Government mutiny. Vote of no-confidence. Public protests. These are all the ways to remove Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from power, and the odds of any of them happening while the Israel-Hamas war is still ongoing
Dec 3, 2023
It was Mark Twain who popularized the line “Everybody complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it,” but apparently it was his friend, the writer Charles Dudley Warner, who coined it. It makes us laugh because it implies that if we aren’t happy with the way the weather’s behaving, we should stop complaining and just do something about it.
Then there’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Nearly everybody complains about him too, but he is still with us, doing what he pleases without any obvious regard for the public whose welfare and security he is entrusted with. Maybe it’s occurred to you that for Netanyahu, as with the weather, there is no amount of destructive behavior on his part that would suffice to force him to depart the political stage.
That’s not actually the case, though. True, while it’s clear that he will never leave of his own volition, there still remain a few different legal measures that could lead to Netanyahu being deposed from his lofty position.
What are those measures, and what is the likelihood of any of them being undertaken successfully in the near future? We investigated.
It seemed appropriate to start at the abstract level by asking what would be sufficient grounds for replacing a duly elected prime minister midterm. For guidance, we turned to Dani Attas, professor of political philosophy at the Hebrew University. What might undermine the legitimacy of a leader?
- Netanyahu’s coalition must remove him immediately
- War in Gaza? Netanyahu is busy badgering the media
- The one move that can save Netanyahu’s legacy
Attas explains that the legitimacy of a government is evident when the public complies with its directives – “not out of fear, and not because it has been brainwashed, but because it sees the government as advancing the collective interests of the public.”
He identifies two considerations that can underlie such compliance: trust and accountability. According to Attas, “when we trust the government and the person who heads it, it means that we are willing to put ourselves in a vulnerable position, because we believe that this can advance our interests. To take perhaps the most extreme example, say I am a soldier who enters Gaza, even though I don’t know all the details about the war. What I am demonstrating is that I am willing to put faith in the decision-makers to advance my interests, in some way, meaning both my own personal interest and the collective interest of society.”
Unfortunately, Attas suggests, “We have good reason to believe that Netanyahu isn’t always making decisions based on what our shared interests are, and that he is motivated and often guided by something else. And that’s a real problem.”
Related to the concept of trust is “our belief in his ability to act in our collective interest.” In the case of Netanyahu, Attas asserts that his limited ability to act for the common welfare may be less a lack of skills than the fact that “he is hobbled by a governing coalition that is controlled by an extremist minority that doesn’t allow him to act freely and deliberately in a way that will advance our collective interests.”
Dani Attas: “We have good reason to believe that Netanyahu isn’t always making decisions based on what our shared interests are, and that he is motivated and often guided by something else. And that’s a real problem.”
Prof. Attas breaks accountability, his second factor, down into two elements. First, “is the leader ready to pay the price for his failures?” In the case of Netanyahu, believes Attas, the premier “has communicated over and over that this is something he is not willing to do.”
Second, “does the leader feel under obligation to give an accounting to the public, via the usual channels for this – for example, to allow himself to be interviewed by the Israeli press. He doesn’t need to be accountable to the citizens of the United States; he needs to be accountable to Israel. It seems that even this he won’t do.”
At least on this theoretical level, says Attas, “both of these things cast doubt on the level of Netanyahu’s legitimacy. And if he lacks legitimacy, then the impression one has it that he shouldn’t be there.”
An ‘elegant’ solution
The next question would be what tools Israeli law offers for replacing a leader who has lost legitimacy. To address that, we turned to political scientist Dr. Assaf Shapira, who heads the Political Reform Program at the Israel Democracy Institute. He outlines the various possibilities, all of which center around the serving government losing the support of a majority of the Knesset, or by having the premier dissolve the legislature and calling an election.
A coalition needs the support of a majority of the Knesset’s 120 members to take power, and it will fall if 61 or more vote against it. If the government loses a no-confidence vote, an election is required to take place three months later. For the Netanyahu government, which is supported by 64 lawmakers, five members of its constituent parties would have to desert it – in effect voting against their own interests – to bring it down.
Polling shows a dramatic drop in public support for both the coalition and its head (a mid-November poll commissioned by Channel 12, for example, showed the coalition parties garnering 45 seats versus 75 seats for the opposition if an election were held now). Paradoxically, this makes it even less likely for serving MKs to vote against the government, since they might not make it into the next Knesset.
Dr. Assaf Shapira calls a constructive no-confidence vote “elegant,” because it bypasses the need for an election: “At the same moment that the government falls, you [automatically] have a new government, with a new prime minister. Theoretically, it can be exactly the same government, with a different prime minister.”
