Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Bonus episode: Lessons from the collapse of the Israeli Government

Episode Date: June 29, 2022

Dan recently joined the Commentary Magazine podcast to share analysis on the current state of Israeli politics. We are posting that conversation here.

what to make of the political meltdown in israel well i've gotten this question from a lot of our subscribers over the last few days i recently had a conversation on the commentary magazine podcast with john podhorts abe greenwald and and Noah Rothman. John interviewed me about what actually is happening in the Israeli political situation, where it's going, what does it mean for Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, Bibi Netanyahu. So we're dropping a special episode today of the Call Me Back podcast where we're taking that conversation I had with the commentary crew and turning it into a dedicated segment to get you up to speed on where Israeli politics stands and where it's going. This is Call Me Back. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine Daily Podcast. Today is Tuesday, June 21st,

2022. It is the summer solstice. I'm Jon Podhortz, the editor of Commentary Magazine. With me as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe. Hi, John. Associate Editor Noah Rothman. Hi, Noah. Hi, John. And joining us today, Startup Nation author, Call Me Back podcast host, friend of the podcast, Commentary Inc. board member, and all-around great guy, Dan Senor. Hi, Dan. Hey, John. And live guest at one point at

your palm beach podcast and a moment one of one of our only live guests ever and you were there in part to talk about what we are going to ask you to talk about today because what we talked about in palm beach has now happened which is that the the Israeli government, the jury-rigged Israeli government led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid has collapsed or has basically committed suicide. And so for an interim period, Bennett has stepped down as prime minister and Lapid. These are two heads of two minor parties. Lapid will become interim prime minister until elections are held in October. Why so late, you may ask? Because of the Jewish holidays of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur and various other things that mean that they have to stretch out until the end of October.

So Dan, though everybody was predicting the demise of this coalition from the minute that the coalition was formed, and it really is a fascinating and unprecedented experiment in governance in Israel. What actually happened here is something that nobody in America really understands and that represents an unbelievable act of political four-dimensional chess gamesmanship by the Israeli politician non-Parae, Bibi Netanyahu. So maybe can you lay this out for everybody, what happened? Because it's kind of crazy, a law that nobody even knew existed that was coming up for a completely pro forma renewal

has turned out to be the weapon that B BB used to engineer the downfall of this government that has kept him out of power. Yeah. I mean, I think we should, we should at some point get into talk a little bit about the lessons of this, this model of government, because there's nothing like it that's been tried, certainly in Israel and anywhere else in the Western world that I know of, uh, in terms of such of such a broad rainbow coalition. But in terms of where we are now, what actually brought the government down, just to get very technical, but it's important, is there is a law in Israel that handles the regulations and rules around how Israeli citizens living in Judea and Samaria are respected under, treated under Israeli law, meaning that there's military authority in the West Bank in Judea and Samaria, but there are

hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers, citizens of Israel who also live in Judea and Samaria. And there's a law that basically applies Israeli civilian law to them, the way their taxes are collected, the way their healthcare is provided, the way they vote in elections, et cetera, et cetera. That law, no one really pays attention to, but technically that law must be extended every five years, the way the statute is written. So every five years, there's actually a vote in the Knesset. It's typically just a pro forma vote. It's not controversial. Most everyone on the right votes for it. Everyone on the center right votes for it. Even the center and the center left typically votes for it. The parties that don't vote for it typically are the hard left and certainly the Arab parties,

because it is in a sense being viewed as it could be interpreted as blessing the occupation. But anyone concerned about just the normal functioning of Israel as it stands now until there's a permanent resolution with the Palestinians recognizes that those Israeli citizens living in Judea and Samaria should be able to live as regular Israeli citizens under Israeli law. That law, the five year extension, is up right now. And the opposition led by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been looking for opportunities to create, to sort of exploit the chasms within this coalition, because it's such an ideologically diverse coalition, and break the coalition apart. He's been poking and poking. And he identified some opportunities that failed over the past year. He wasn't able to do it. But on this particular issue, he was able to do it because you normally don't have a party that's going to move further right,

even further right than Likud. It was his party was founded to be on over at Likud's right flank. So you had on the one hand, someone like Bennett and his allies, Ayelet Shaked and others within the coalition who were obviously going to vote for the extension of this law. And then you had the an Arab party, the Ram party, a Muslim party in the coalition. You had the Merits party, so you had hard left and Arab parties in the coalition that would never vote for it.

