Two very different comebacks

This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

The American public has spoken, loud and clear.

Returning president Donald Trump called his election victory “the most incredible political thing, political victory, that our country has never seen before.”

His Vice President-elect JD Vance hailed “the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America.”

And so, too, did Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was quick to issue a statement to that effect: “Congratulations on history’s greatest comeback!”

Trump achieved his extraordinary feat — becoming only the second defeated US president to win a fresh White House term (132 years after Grover Cleveland) — just a few hours after Netanyahu brusquely advanced a dramatic comeback of his own, ousting his only significant coalition dissenter, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and thus cementing his political domination barely a year after the unprecedented catastrophe of October 7, 2023.

A day earlier, Netanyahu had reportedly tasked Justice Minister Yariv Levin with finding a “solution” for his other prime potent irritant, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, the government’s chief legal adviser, who keeps objecting to his efforts to entrench in legislation the inequitable and discriminatory exclusion of ultra-Orthodox males from military service. His determination to appease his Haredi partners and thus stabilize his coalition — mid-multifront war, at the expense of the overstretched standing army and reserves — was one of his main bones of contention with Gallant, who refused to back any such law, regarding it as unjust, divisive, and harmful to the war effort.

Related: Netanyahu’s firing of Gallant mid-war is reckless, divisive and dangerous to Israel

Gallant’s removal — and his replacement by Israel Katz, whose brief tenure as foreign minister will be remembered chiefly for a series of tweets insulting world leaders hostile to Israel — means there is a neophyte in charge of the army as Israel battles Hamas, Hezbollah and ultimately Iran. It also means there is nobody in the key cabinet decision-making forums, with the exception of far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, who will challenge or push back against Netanyahu. And nobody who will object if Netanyahu moves to replace the heads of the IDF, Shin Bet and Mossad — all of whom share culpability for October 7, and all of whom have reportedly encouraged him to secure a hostage-ceasefire deal with Hamas in Gaza on terms he and the far right oppose.

Baharav-Miara’s ouster, doubtless to be succeeded by a more convenient personage, would mean the departure of the only independent legal adviser at the cabinet table. It would also ensure a more sympathetic figure at the helm of the state prosecution, at a time when Netanyahu is on trial in three corruption cases and two war-related police and Shin Bet investigations are in full sway with significant potential implications for the Prime Minister’s Office.

In acute contrast to Trump’s historic comeback, however, Netanyahu’s has been achieved without recourse to the electorate since the greatest calamity in Israeli history unfolded on his watch, without him having acknowledged his prime responsibility for the failures that enabled the Hamas invasion and massacre, and without him allowing the establishment of a state commission of inquiry into what went so catastrophically wrong. His refusal to permit such an inquiry — vital to shed light on what exactly happened, and to learn essential lessons to prevent anything remotely similar happening again — was another of the issues over which he and Gallant openly clashed.

In specifying why he was fired, Gallant cited a third reason — his conviction that a hostage-ceasefire deal is necessary and doable, and indeed that the current “abandoning” of the hostages is unforgivable, and if maintained “will be a mark of Cain on the forehead of Israeli society and those leading this mistaken path.”

On all three of these issues, Israel’s unreliable polling indicates that most of the public aligns with Gallant. On the issue of the Haredi failure to serve in the IDF, parts of Netanyahu’s own supine Likud Knesset faction and the far-right coalition parties do too.

And unreliable polling is all we have, given that Netanyahu, sworn in as prime minister after his Likud-led bloc won 64 of the 120 Knesset seats in the November 2022 elections, is not required to face Israeli voters again until October 2026. If Netanyahu can find a way to meet the ultra-Orthodox IDF-evasion demand, there is no reason to believe his now 68-member coalition — bolstered by the four-strong party of incoming foreign minister Gideon Sa’ar, a rival turned utterly unprincipled supplicant — will fall before then. And no reason, I should stress, to believe that he would not win re-election when the time comes.

Now that Netanyahu serves not only as prime minister but, via his ciphers Katz and Sa’ar, as defense minister and foreign minister, too, and with the attorney general in his sights, the next concern is that he will revive the central legislative effort of the first nine months of his government: a package of bills designed to broadly subjugate the judiciary to the political majority — a gambit that only stalled after Gallant warned of its divisive consequences and was temporarily fired for his trouble, and that Netanyahu’s justice minister has continued to advocate even amid the war.

This would give the prime minister near-absolute authority in Israel, still without having secured a fresh mandate from the people.

And that would constitute not just a comeback, but a vast surpassing of the powers he held before October 7.