Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed determined to avoid new elections. Toward the end of this week, Netanyahu seems to be driving just as energetically toward the ballot box.
Netanyahu has left himself an escape hatch and could still stick with the current government. But he has evidently concluded that elections later this year are the lesser evil. In 2021, his situation could be much worse. It's better to take the risk now and cut his losses than to find himself trapped in an unholy marriage with Defense Minister Benny Gantz and forced to hand over the premiership to him in November 2021 as per their deal — or find an excuse to call elections next summer under far worse circumstances.
What changed between this week and the last that Netanyahu would make an insane gamble, dragging a divided and economically battered Israel into its fourth election in 18 months? It's the timetable set by the judges presiding over his corruption trial. In a July 19 technical discussion regarding the upcoming evidentiary phase, Jerusalem District Court Judge Rivka Friedman-Feldman, who heads the three-judge panel, ruled that starting in January, the prime minister would have to present himself in court three times a week. While she acceded to a request by Netanyahu’s lawyers to postpone the evidentiary phase until January to give them time to study the evidence, she set a fast-paced, grueling trial schedule.
As the week wore on, Netanyahu seemed to realize that next year, he would be a far lamer duck than he is now. Not only does the economic crisis seem here to stay for the foreseeable future, and not only have COVID-19 infections resurged with a vengeance and prompted widespread finger-pointing at Netanyahu’s failed crisis management. Nore so, not only is there a fair chance that the occupant of the White House will be Joe Biden rather than Donald Trump, but Netanyahu will find himself in an awkward position. The prime minister will have to spend endless weeks facing his judges, inevitably prompting calls and petitions demanding that he declare himself temporarily incapacitated and step aside.
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