Now, Bennett and many of his allies in the government just assumed, and by the way, Lapid was prepared to vote for it because as I said, the center and even the center left don't have a problem with it. We should explain that Lapid was prepared to vote for it because, as I said, the center and even the center left don't have a problem with it. We should explain that Lapid's party is actually three times the size of Bennett's party. Bennett was prime minister with a party that until six weeks ago or something had a grand total of six seats out of the 120 in the Knesset. But Lapid's party totally unprecedented

by in Israeli politics again typically in Israeli politics historically the party that the the prime minister of the country is the leader of the party with the greatest number of seats in the Knesset and or or in the government so you would have like the labor party with 20 30 seats the leader of the labor party builds a coalition and becomes prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu And or or in the government. So you would have like the Labor Party with 20, 30 seats. The leader of the Labor Party builds a coalition and becomes prime minister. Benjamin Netanyahu for years, prime minister, you know, Likud would have 20, 30 seats. They were the largest party within the coalition. Bennett, to your point, John, had six seats, whereas Lapid's party had multiples of that in his party. Like 18. Right. mean, he had like, so he had three times the number of seats, but he was not acceptable enough to the parties of the even further right to Bennett.

And so this thing happened where Bennett with six seats ends up as head of the coalition. And then about six weeks ago, he, three different members of his party. Of Bennett's party. Of Bennett's party, Yamina, resigned. Or, I mean, I don't quite know. Or they left the government. Yeah. They didn't resign.

It's important to say that this whole coalition, because Lapid could not form a government, even with his party that that had a large number of seats. Lapid goes to Bennett and says, let's form a partnership and we will rotate as prime ministers. Then I get to take your six, seven seats, depending on when it was, add them to my party and we'll cobble together a few others. And then we can actually get to 61. We can form a government. Right. 61 is the majority because there were 120 seats in the class. So Bennett had incredible negotiating leverage in this situation because Lapid could not form a government without him. So Bennett said, fine, we will form a partnership. We will be rotating prime ministers. We'll each serve as prime minister, but I'll be first. Bennett said, I'll be the first prime minister and you'll come in after me and and

Lapid agreed to that which then created this bizarre situation with Bennett leader of one of the smallest parties in the Knesset becoming prime minister of Israel which on the one hand was very impressive and I've had guests on my own podcast, people like Mika Goodman, for instance, who've marveled at what an accomplishment this was and a great moment of political compromise that these very ideologically diverse leaders could come together and form a government. And it was something to be studied. And I think there's some truth to what Mika Goodman and others have argued but the but at the end of the day you also recognize bennett was an incredibly weak prime minister because he had no political base within his own government he had nowhere to turn within his own government for support so he was constantly negotiating not only with members of his own party which as you point out john started to pull back and say they were

not going to be part of the government anymore but he but he had a very he was constantly negotiating with the muslim party and left-wing parties and so it ideologically just became unworkable which many people predicted it was just a matter of when i i for one did not expect this to be the moment i thought there were many other fault line moments that would have broken up this coalition and it didn't up to now and it was impressive that it didn't but this is this is a bizarre situation so basically bennett had to resign in a weird way on principle which is to say he had to quit because by quitting and ending the government with this caretaker government that law that had to be affirmatively passed next week or the citizenship rights of israelis living on the west bank would have been imperiled

right the government had to fall so that that law would become would automatically renew so that's the genius of what bb did here yeah yeah okay so so let me just so just because because it's it's a little technical so the law says every five years the law has to be formally extended the knesset has to form has to vote on it and it's normally a formality if the knesset doesn't vote on it then it's automatic there's an automatic six month extension built into it. Bennett assumed he would have the votes for it, either in his own coalition or, since the opposition is dominated by the right, of course the right is going to support this.

