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Has Netanyahu’s succession war already started?

Senior Likud members are terrified of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and won’t launch a succession war, but there are incidents that indicate some of them are testing the waters.
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Reuven Rivlin landed the prized position of the president of the State of Israel after swimming for many years in the stormy and often murky waters of Israeli politics. Everyone knows that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not his cup of tea, to put it mildly. Once, when he was still only “Ruvy,” the Likud legislator and loyal fan of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer club, he joked that an elephant with Netanyahu’s hide had been discovered in Africa. So why is such an experienced and savvy politician going all out to keep Netanyahu at the official residence on Balfour Street? Why is he making such efforts to find a compromise for Netanyahu and Benny Gantz to form a unity government?

Hard to believe that Rivlin truly thought Netanyahu’s rivals, Gantz and his Blue and White party colleagues would jump at the strange deal he proposed to them and to the Israeli public on Sept. 25. The president proposed a rotation agreement between Netanyahu and Gantz together with a legal change to the position of “substitute prime minister” that would grant the officeholder “full power” in case the prime minister could not carry out his duties (such as in the case of an indictment). Rivlin surely knew he was declaring the deal dead on arrival, but at the same time fired the starting gun for the race to succeed Netanyahu as Likud leader and to serve half a term as prime minister. The other half, according to the job-sharing idea Rivlin proposed, would be reserved for Gantz.

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