Netanyahu Faces a Political Crisis Over the Gaza Cease-Fire Deal

 

News Analysis

Netanyahu Faces a Political Crisis Over the Gaza Cease-Fire Deal

 

With his far-right coalition partners opposing an end to the war and threatening to quit, the Israeli prime minister may have to choose: them or the agreement.

 

Isabel Kershner

By Isabel Kershner

Reporting from Jerusalem

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/16/world/middleeast/netanyahu-israel-cease-fire.html

Jan. 16, 2025

 

The Gaza cease-fire deal between Israel and Hamas had yet to be ratified by Israel’s government on Thursday, but the battle over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s political future has already begun.

 

Hours after the deal was announced, Mr. Netanyahu was facing an internal rebellion from far-right partners in his governing coalition on whose support he depends to remain in power.

 

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister for national security, announced on Thursday night that his ultranationalist Jewish Power party would resign from Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition should the cabinet approve the cease-fire deal.

 

The move threatened to destabilize the government at a critical time even though it would not, in and of itself, prevent the Gaza deal from moving ahead. A majority in the cabinet is in favor of the cease-fire agreement, and it is expected to be approved even without the votes of Jewish Power and another far-right party in the coalition, Religious Zionism. Led by Israel’s finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, Religious Zionism also vehemently opposes the deal.

 

Jewish Power holds six seats in the 120-seat Parliament, and if the party resigns, as promised, it would reduce the government’s parliamentary majority to a razor-thin majority of 62 from 68. Mr. Ben-Gvir said his party would offer to rejoin the government should it resume war against Hamas.

 

Mr. Smotrich, whose party holds seven seats, has threatened to quit the government at a later stage if Mr. Netanyahu proceeds from the first phase of the cease-fire agreement, which calls for a six-week truce, to a permanent one.

 

Mr. Netanyahu may have a fateful choice to make in the politically precarious weeks ahead: maintain his parliamentary majority by resuming the fight against Hamas in Gaza or risk the collapse of the coalition halfway through its four-year term and gamble on an early election.

 

After more than 15 months of devastating war, and with President-elect Donald J. Trump about to assume office on Monday, some analysts say that ending the conflict in Gaza is a better option for the Israeli leader.

 

“Elections are about a story,” said Moshe Klughaft, an Israeli strategic adviser and international political campaign manager who has advised Mr. Netanyahu in the past, adding that, in the event of an election, Mr. Netanyahu’s next story will be one of “war and peace.”

 

The first phase of the deal is expected to start on Sunday and last six weeks, during which Hamas is supposed to release 33 Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, and Israeli troops are supposed to redeploy east, away from populated areas of Gaza.

 

If carried out, the second phase, over another six weeks, would see the rest of the hostages return home — some alive, some dead — and a full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Gaza.

 

The hostages’ families have pleaded with Mr. Netanyahu to put politics aside and complete the cease-fire deal. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he wants the war, prompted by the Hamas-led terrorist assault on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, to end.

 

The first Trump administration brokered the normalization of diplomatic ties between Israel and three Arab countries. Israelis are now eyeing the prospect of a grander bargain leading to formal ties with Saudi Arabia in Mr. Trump’s next term, an arrangement that would strengthen the regional axis against Israel’s archenemy, Iran.

 

Mr. Klughaft, the strategist, said he believed there was “more chance that Mr. Netanyahu will choose Saudi Arabia and elections over Smotrich and continuing the war.”

 

Mr. Ben-Gvir and Mr. Smotrich want the war in Gaza to go on until Hamas is eliminated. Their hope is for the Israeli military to rule in the Palestinian enclave to eventually pave the way for Jewish settlements there.

 

Mr. Ben-Gvir has described the deal as an Israeli “surrender” to Hamas and called in a video statement for Mr. Smotrich to help him make up the numbers to thwart it by resigning together from the government. Neither has the power to bring down the government alone.

 

Mr. Ben-Gvir had already proved to be an unreliable and troublesome coalition partner. Demanding wage hikes for the police, he refused to support the government in passing a crucial piece of legislation last month, forcing Mr. Netanyahu to leave his hospital bed as he was recovering from prostate surgery and vote in the assembly to make sure the law passed.

 

Mr. Netanyahu has held frequent and lengthy meetings with Mr. Smotrich in recent days to persuade him to remain in the coalition. After three hours of talks between Mr. Smotrich and his party’s lawmakers on Thursday, the party issued an ultimatum demanding a promise from Mr. Netanyahu that he would resume the war against Hamas immediately after the first six-week cease-fire as a condition for Mr. Smotrich’s staying in government.

 

Mr. Netanyahu, meanwhile, held off convening the cabinet for a vote to ratify the deal, citing last-minute disputes with Hamas over the details. Early on Friday morning, he said the negotiators had worked out their differences.

 

Mr. Netanyahu is battling corruption charges in a lengthy trial and risks facing a public reckoning once the war ends for the military and policy failures in the run-up to Hamas’s 2023 attack. Given the circumstances, some analysts believe that he will opt to scupper the second phase of the deal, if Hamas doesn’t do so first, to keep his coalition intact.

 

“Netanyahu wants to stay in power,” said Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “It doesn’t make any sense for him to go to elections that he might not win. He wants another two years leading the government.”

 

Mr. Netanyahu could yet reach understandings with Mr. Smotrich. Even if the finance minister joins Mr. Ben-Gvir in leaving the coalition, Mr. Netanyahu could, at least for a while, hang on as head a minority government. Opposition party leaders say they will provide Mr. Netanyahu with a political safety net for the sake of peace.

 

In any event, the government is likely to survive until the end of the first phase of the deal, said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Jerusalem.

 

But Mr. Netanyahu may have to decide between his parliamentary majority and his relationship with the incoming administration in Washington, with Mr. Trump and Saudi Arabia perhaps offering him the opportunity to burnish his legacy.

 

“I think his mind is already in the next big move,” Mr. Plesner said of Mr. Netanyahu, adding, “If he has to choose between an intimate relationship with the Trump administration and Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, he’ll opt for Trump.”

 

American and Israeli officials have said that the deal reached this week is very similar to the proposal that President Biden outlined last May.

 

Critics of Mr. Netanyahu’s government, including many of the families of 98 hostages still held by Hamas in Gaza, have long accused the prime minister of sabotaging past efforts to reach a deal in order to preserve his coalition.

 

Mr. Ben-Gvir seemingly confirmed those suspicions in his video statement this week, asserting that he and Mr. Smotrich had used their political leverage to thwart a similar deal “time after time” over the past year.

 

Mr. Netanyahu and his loyalists have blamed Hamas for past failures to reach a deal.

 

Many Israelis and hostage families say they support a deal that will bring all the hostages home. They include Rachel Goldberg-Polin and Jon Polin, the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a dual American-Israeli citizen whose name appeared in the original list of hostages to be freed in the first phase of a deal last year, but who was killed along with five other hostages last August by their captors in a tunnel in Gaza.

 

“It is imperative that this process is completed, and all 98 hostages are returned to their families,” they wrote in a statement welcoming the deal on Thursday. “It is also time for the innocent civilians of Gaza to be relieved of the suffering they have endured.”

 

Isabel Kershner, a Times correspondent in Jerusalem, has been reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs since 1990. More about Isabel Kershner