Of course the opposition will support it because they're supported by the settlers. To vote against this is effectively to vote against the settler movement. And what Netanyahu engineered was no, no, no, no. Prime Minister Bennett, don't take these right wing votes in the Knesset for in the opposition for granted, just because they are they are aligned ideologically on protecting the settlers. If it means over this vote as a process matter, we can bring down your government. That's the priority. And the settlers will understand it because they're sympathetic to bringing down your government. So do not count on on the right wing parties in the most bizarre situation over these last few days, go into negotiations with the Muslim party and the hard left party in their own government, begging them to vote for a bill that will give protections to Israeli settlers.

And the and the Rom party and the and the other and other left wing parties and factions within the coalition are like, are you kidding me? We cannot vote for this. So, so he, I mean, it was like, so he had nowhere to go. And, and it, it really did. I mean, you know, Ron Dermer, who is on my podcast this week, but a couple of months ago, he was, he was on my podcast. So Ron Dermer was Israel's ambassador, is an American who made Aliyah and was Israel's ambassador to the United States and one of the closest states, he would never sit with Lapid, that he would sit with Bibi, but he would not sit with Lapid in a new government. And then, of course, he he he didn't sit with Netanyahu and he did form a government with Lapid, a government that would ultimately make LaPete prime minister. But what Ron Dermer argued in that conversation was at the end of the day, this is a coalition.

While the Mika Goodmans of this world and others will marvel at the incredible feat of political compromise that was necessary and that was accomplished to form this government, at the end of the day, this government was about one thing, which was opposition to one man. It was a coalition whose only fuel and almost like links among the various factions within the party were hardened by opposition to one man being in power, and that was Netanyahu. And once that is – Netanyahu is not in the frame, ideologically, there's problem after problem after problem and internal tension after internal tension after internal tension, and there's no way a government that is so – not just unaligned,

but actually an open conflict on so many core issues. There's no way a government like that can survive. And I actually think Mika Goodman and Ron Dermer were both right, right? I mean, I think that this government accomplished more than even some of its biggest skeptics like Dermer would have predicted, right? They passed a two-year budget, and passing these budgets in Israel are very hard to do, even hard to do for a government that's ideologically aligned, and they passed a two-year budget. So that was impressive. Two, Israel had a really rough last few months. I mean, it's one of these periods where Jerusalem Day, which is often the source of a lot of tension, a lot of these marches in the old city, in the Jewish quarter, that some would characterize as provocative by, you know.

Marches by right-wing Israelis. Yeah, hardcore. Celebrating the unification of Jerusalem. Unification of Jerusalem, and then march into Arab neighborhoods and go, yeah, yeah, yeah, basically. So hardcore religious Zionists protest in a way that some characterize, I think it's overstated, that's provocative and can inflame a tense situation. And it happened to overlap with Ramadan. So it was like a powder keg waiting to happen.

At the same time, you had the street violence, which we know about, the stabbings and shootings in Israeli towns and the spike of a different kind of terrorism than Israel has typically experienced. And so things got really hot over the last few months. And this coalition basically held together despite that. Some kind of domestic flare up between Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, which you saw around Ramadan and Jerusalem Day, or another Gaza flare Party, the Muslim Party, would say there's no way we can be part of this coalition, Mr. Bennett, when you're taking such a hard line. Because Bennett was pretty hard line, actually. Some would argue even more hard line than Netanyahu in dealing with these terror threats in terms of the tactics he was willing to use. I thought an issue like that or the budget would break up the government. I would have never imagined this sleepy law that literally gets re-extended every five years as though like, and no one's paying attention, would be the issue that broke up the government. But it did. And like I said, nothing yeah who's been looking for these these pinpricks to kind of test the the whether or not the the the ideological tensions could break and he found it so look if you love politics i just have to say if you if you love politics as a spectator sport you know i mean you're watching you know i don't know you're watching you're watching michael joy i mean you're watching

a man who is better at the raw functioning of politics in bb netanyahu than any other person alive on this planet nobody could have predicted this because he's the only one who saw it on the chessboard and figured out that this he could make this move now here's what's interesting we go to october bb knows and this is also this is the thing in the background of why this happened now polling in the last two or three weeks has shown a surge bb's numbers when when israel when when you see polls of of of israel they calculate how many seats each party would get if the election were held today, as opposed to percentages the way we do. Biden would get 43%. So you see it party by party.