Easier to envision is what’s called a constructive vote of no-confidence. This requires not only that five or more coalition lawmakers sign a letter declaring not just that they are prepared to vote against the government, but also that they support an agreed-upon prime minister, cabinet members and political guidelines. That’s a far higher hurdle to leap, but if the opposition can assemble such an alternative, the government is automatically dissolved and the new government takes its place.
Shapira calls a constructive no-confidence vote “elegant,” because it bypasses the need for an election: “At the same moment that the government falls, you [automatically] have a new government, with a new prime minister. Theoretically, it can be exactly the same government, with the only difference being a different prime minister.” But it could also be a government based on what is now the opposition.
The public decides
Prof. Reuven Hazan, of the Hebrew University’s political science department, explains why in this case “elegant” doesn’t mean easier.
“This has to be a positive majority, meaning they have to agree not only on what they don’t want” – but also on an alternative. For that reason, Hazan sees a regular vote of no-confidence as more likely, in which a majority must agree only that they want to bring down the government. “You don’t need, for example, to get Arye Dery and Ayman Odeh to agree to sit together in the government,” referring respectively to the chairman of the Sephardi-Haredi Shas party and the head of the mostly Arab Hadash-Ta’al slate.
Similarly, while one can imagine circumstances in which Yisrael Beiteinu head Avigdor Lieberman and Yitzchak Goldknopf , who chairs the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, agreeing to vote against the current government, it’s far harder to see them signing on to the same set of coalition guidelines.
There’s another reason, says Hazan, why he believes going to an election – despite the expense and the drawn-out period it demands – is preferable to a constructive vote of no-confidence: “I don’t want to see Bibi ‘fall.’ I want to see Bibi defeated by the public,” he told interviewer Michael Mero last month. Speaking with Haaretz, he explains how, “if you call for an election, and in it the public repudiates Netanyahu, you can expect to see Benny Gantz’s National Unity Party two or three times as large” as its current 12 seats. As a consequence of such a repudiation, he says, “you might just see Likud undergo a process of heshbon nefesh [self-examination] and house-cleaning.”
Why Bibi has to go
Bernard Avishai sees Netanyahu’s removal from office as both essential and urgent. Avishai, a writer and political analyst who divides his time between Jerusalem and New Hampshire, points to Israel’s international legitimacy as critical to its ability to continue wage war against Hamas.
“The moral position of the government is that the attack on Hamas and Gaza is not against Palestinians per se, but against one arm of the Palestinians – a terrorist, jihadist, Jew-hating Palestinian cult, a group we could never make peace with. It’s using that to justify collateral deaths of Palestinians, whom we are saying are in a way the victims of Hamas and not our victims.
Bernard Avishai: “We are completely underestimating what a liability this government and this prime minister are internationally, in a world where diplomacy is not a small thing – and particularly what a liability he is in America.”
However, notes Avishai, a visiting professor of government at Dartmouth College, “The policy of the Netanyahu government, before the emergency government was formed, was never to entertain anything like Palestinian independence in any form, and its controlling ultra-religious Zionist factions are committed to a version of Israel that is a mirror of Hamas – which is to say, we have our own zealots, who believe that they’re doing God’s will to rid the land of the Other.
“As long as the world feels that Israel is really just surrendering to zealots of its own – then it’s just a game of numbers. It’s just, how many can we kill, and how many can they kill? Netanyahu is the face of what makes our moral position untenable. And he has to go.”
In addition to whatever damage this situation does to Israel internally, continues Avishai, “We are completely underestimating what a liability this government and this prime minister are internationally, in a world where diplomacy is not a small thing – and particularly what a liability he is in America.”
Unrealistic scenarios
Looking to supplement Avishai’s high-minded analysis with a slightly more skeptical perspective, we also turned to Raviv Drucker, political commentator for Channel 13 News and host of the station’s investigative-reporting program “Hamakor” (“The Source”).
He believes that it’s “unrealistic” to think the Netanyahu government can be replaced while the state is at war. He runs down the options and dismisses each one: Netanyahu won’t resign on his own, and even if he were to do so, his party would need to choose a new leader and hold a primary for its Knesset slate – and that combined with a national election would require several months, during which time Netanyahu would continue to be in power.
Raviv Drucker: “Likud has become a party that consists either of Netanyahu’s lapdogs, who do what he commands, or of people who have no ability to unite. A scenario in which Yisrael Katz, Nir Barkat, Yuli Edelstein, David Amsalem and Yariv Levin agree on anything, and then go to Netanyahu and tell him he has to go, is nonexistent.”
A constructive vote of no-confidence would obviate the need for an election, but Drucker calls it “a very unlikely scenario.”
