Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was noticeably late when he arrived at the Likud Knesset faction’s weekly meeting on Dec. 17. The Knesset was packed with journalists and Likud activists, who started to suspect that something big was happening behind the scenes. Some of them raised the possibility that Netanyahu was planning to issue a statement attacking the ministers who participated in the right-wing demonstration against the government a day earlier.

All the leaders of the settler movement attended the demonstration, which took place outside the Knesset. It was organized in response to the recent wave of terror attacks in the West Bank that left two soldiers and a four-day-old baby dead. It should have irked Netanyahu that nine coalition ministers from the Likud, HaBayit HaYehudi and Kulanu, including Ze’ev Elkin, Yariv Levin, Naftali Bennett, Ayelet Shaked and Yoav Galant, participated. No matter how one looks at it, these ministers were demonstrating against the defense policies of the very government in which they serve, and in which Netanyahu is also the defense minister.

That some of these ministers are also members of the security cabinet only intensified the absurdity and the commotion in the coalition. The chairman of HaBayit HaYehudi, Naftali Bennett, announced that it is time for Israel to start winning again, even though he is a senior member of the current government.

Bennett and Shaked did not stop at bellicose speeches at the demonstration but continued to challenge Netanyahu at the cabinet meeting, which took place in an already tense atmosphere. They used the occasion to demand once again that the prime minister appoint Bennett as defense minister and announced that they would abstain from a vote to put Netanyahu officially in the office. While the prime minister dismissed them with derision, he did make much of a fuss.