Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman planned this ruse as one would plan a political assassination. On May 1, he told Al-Monitor in a phone conversation that “everything is possible. The chances that I’ll become part of the government are 50-50; I'm truly undecided because [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu violated his promises and I cannot be partner to a government that will cancel all the achievements we scored in the previous government.”
My guess is that during that conversation, Liberman already knew he was not part of the game. His supreme goal at this very moment is to bring Netanyahu down, and Liberman has the knowledge and the talents to carry this out. “I assume that this government won’t survive to the end of the year,” Liberman said the day after he resigned. In closed talks, he added that panic will cause Netanyahu to make mistakes that will speed up the end to his fourth government. Liberman promises that he will do everything possible to forestall a fifth Netanyahu government. It is a life-or-death political duel between two historic allies who burst into Israeli politics together in the 1996 elections and since then have steadily moved apart, until becoming almost opposites on the spectrum.