“Even if there are five courageous people in the coalition ready to support constructive no-confidence – and at present there isn’t even one person like that” – it’s hard to see them cooperating with either of the Arab parties [Hadash-Ta’al and United Arab List], and the chances of them being able to agree on the same candidate for prime minister is “very, very low.” Furthermore, to do it “without the support of Hadash-Ta’al, you will need 10 MKs from the side now in power, either Haredim or Likudniks. And that’s before we even consider that Yair Lapid will say, ‘Not so fast. Why should Gantz be prime minister? His party only has 12 seats, I have 24. I should be PM.’”
Why won’t his own party come to Netanyahu, put the proverbial gun on his desk and leave the room, allowing him to draw his own conclusions?
“Likud has become a party that consists either of Netanyahu’s lapdogs, who do what he commands, or of people who have no ability to unite. A scenario in which Yisrael Katz, Nir Barkat, Yuli Edelstein, David Amsalem and Yariv Levin agree on anything, and then coming to Netanyahu and telling him he has to go, is nonexistent.”
So cowed are members of Likud by their leader, according to Drucker, that even if each of its ministers “in his heart of hearts” believes that Netanyahu needs to go, “the thought that even talking about it as a group could lead to it being leaked to Netanyahu would immediately destroy their appetite for even thinking of it.”
What about the Haredim? Wouldn’t it be easier for them to withdraw their support from Netanyahu?
“There’s the question of how it would be expressed. They won’t agree to early elections. They won’t agree to a vote of constructive no-confidence. It could be that they would make demands of Netanyahu [that he can’t afford to give into], but at the moment of truth, I’m not sure that that would happen either.
“Most of their voters, nearly all of them, are right-wing – in fact, very right-wing. And Likud will present the opposition under Gantz as extreme leftists. They’ll say [to the Haredi public], ‘Do you want a government that includes Yair Golan?’”
‘Massive’ pressure
Drucker is referring to the former Israel Defense Forces deputy chief of staff who entered politics in 2019, and sufficed to serve in two Knessets and as a deputy minister before his party, Meretz, evaporated last year when it failed to pass the electoral threshold. Golan is ambitious and outspoken – many will remember a speech he gave on Independence Day in 2016, while still in uniform, in which he observed that contemporary Israel contained some “remnants” of “horrific processes that developed in Europe – particularly in Germany – 70, 80, and 90 years ago.”
It would be an understatement to say that this did not sit well with many Israelis, but with the public that still saw itself as left, it expressed not only something many of them were thinking but also demonstrated a courage rarely seen in these parts.
Golan’s courage was also on display on October 7 when, hearing on the radio what was happening in the south, he rushed to the Home Front Command for a gun and then headed to the area next to Kibbutz Re’im where hundreds of participants in the Tribe of Nova trance music festival were seeking shelter, and rescued as many as he could.
Golan, who is clearly raring to reenter the political fray, if not to stand atop it someday as prime minister, is unfazed by the idea of Israel holding an election while the war is still on.
Yair Golan: “The goal is to bring about a democratic change of government – but not in another three years, as would normally be the case. It needs to be immediate. Israel urgently needs a government that the public can trust.”
For one thing, Golan, like others, believes the war in Gaza has entered a new “static” phase, for a variety of reasons – not least the rolling cease-fires that accompanied the recent hostage releases. (His conversation with Haaretz took place before the fighting resumed on December 1.) Israel is constrained by both politics and conditions on the ground from “smashing” Hamas, he says. But Golan is also convinced that the Islamic Resistance Movement’s removal from power will have to be the result of “internal pressures, in response to the unimaginable disaster Hamas brought down on the people of Gaza.”
In any event, he notes, Israel has held an election before during a war – in December 1973. That year, an election had been scheduled for October 30 but was postponed by two months due to the Yom Kippur War. He notes that, although “the southern front was already quiet [by then], there were still tens of thousands of people serving in the reserves along the Suez Canal. And the situation in the north [on the Syrian front] was still raging.”
You have said that it is heavy public pressure, not machinations among the politicians, that will usher in the election needed to bring down the Netanyahu government.
“Not heavy pressure – massive pressure. If there are half a million people on the streets day after day after day protesting, I think that it will lead to a situation in which the government will be obligated to call for new elections.
“The goal is to bring about a democratic change of government – but not in another three years, as would normally be the case. It needs to be immediate. Israel urgently needs a government that the public can trust. This government doesn’t have the public’s trust. It’s dependent on profound corruption, and on extremist, messianic nationalism. It’s not possible to build a state on this.”
If Golan and the others are correct, it appears that, once again, it will be the Israeli public that will need to take the action that their politicians are unable to take on their own. The same public that forced a halt to the judicial coup, and that stepped up to respond to the urgent humanitarian relief needs created by the war, will have to give the government no choice but to call an election.