The coalition agreement between the Likud and Blue and White was ready to be signed last week. All that remained was to put together a historic power-sharing government led by two prime ministers with equal rights and authority. However, after forcing Blue and White leader Benny Gantz to dismantle his party, one half of which balked at joining such a government, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did an about-face with two additional demands. One was for veto power over the Judicial Appointments Committee in order to control the makeup of the Supreme Court. The other was for a mechanism to prevent the top court from ruling against him serving as prime minister under criminal indictment.

Gantz cannot give in to these demands. The defense of Israel’s legal and law enforcement systems against persistent efforts by Netanyahu and his allies to weaken them is his sole political achievement vis-à-vis Netanyahu. They are also his sole moral and historic justification for forging a deal with a politician charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust. Granting Netanyahu veto power over the appointment of judges means giving him control over the identity of the justices who might rule on his appeal if a lower court convicts him.

It was the latest twist in the unbelievable plot of Israeli politics over the past 18 months, the latest curve in the insane roller coaster ride that has left the state in an endless election cycle and without a functioning government.

Over the Passover holiday that began on April 8, Gantz became yet another statistic in the endless list of Benjamin Netanyahu’s political victims. Gantz had abandoned the friends from Yesh Atid with whom he had formed Blue and White in early 2019, leading to the disintegration of the first alternative to emerge in the past decade to challenge Netanyahu’s hold on power — only to discover that he had been led astray by the most devious magician in Israeli political history.