The Coalition That Was Never Designed to Last
When Benjamin Netanyahu assembled his War Cabinet in late 2023, the structure seemed pragmatic. Emergency coalitions work best when they’re small, focused, and composed of figures willing to set aside ordinary partisan conflict for national survival. Netanyahu brought in Benny Gantz from the National Unity Party and Gadi Eisenkot, a retired general with real credibility. The idea was simple: win the war, then dissolve. Except war doesn’t work on a calendar.
By June 2024, Gantz had walked out. His departure ended any pretense of unified national purpose. The exit wasn’t primarily about military strategy or hostage negotiations, though those remained contentious. It was about Netanyahu’s refusal to commit to a post-war plan, to say what victory actually looked like, to name a date when emergency rule might end. For Gantz, a politician with his own constituency and ambitions, staying in an indefinite emergency cabinet meant surrendering his party’s identity without gaining anything in return. The calculus was brutal but understandable.
What followed was predictable. With Gantz gone, Netanyahu’s coalition narrowed further. The far-right parties, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, consolidated influence. The emergency cabinet became increasingly indistinguishable from Netanyahu’s regular political base. By late 2025, polling data showed Likud hovering below 20 seats in any hypothetical election, a dramatic collapse from its historical strength. The war hadn’t unified Israel. It had fractured it.
The Hostage Deal and the Visibility Problem
The January 2025 ceasefire agreement brokered by Qatar, Egypt, and the United States introduced a new complication into Israel’s political landscape. The deal’s structure was elegant in its way: a three-phase exchange where 33 Israeli hostages would come home in the first phase, with roughly 1,900 Palestinian prisoners released in return. Subsequent phases would address the remaining hostages and the broader status of Gaza. For families waiting at home, the agreement was salvation. For Netanyahu’s government, it was a legitimacy crisis.
The ceasefire created what might be called the visibility problem. As long as Gaza remained a zone of active military operations, the conflict existed in a kind of perpetual emergency that justified executive power concentration and the suspension of normal political processes. Once a ceasefire took hold, the urgency evaporated. Israelis could ask simpler questions: Why is this government still in place? Why are we still in emergency mode? What’s the plan beyond the next tactical maneuver?
The hostage releases became politically double-edged. Each returning hostage represented triumph and trauma at the same time. Families were reunited, but those returns also forced a public confrontation with the war’s costs and the government’s handling of the crisis. The mood shifted from “we must continue fighting” to “we must reckon with what has happened.” That reckoning would be deeply uncomfortable for a government that had avoided serious accountability for its decisions.
The International Legal Dimension and Its Domestic Echo
In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The charges involved using starvation as a method of warfare. For American readers accustomed to thinking of the ICC as a somewhat distant institution, the implications might seem abstract. They’re not. The arrest warrants create immediate practical problems in 27 ICC member states, meaning Netanyahu’s travel is now constrained to countries outside that jurisdiction.
More critically for Israel’s domestic politics, the warrants shifted the conversation in a direction Netanyahu’s coalition could not control. The question was no longer about whether specific military tactics were justified. It was about whether the government itself had crossed a legal line that the international community recognized. A International Criminal Court: Situation in the State of Palestine investigation is inherently about accountability. The political opposition inside Israel seized on this, using the warrants as evidence that the government had lost its moral authority and international standing.
That’s not merely symbolic. When a prime minister becomes legally vulnerable abroad, his political leverage at home diminishes. Coalition partners wonder about their own liability. International partners grow more cautious. Investors question the government’s stability. What looked like a strong hand in 2023 had become a weak one by 2025, and Netanyahu couldn’t quite explain how it happened.
The Humanitarian Crisis as Political Constraint
By January 2025, the humanitarian situation in Gaza had reached what the UN World Food Programme described as near-complete collapse of food distribution infrastructure. The northern governorates were in Category 5 famine conditions. The total population of approximately 2.1 million faced what UN OCHA: Humanitarian Situation Update — Gaza classified as an unprecedented crisis. These aren’t abstract humanitarian metrics. They are observable realities with political consequences.
A humanitarian catastrophe on this scale constrains political options. It generates international pressure for negotiated settlement. It makes indefinite military occupation politically untenable, even in a government that won office partly on security grounds. Voters begin asking whether the security achieved justifies the humanitarian cost. Right-wing constituencies still demand military dominance, but centrist voters question whether military victory at this scale of human cost is victory at all.
The humanitarian dimension also affects recruiting, morale, and long-term military readiness. Soldiers become demoralized. Their families question the government’s judgment. The narrative of necessary security gives way to narratives about excess and loss of control. By 2025, Israeli society was polarizing not around whether security matters, but around whether this particular government could be trusted with power during a catastrophic situation.
The Fiscal Reality and the Limits of Political Durability
Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics reported in late 2025 that the war’s direct costs had exceeded 200 billion New Israeli Shekels, roughly 55 billion dollars. The fiscal deficit had reached 8.1 percent of GDP, its highest level since 2002. These numbers matter because they create a hard constraint on how long any government can sustain a military campaign without domestic political collapse.
Wars get financed somehow, and Israel was financing this one through borrowing and deficit spending. Interest rates were rising. Infrastructure investment was being deferred. Social services faced cuts. Coalition partners representing peripheral communities and special interests began calculating their own political risk. If the government stays in place through the 2026 budget cycle, social spending will contract further. That means real political pain for real constituencies.
Netanyahu’s political base had always been somewhat diverse in coalition terms. It included religious parties, settlers, and nationalist constituencies, but also secular conservatives and business interests concerned about fiscal stability. The war’s cost was beginning to fracture this coalition. Gantz had already left. Others were calculating exit strategies.
What Comes Next
The structural question facing Israel in 2025-2026 is whether any government built on Netanyahu’s remaining coalition partners can govern effectively on anything beyond security matters. The answer appears to be no. The war cabinet collapsed not because any single dramatic event broke it, but because prolonged crisis naturally privileges emergency and marginalizes normal governance. Once the emergency begins to lift, the political structure that served during crisis becomes a liability.
The policy questions facing Israel are genuine and difficult: How to approach Gaza reconstruction? What role should Israel play in regional diplomacy? How to manage the ICC situation? How to restore fiscal sustainability? None of these yield to military force. They require coalition management, international negotiation, and political legitimacy. Netanyahu’s government increasingly lacks all three.
The real question is whether Israel’s political system can produce a different coalition, and whether that coalition would pursue substantially different policies or merely different styles. That answer will define Israeli politics through 2026 and beyond. What do you think determines how this recalculation will play out?