last card left to him to avoid accountability in his ongoing corruption trials, as well as his transparent military and security failures in the two years since the Al-Aqsa Flood attacks of 2023.
While he’s attempting to keep the door open to sustained conflict in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Iran, the ongoing crisis of conscription has reared its head again, threatening to disintegrate the Prime Minister’s paper-thin coalition.
The issue revolves around the ongoing exemptions given to the Ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) Jewish population, which the Supreme Court declared in 2024 to be illegal, mandating the government to begin drafting them. The difficulty for Netanyahu is that his government is comprised of a coalition with the two parties specifically representing this segment of the population, Shas and United Torah Judaism. Both parties have conditioned their support for Netanyahu on his passing of legislation “re-legalizing” their exemption. As the costs and strains of “Israel’s” two-year multi-front war against the region have accumulated, such a nakedly political move has become electorally poisonous, particularly with elections mandated for no later than October 2026.
In mid-November, the Supreme Court directed Netanyahu’s government to present a specific list of measures, including criminal prosecution, for those who evade military service, especially among the Haredi population. The Court issued a deadline of 45 days, after which it indicated it would issue specific orders should the government fail to comply. Currently, this deadline will fall on January 3, with very little indication that the government has shown any attempt to comply with the court order. If the Court follows through on its threat, as is widely expected, it will likely begin ordering state institutions to impose specific penalties on the Haredi, independent of Netanyahu’s government. That these likely measures include criminal prosecution and the termination of state subsidies for Ultra-Orthodox institutions poses an existential question for the government.
In the absence of a law enshrining their exemption from military service and with legal sanctions on their community regardless of the wishes or promises of the Prime Minister, the most likely response of Shas and UTJ will be to formally end their coalition with Likud and vote for the dissolution of the government, leading to early elections. This is what Netanyahu is desperate to avoid.
The one tactic that may still be effective at buying him time will be exactly what he has spent the last two years doing, provoking regional wars to keep himself in office under the guise of “national unity.”
The cynicism of this strategy is difficult to fathom, except that we have already seen it play out this year. Both Haredi parties were on the brink of supporting a no-confidence vote that would have dissolved the Knesset in June over Netanyahu’s failure to pass the exemption law. At the last minute, he retained their support based on an impending “security situation.” His government survived the no-confidence vote, and the next day, June 13th, “Israel” directly attacked Iran.
Almost as soon as hostilities were paused by the ceasefire, Netanyahu’s coalition partners left the government, but did not side with attempts to topple the Prime Minister. He then immediately pivoted back to the Gaza theatre with his gambit of fully occupying Gaza City, which he failed to do before the ceasefire’s first stage was agreed.
On Tuesday, the PM stood beside US President Trump for the fifth time in less than a year, trotting out what is by now the most tried and tired script of the century so far, that Iran and Hezbollah, despite being “defeated” are rapidly rearming, necessitating (according to his logic) renewed US-Israeli aggression. Trump also gave his typical spiel, saying that “if” the Islamic Republic rearmed or rebuilt its nuclear program, he would support renewed Israeli bombing campaigns. He also professed not to be worried by anything “Israel” was doing in Lebanon, where it has committed thousands of violations of the ceasefire with Lebanon over the past year.
Trump’s statements could very well stem from his accelerating cognitive decline, a desire to paper over private frustration with Netanyahu’s relentless attempts at sabotage, or both. However, the effective emptiness of his words appears calculated to give a green light to Netanyahu without committing the United States to direct military action.
The regional conflagration that began in 2023 is at a critical juncture, between petering out or reigniting with a vengeance. The true obscenity of the situation is that it is largely hostage to the narcissism of a generational war criminal who will stop at literally nothing to buy himself a few extra weeks or days of legal impunity. For the sake of the region, one can only hope that enough deterrence still exists to prevent yet another criminal provocation by the Butcher of Gaza.