So Likud, Bibi's party, is back in these polls at 36, double the number of any other party's representation. However, if you tally together the kind of government that Likud could form based on all the political analysis, even with this surge, because I think he got 30 seats or 29 seats in the last election. So he would have been back to 36,

which is what he was at when he formed his government in 2017 or whatever. He still can't form a government. He's at 59. He's not at 61. So we're back in this amazing situation in which there were four elections in which no one could get to an outright majority from 2019 to 2021. Four elections. So Bibi just remained prime minister until finally this thing was cobbled together to take it away from him. And you could see the same thing happening in October of 2022, maybe.

Well, right. So the election slated for October. The question is, I mean, there are a few inputs that you have to consider. Right now, you're right right based on the public polling. Now, not to get, again, super technical here, but under Israeli election law, you need – so you get a seat for every percentage of the vote you get. But there's a threshold of 3.25%, meaning 3.25% gets you about four seats. If you get 3.25% of the national vote, you get about four seats in the Knesset. If you fall below 3.25, if you get 3% or you get 2.5%, you get zero. In other words, it's not like you can get one or two seats. The law says you have to have a minimum of 3.25 percent of the vote.

And with that, you get your four seats and then you can build above that. But if you get less than that, then your seats get reapportioned to other parties. There is a push right now. the right-wing Orthodox groups, Orthodox Jewish religious parties in Israeli politics, is apparently introducing a bill that would bring the threshold down to 1.25%, which would make it easier for seats, for parties that just win one or two seats to still get their seats. Netanyahu is, from what I understand, behind all of this. So there's some move to make sure that parties on the right that get fewer seats don't lose those seats. So that's the first thing.

The second thing to look, the two people to watch are Gidon Saar and Benny Gantz. So Gidon Saar was a member of Likudniks. These are both Likudniks. Well, Gidon Saar. Not Benny Gantz, but he was actually speaker of the Knesset, Gidon Saar. Not Benny Gantz, but he was actually Speaker of the Knesset, Gidon Saar. Yeah, and he was a long-time Likud Knesset member, been involved with

Likud politics for some 20 years, broke off in opposition to Netanyahu, started a new party called New Hope. He has six seats right now in the Knesset. If Netanyahu can figure out a way to bring him over to the Likud, right now he's saying he will not join the Likud. He will not fold back into Likud. He will not

partner with Likud. He will basically not enable a path for Netanyahu to return to prime minister. I'm not sure that's his last, his final word, because if you look at the polling, he runs the risk of actually falling below the threshold and losing all his seats or at least polling worse than than he currently has. So there may and he's currently justice minister. And I don't think he wants to go from being justice minister, prominent role in the government to having nothing. So so he still may be in play. So, John, when you talk about that, that Netanyahu is still not north of 60 seats, it's assuming that Gideon Saar doesn't break and come over. The other one is Benny Gantz, current defense minister, leader of Khol Lavan, the Blue and White Party.

And Gantz, who feels that he got screwed by Netanyahu in – Like everybody else in Israeli politics. 2020-21, where he and Netanyahu worked on a rotation agreement where Netanyahu would serve as prime minister in the first year. And then in November of 21, he would hand over the premiership to Gantz. But in June of 21, Netanyahu figured a way to break up the government, go to new elections, denying Gantz's opportunity to ever be prime minister. So Gantz hated Netanyahu and felt that Netanyahu completely double-crossed him. The only person Gantz hates more today than Bibi Netanyahu is Yair Lapid.

