The Blue and White party collapsed like a house of cards March 26, and with it, the most meaningful challenge to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rule in the past decade. It will just be a matter of days before Israelis are introduced to their new “coronavirus government,” with Blue and White leader Gantz holding either the defense or foreign affairs portfolio. Based on the emerging agreement, he will replace Netanyahu as prime minister in another year and a half.

Gantz made the most difficult decision of his political career, knowing that it would lead to the dismantling of Blue and White. He struggled and anguished over it, and he postponed it to the very last minute in the hope that Yair Lapid, the No. 2 member of Blue and White, would lift his veto of a Netanyahu government. At the same time, however, he also came to realize that there was no way for him to form a minority government. He went with the polls, which showed that the people were fed up with all the political squabbling and most of his voters wanted a unity government, even if it included Netanyahu. The coronavirus had the final word.

The problem was that as much as Gantz leaned toward a unity government, Lapid and his ally, Yisrael Beitenu Chairman Avigdor Liberman, stood firm in their opposition to the move and used whatever power they had to block it. As leaders of the contrarian line against the Blue and White party chairman, they even tried to take over the Knesset with their “Anyone but Netanyahu” bloc of a supposed 61 seats. Only this, they claimed, would bring an end to Netanyahu’s government.

What Lapid never fully understood about Gantz was that despite his kindly demeanor and his maneuverability, he could also make difficult decisions in a matter of minutes without the slightest display of emotion. That is exactly what happened too, when Lapid yanked on the rope a little too hard. “Benny [Gantz] realized that Lapid and Liberman were neutralizing him. He didn’t have a government, and they were preventing him from leading in his own way, so he decided to put them to the test,” one of Gantz’s senior advisers told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. The test that Gantz posed to Lapid on Thursday morning was actually quite simple. He asked him to shelve his plan to get Knesset member Meir Cohen (of Lapid’s Yesh Atid party) elected speaker of the Knesset. Cohen was something of a red flag for the Likud. The decision to remove him from the running signaled that there was still room for negotiations with Netanyahu over a unity government.