National Unity chairman Benny Gantz’s call for a national election in September was the first time he specified a time for it since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war on October 7. He attributed his decision to the uptick in the intensity and volume of protests against the government over the past week. What Israel needed was “quiet in the ballot box instead of flames in the streets,” he said.
This argument is diametrically opposed to that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who warned in a press conference on Sunday night that an election would create divisiveness and play into the hands of Hamas. An election was a bad idea when we are a “step away from victory,” he said.
This was somewhat contradictory to a comment made earlier in his speech, however, when he said a humanitarian and then military operation in Rafah would “take time” and that there was “no victory without entering Rafah,” implying that victory was not immediately at hand.
Either way, ironically, an election could actually ease the way forward to ending the war in Gaza with a hostage deal and a governing alternative to Hamas.
Formally, Israel heads to an election either when the prime minister resigns or when the Knesset passes a bill to disperse itself. Once this happens, the government becomes a caretaker government and remains in power until the next government takes over.
Caretaker governments are not supposed to make far-reaching decisions. Still, they are not defined in law, and a number of significant moves were indeed made under them, including former prime minister Yair Lapid’s maritime border agreement with Lebanon in 2022.
As long as Netanyahu’s government relies on its far-right parties, the Religious Zionist Party and Otzma Yehudit, he will be limited in the concessions he is willing to make on a hostage deal and the future of Gaza. With the Knesset officially disbanded, however, the far-right parties lose their leverage; they cannot threaten to bring down the government since it has already fallen.
This could pave the way for an ad-hoc coalition of at least some of the remaining Jewish parties, including those currently in the opposition, to move forward. According to a National Unity Party spokesperson, Gantz’s call for an election—along with several policy arguments regarding a hostage deal, the security situation in the North, and the possibility of normalizing ties with Saudi Arabia—was intended to point to “where we are headed.”
Netanyahu has hesitated to state a clear policy on what the end of the war will look like. Still, he has insisted time again that its three goals – defeating Hamas, freeing the hostages, and ensuring that Gaza will never again be a security threat to Israel – will be attained. If he concludes that these cannot be achieved within a reasonable time due to the far-right parties, disbanding the government may actually enable him to do so.
Of course, this would be a political gamble, which Netanyahu is famous for avoiding. He would be ferociously attacked by the parties to his right and would likely lose votes to those parties. It also is not optimal from a democratic standpoint because governments should not take advantage of their caretaker status to implement policy.
But if the prime minister comes to the realization that an election in the coming year is unavoidable, he may benefit from being the one to initiate it, portraying himself as the responsible adult who is attentive to public sentiment.
The Likud, as it usually does, attacked Gantz in response and accused him of engaging in “petty politics.”
With Gantz making the first move, there may come a time in the coming months when Netanyahu realizes that Gantz has a point and makes a move himself.