Netanyahu Has Nothing Left to Offer

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a ceremony following the swearing-in of the 26th Knesset at the Knesset in Jerusalem, November 10, 2026. (Chaim Goldberg/Flash90)

It’s Friday, November 13, and Miriam Peretz, an Israel Prize laureate, a national symbol of determination and hope, the mother of two fallen IDF soldiers, and as of this week also an MK for Yashar!, told her friends in shock what had happened to her son. Eliasaf posted in favor of a Zionist government, ostensibly something self-evident. In response, he was flooded with abuse as if he had proposed sitting under Itamar Ben-Gvir in a coalition, rather than simply expressing the party’s official position.

His life is still easier than Benjamin Netanyahu’s. At 77, the prime minister finds himself in an uncharacteristic position: he is the subject of the coalition negotiations, but not their predicate. Put simply, his span of control over events is extremely limited.

Usually Netanyahu always has something to give: a reserved slot, a role, an interesting pairing. Now, in a caretaker government, with 46 seats and without the most important seat of all, which is parked with Gadi Eisenkot, the Yashar! leader, for now, he is trying to gather intelligence on the other side’s plans. Instead of collecting defectors from the other side, Netanyahu faces rumors in the Likud of defection in the opposite direction. Likud veteran David Bitan is mentioned there with apprehension (he denies it, of course). He has no government to offer the Haredim, and no roles or horizon to offer defectors.

At the start of the week, Netanyahu was convinced that a minority government relying on the Arabs would be brought to a vote by the end of it. Then all the red lights went on over the cooperation between Avigdor Liberman, the Yisrael Beiteinu leader, and the Haredim. On the morning of the Knesset swearing-in, after a long overnight conversation with the chairman of United Torah Judaism, a temporary all-clear sounded. If you join the coalition, Netanyahu told Asher, they will appoint an attorney general and ten Supreme Court justices. “And then even a majority of 70 seats won’t help you. You’re furious at the conduct of the legal system, but you’re going to entrench it for 30 years.”

With or without a connection, the briefings that followed from the Haredi camp turned tougher. And so came the speech at the Knesset swearing-in. Netanyahu had prepared a relatively conciliatory speech, but on the short way from the Prime Minister’s Office to the Chagall Hall, it turned into a diatribe. It’s not the first time this year. Since she retired, Sara Netanyahu has been spending more and more hours at her husband’s job. So have the new MK Yaakov Bardugo and the old adviser Natan Eshel. All three take a firm-to-aggressive line. “Did you see how Miriam Peretz applauded the words?” they rejoiced in the Likud.

But she is not necessarily their audience. The Likud’s goal is that in two to three months, if the Liberman-Haredi axis is foiled, Change Bloc MKs will face a choice between a minority government and going to elections, on one side, and a unity government with Netanyahu first in the rotation, on the other.

Eisenkot’s logic is that if the country goes straight to elections, this is not permanent reliance on the Arabs, only an episode whose purpose is removing Netanyahu from the Prime Minister’s Office. For that he will need Liberman, but mainly every member of his own faction. Will MKs who strongly oppose a government with Arabs leave Netanyahu’s speech feeling that unity should be given a chance? Or exactly the opposite? It was enough to look at the faces of the party leaders during the traditional photo. They looked like a wedding family portrait where the father and mother are divorced, the brothers and sisters aren’t speaking to each other, and the photographer, unaware of all of it, shouts: cheeeese.

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.

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Israeli attorney general Gali Baharav Miara attends a House committee meeting at the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament in Jerusalem on, June 9, 2026. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

In 19th-century America, fire services were political. Firefighting was provided first to supporters of the party that appointed the firefighters. Black people whose homes burned got no response. Back then, it seemed logical. A century or two later, it is taught in political science departments as an example of corruption that now seems absurd.

Absurd, really? Two civil servants, one serving and one retired, are challenging the assumption that Israel’s public service is provided equally, without fear or favor. Boaz Blatt, head of the Police Intelligence and Investigations Division, said in a recording published this week that files in Israel are kept in a drawer and pulled out to pressure citizens or to bring into line police officers who dared to think differently. Ayala Hasson, a senior presenter at the Public Broadcasting Corporation, resigned after being forced to apologize on air again and again for things she had said somewhere else entirely. Blatt explained that investigations are launched or frozen for improper motives. Hasson related that broadcasts serve one political side for non-substantive motives. An unexpected corroborating voice arose for her: a week earlier, during an election broadcast that hosted only opposition supporters, a sign-language interpreter was suddenly heard on air saying to his colleague, not knowing he was being broadcast: “Isn’t it odd that there isn’t a single representative of the right here all evening?” It’s odd that the Corporation’s management didn’t put him in the pillory too.

A broadcast aimed at only one side is like surgeries handed out through connections to only one sector. Investigations used not for justice but for extortion are like firefighters who don’t put out fires for whoever dared to vote differently. Aren’t the Corporation’s viewers on the left embarrassed that 1 billion shekels a year of all our money is poured only on their heads? How is that different from a road paved only for the Democrats’ voters?

Someone will say, “Well, duh.” After all, Bezalel Smotrich also invested vast sums in his supporters in Judea and Samaria, and as for the subsidies given to the Haredim, there is no need to elaborate at all. The difference is twofold. One, these are politicians who declare their intentions in advance and are elected on that basis, not broadcasting and prosecution services that pride themselves on being apolitical and objective.

Second, politicians can be replaced, and with them their priorities. The court, by contrast (another body that provides its services mainly to one side), has blocked with its own body any “political” intervention in precisely those places, the Public Broadcasting Corporation and the Justice Ministry. It was reckless protection that let them keep blatantly discriminating against huge groups in the public while cynically using the term “public service.” That is why Hasson’s de facto ousting echoed far beyond the dismal ratings of the Corporation’s news broadcasts, and why Blatt’s words in the recording earned far more credibility than the rather poor credibility of the law-enforcement system.

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.

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English Editor: Ari Tatarka

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