Officially, the debate scheduled for the Tuesday night session at the Knesset is about Israel’s military. The 120 members of Israel’s parliament are considering a bill that would exempt ultra-Orthodox Jewish youth from serving under the country’s mandatory military service, a long-thorny issue in the country’s politics.
But the political drama behind the debate could bring about the end of the 20th Knesset — and those debating the issue.
The bill itself, known as the Draft Bill, has nothing inherently to do with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet the Israeli leader is at the center of the entire coalition crisis boiling over just days after he returned from a trip to Washington.
The two ultra-Orthodox parties demand that the bill be passed into law or they will take down the government. They have threatened to vote against the budget, which would automatically trigger elections, if the Draft Bill isn’t passed.
Meanwhile, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon says, if the budget isn’t passed by month’s end, he will take down the government.
Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman refuses to vote for the Draft Bill, promising to quit the coalition if it’s passed. His Yisrael Beiteinu party doesn’t have enough seats to topple the government, but it would leave Netanyahu with a razor-thin 61-seat coalition.
Netanyahu himself has said a 61-seat coalition isn’t enough, opting to head for snap elections if that’s what he’s left with.
Speaking in the Knesset on Monday night, Netanyahu said, “The hour is late but not too late, we must make a supreme effort to keep the government in its current composition for a long time. A government that relies on a one-vote majority simply cannot function. We’ve been there; we’ve seen what it’s like.”
Netanyahu’s coalition partners have urged him to hold the government together.
Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked called the political showdown a fake crisis, and warned Netanyahu not to head to snap elections. “Prime Minister, to take down a right-wing government over nothing would be a historic mistake,” she tweeted.
Education Minister Naftali Bennett followed suit, tweeting, “If you topple a right-wing government and lead us to early elections over personal matters, you will lose us.”
Netanyahu, who has always insisted he doesn’t want to hold elections before the next set date in November 2019, may be the biggest beneficiary of heading to the polls early.
Recent polls show his Likud party winning elections if they were held today, despite five separate corruption investigations targeting the Prime Minister and his inner circle. Right before jetting to Washington for a meeting with President Donald Trump earlier this month, Netanyahu was questioned for an eighth time.
Investigators interrogated him “under caution,” making him a suspect in three separate cases now. Netanyahu has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing in any of the cases, often saying, “There will be nothing because there is nothing.”
Elections wouldn’t stop the investigations — the state attorney recently said the cases against the Prime Minister would continue regardless — but a convincing win would be a way for Netanyahu to send a message to the judiciary that the people decide who leads Israel, not the attorney general. It has been a frequent refrain of the Israeli leader that the investigations are a “witch hunt” driven by media pressure to which he refuses to succumb, instead relying on his voter base to support him.
The timing of a snap election also favors Netanyahu. If elections were called this week, they would be held in mid- to late June. That’s one month after Israel celebrates its 70th anniversary and the White House moves the US Embassy to Jerusalem. For Netanyahu, that means every speech around the celebrations becomes a stump speech, and every event he attends becomes a campaign rally.
It’s the perfect run-up to a snap election.
But only for Netanyahu.