On Dec. 8, just a few hours before the 19th Knesset voted on its premature dissolution, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu entered — perhaps for the last time in his capacity as premier — the spacious conference room of the Likud faction in the Knesset.
It was a particularly tense weekend for Netanyahu, following his failure to persuade Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman to agree to the introduction into the government of the ultra-Orthodox — a move by which Netanyahu sought to stop in its tracks the galloping election train, which he perceived all of a sudden as destructive and menacing.