Meron Rapoport writes:

A little over a month after October 7, 2023, Israel’s Channel 12 published its first Knesset seat projection following the Hamas attack. Unsurprisingly, the results were catastrophic for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

His Likud party, which had won 32 of the Knesset’s 120 seats in the election only a year earlier, was polling at just 17 seats — close to its worst-ever showing. The governing coalition, which totaled 64 seats, had dropped to 45 in the poll. Netanyahu’s path out of power and toward political ruin seemed all but paved.

Nearly three years later, Netanyahu’s coalition still appears to be short of a majority, with polls generally putting it at between 49 and 54 seats. Yet compared with its position immediately after October 7, it is very much back in the game, and another Netanyahu victory is hardly inconceivable. Nor can anyone say with certainty that the polls conducted by Netanyahu-aligned pollster Shlomo Filber and Channel 14, which regularly give the governing bloc a majority, are entirely wrong.

Over the last three years, the coalition has survived nearly every parliamentary challenge placed before it. It has passed budgets and legislation central to its agenda, and has even expanded: With Gideon Sa’ar and four members of his party joining the “emergency government” in the aftermath of October 7, the coalition now holds 68 seats compared with its original 64.

There are several possible explanations for the government’s remarkable stability after what was undoubtedly one of the gravest failures in Israel’s history. But the most convincing explanation is that the government has transformed war into a permanent state of affairs, without a clear endpoint. Nothing captures this better than Netanyahu’s “total victory” mantra, a concept whose meaning he has never even bothered to define. [Continue reading…]