The Collapse Nobody Expected, Everybody Saw Coming
Political coalitions fail for boring reasons. They fail because coalition partners disagree on taxes, or healthcare policy, or which ministry gets funding. They rarely fail because one partner walks out in the middle of an existential conflict. Yet in June 2024, Benny Gantz did exactly that. His National Unity Party abandoned Israel’s emergency war cabinet, citing insufficient progress on war aims and what he characterized as political rather than security-focused decision-making by Netanyahu. On the surface, it looked like standard political theater. It was not.
Gantz’s departure created a structural problem that would ripple through Israeli politics for the next eighteen months. His party had provided something precious in a wartime coalition: legitimacy. A centrist leader, a former military chief, explicitly lending credibility to the conflict. When he left, he took that centrist cover with him. What remained was ideological. What remained was vulnerable. By late 2025, polling consistently showed Netanyahu’s Likud party commanding fewer than 20 seats in any hypothetical Knesset election. For context, you need 61 seats to form a government. The arithmetic was unforgiving.
The timing mattered enormously. Gantz left not during early combat operations but during the grinding phase. He left when ceasefire negotiations were already underway. He left when cost-benefit calculations had shifted decisively for anyone paying attention to the actual numbers.
Gaza, the ICC, and the Currency of Coalition Leverage
Understand what was happening in the background. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. The charges included using starvation as a method of warfare. The political implications were straightforward but severe: Netanyahu could not travel to 27 ICC member states without risking arrest. His diplomatic reach contracted sharply. His leverage contracted with it.
Meanwhile, humanitarian conditions in Gaza had deteriorated past any euphemistic descriptor. By January 2025, the UN World Food Programme reported near-complete collapse of food distribution infrastructure. Northern Gaza faced Category 5 famine conditions. The population of approximately 2.1 million was experiencing what the humanitarian apparatus calls “acute food insecurity,” which is technical language for mass hunger. You can read the full scope of this in the UN OCHA: Humanitarian Situation Update — Gaza reports. The data is there. The scale is there.
Here is where the political economy gets interesting. A war cabinet without a centrist partner cannot sustain international pressure indefinitely. It cannot absorb the reputational costs as easily. Coalition partners on the far right begin demanding escalation precisely because their political base demands it. Coalition partners in the center have already left. That leaves Netanyahu governing with parties whose core constituencies want continuation, not resolution.
When the ceasefire agreement finally materialized in January 2025, brokered by Qatar, Egypt, and the United States, it reflected exhaustion on all sides. Phase 1 involved the release of 33 Israeli hostages in exchange for approximately 1,900 Palestinian prisoners. The numbers tell you something. They tell you what each side valued most in that moment. They tell you about bargaining power, about who had leverage and who was spending it down.
The Fiscal Reckoning and the Shape of Future Coalitions
Money constrains politics. It always does, even when people pretend it does not. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics released figures in late 2025 that should have anchored every strategic discussion afterward. War costs had exceeded 200 billion New Israeli Shekels, roughly $55 billion. The fiscal deficit had swelled to 8.1 percent of GDP in 2024, the highest level since 2002. Those numbers were not mistakes or preliminary estimates. Those were the actual costs of a prolonged conflict fought without the kind of broad coalition that might have distributed political pain more evenly.
Consider what this means for government formation. A prime minister governing without centrist coalition partners must fund both the war and social services. He must manage inflation, currency pressure, and international bond ratings simultaneously. His coalition partners on the right have no interest in austerity. They have interest in expansion of settlements, increased military spending, demographic programs favoring their constituents. There is structural conflict baked into this arithmetic.
Netanyahu faced a genuine dilemma by late 2025. He could continue governing with his right-wing coalition and face persistent pressure on fiscal sustainability. Or he could attempt to rebuild a broader coalition, which would require accepting constraints on war policy, concessions on judicial reform, and probably new elections he might lose. The polling numbers suggested he would lose badly. This constraint shaped every decision about when to escalate, when to negotiate, when to hold position.
The Strategic Vacuum and What Fills It
When war cabinets collapse, the vacuum does not stay empty. It fills with something. In this case, it filled with competing factions each pursuing slightly different strategic visions. The far-right coalition members pushed for continued operations and settlement expansion. Military leadership pushed for operational consolidation and reduced political interference. International pressure pushed for humanitarian access and prisoner releases. Netanyahu pushed for survival of his government and his personal legal exposure.
These are not aligned interests. They cannot be aligned without one faction subordinating itself to the others. The ceasefire agreement represented a moment of rough equilibrium. Hamas accepted terms because its capacity had degraded significantly. Israel accepted terms because its coalition could not sustainably fund indefinite operations. Egypt and Qatar accepted terms because they had incentives in regional stabilization. The United States accepted terms because it needed a diplomatic win.
A ceasefire is not a peace agreement, though. It is not even necessarily stable. It is an agreement to stop shooting, which can be revoked if incentive structures change. In late 2025, the incentive structures remained volatile. Netanyahu’s government retained narrow Knesset majorities only through coalition discipline that could fracture on any contentious vote. International pressure via the International Criminal Court: Situation in the State of Palestine created ongoing leverage for countries that might otherwise have reduced engagement. And humanitarian conditions, while no longer deteriorating, remained severe enough that renewed fighting would trigger immediate international backlash.
What Comes Next: The Post-War Arithmetic
Strategic posture in 2025-2026 would be shaped less by military capability and more by coalition arithmetic. Israel could resume major operations only if its government could sustain them politically. That required either rebuilding a centrist coalition or finding new sources of legitimacy. Neither path was obvious. Neither path was politically easy for Netanyahu, whose personal legal exposure creates incentive structures that do not align neatly with state interests.
The vacuum created by the war cabinet’s collapse would likely persist for years. Not because Israel lacks military capability, but because military capability requires political permission. Political permission requires coalition partners willing to grant it. And coalition partners, in a democracy, require something in return. The question is not whether Israel can fight. The question is whether its government can command the political consensus necessary to sustain conflict while managing fiscal constraints, international pressure, and domestic opposition. That is a different calculation entirely.
What patterns do you see in how war cabinets fracture? Do the fiscal constraints outlined here match what you observe in your own country’s budgeting debates? The intersection of military cost, coalition politics, and diplomatic pressure shapes outcomes more than most strategic analysis acknowledges. Your thoughts on how these forces actually play out are worth considering.