Ladies and Gentlemen, the Once and Future Israeli PM

Bibi you magnificent bastard! You did it!

Benny Gantz blew up his own Blue and White Party for the sake of stability and will be Netanyahu's Defence Minister. In eighteen months the premiership will rotate to him. Yeah, sure. Though that may just be for how long Bibi wants to hang on.

Of course a good deal of this has to do with the Wuhan Chinese Virus from Wuhan China, and there is the matter of Netanyahu's upcoming corruption trial, but still. 

The PM, now and always.

Yesterday's Best Seller

Israel Strikes: War of the Red Sea.

In fact sales are spiking. People cooped up? Algorithmic mischief? Who knows?

Meanwhile, the Arab Joint List, 15 seats in all, has backed Gantz and the Blue and Whites. We're getting close to driving Bibi down.

Gantz would need a Knesset majority made up of his Blue and White (33 seats), the hawkish Yisrael Beytenu (7 seats) and dovish Labor and Meretz (6 seats without Gesher leader Orly Levy-Abekasis), with support from outside of the coalition from the Arab lawmakers of the Joint List (15 seats).

If all those parties recommend him to form the next government, even without becoming part of it, he would have the backing of 61 MKs compared to 58 for Netanyahu from Likud (36), the ultra-Orthodox Shas (9) and United Torah Judaism (7) parties, and the right-wing Yamina (6). 

Liberman hates the Arabs, so I don't know how he joins a government with them. But still, with him and Bibi, it's personal.

In the meantime:

Bibi be Mine

Bibi, you magnificent bastard, you did it!

As of this writing Likud's late surge in the polls gives them 36-37 seats to the Blue and White's 33. Overall the right-bloc won 59-60 seats. Still short of a majority, so they'll have to find a couple of MKs to switch parties. 

Not our problem.

Blue and White leader Benny Gantz should step aside. He can't get the job done. 

Meanwhile Benjamin Netanyahu is the once and future Prime Minister of Israel.

Oh, his corruption trial starts the 17th.

Bibi Holding

The Jerusalem Post tells us that two different polls show the Blue and Whites coming down from their post announcement high of 35-37 seats and in a tie at around 30 with Bibi and Likud. Worse for the anti-Bibi crowd, the right block of parties would win 61 seats, just enough to form a government.

We've read about Benny Gantz, the Blue and White Leader. He's a general, former IDF chief of staff. Over here that'd make him a celebrity and favorite, but not in Israel. Everyone's in the military over there and they get a new CoS every few years.

Benny Gantz’s first assignment as a young army recruit was to participate in securing Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s historic visit to Israel in 1977.

Twenty-three years later, he was the last Israeli soldier to leave Lebanon after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in 2000.

Today, four years after he left the army as its 20th chief of staff, he is the first person in a long while who has a realistic chance of replacing Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s prime minister.

Though he has zero political experience and the high-tech company he chaired for three years was a spectacular failure, Gantz, a tall, 59-year-old, father of four, seems to be convincing an increasingly large group of Israeli voters that he can lead the country better than his former boss.

We can't quite put our finger on it, but for us personally, there just doesn't seem to be much there-there. 

The race has regressed to the mean.

It seems to us that the Blue and Whites need to peel off guys like me from Likud. Even as Bibi seems just a little more despicable everyday, they're not doing it.