And Gantz has eight seats. He's part of the Bennett government. He does not want to be part of a Lapid government. And according to public reporting, there have been intermediaries between Netanyahu and Gantz meeting. So there is a world in which Gantz moves over to the opposition and helps Netanyahu form a government. They could try again to form a rotation. So there are still, I mean, yes, Netanyahu is not at north of 61 in public polling, but there are still a lot of cards to turn over. And Netanyahu is negotiating with

Gantz's people, with Guido and Sara's people. There's this push to reduce the threshold to empower smaller parties on the right to have more representation. So I still think there's a lot of maneuvering to play out over the next couple of months. That could help. Yeah, I have a question. What is the status throughout all this of Bb's court cases um and is it safe to say as it looks that the those issues have not hampered him at all in in his sort of fight back to to to power

the cases are dragging on i mean i i saw netanyahu in fe in Jerusalem, met with him. And at the time, he was focused on three things, which seemed to be in this order. One, figuring out how to engineer his return. Two, working on his memoir. So he's working on a book, which I actually think will be pretty interesting. He hasn't penned a book in something like 30 years, a little less than 30 years. His last book was Place Among the Nations, which was very good. And this book is going to be his life story. And then he was working on his legal cases. and the legal cases seem to be taking up. This is just my impression. It's nothing he said to me. I'm just was observing just my sense of situation. We're taking up the least amount of his time because they were dragging on. One of the cases in particular is hit a bunch of roadblocks from a from the prosecutor standpoint.

And and I so I I you know, they're not getting the attention they once were. And I think Netanyahu or the people around him at least believe that he becomes prime minister. These cases really, really, really slow down. There was a push to get a bill attached to I forget which bill. I think it was the bill that would dissolve the parliament, dissolve the Knesset that would make it virtually impossible for someone who's under indictment and fighting these kinds of charges in court to serve as prime minister. Obviously, this bill was designed to target Netanyahu.

So it would make it impossible for Bibi to serve. The bill failed to pass. So I don't think his, I mean, this is not my judgment on the situation. I just, it's an analytical point. I don't think the legal cases mean this is not my judgment on the situation. I just – it's an analytical point. I don't think the legal cases are an obstacle to his return. I mean they're also not a legal obstacle. They may not be a political obstacle to his return because the longer these go on, the more the holes in the cases become apparent.

They are weak. I mean they are weak, weak cases. And I would be perfectly happy to say otherwise, if I believed otherwise. I'm not here holding a brief for Bibi, but a lot was going on that led to on here and the pressure that was put on Mandelblit, the attorney general who allowed the cases to go forward, that is very of the political establishment on the right, was sick of him and he had made so many enemies and wanted to see the back of him. But this will be maybe, with the exception of Trump getting reelected in 2025, maybe one of the single most extraordinary resuscitations in political life. Well, I will say just two quick points. One, he is trying right now to, Netanyahu is trying right now. I think it's difficult. He's trying right now. So basically, the bill that determines the dissolution of the Knesset, each side, the government has its own bill to do it, and the opposition has its bill. So it's

basically on whose terms would the government be dissolved. Now, under the opposition's bill, on the Netanyahu's preference, is that he, there's not a caretaker government led by Lapid, which is what will happen if the Knesset's dissolved. Caretaker government led by Lapid for the next few months until an election. Netanyahu's preference is that a new government is formed, a new caretaker government, but a new government is formed with the existing Knesset. So if Netanyahu can cobble together 61 seats within the existing Knesset, so force the vote of no confidence,

and then a replacement government is formed that he leads. Now, presumably they still go to elections under that situation, but at least he's the interim lame duck prime minister when they go to elections. Now, why is that important? From what I understand, it's very important to Netanyahu. When he was prime minister during those four elections that failed to lead to a government that you cited earlier, John, he was always the interim prime minister. He was always the lame duck prime minister during those interim periods when Israel bounced, you know, hobbled from hobbled from from election to election. He said he still had power and that power mattered to the religious parties and the religious groups in Israel and the settlers because he still could apportion.

He could deal with appropriations of funding and all sorts of other issues. So it mattered to those parties that Netanyahu was still in the seat, and he was able to use that to keep them loyal to him. If he's not the interim prime minister, when he's running for prime minister, which means he's not able to form a government after the, if he's not able to form a government after the next election, then he doesn't have that much. Some of these folks are saying, you know what, we'll give you another shot. You're our guy to try and run again, because we think you're the best shot at winning. But if you fail again,

that you can't form a government, what do you have to offer us? You're not the interim prime minister that is there holding things together until the next election. You can still take care of us. So him having even that interim power is important to him. Anyway, this is an incredibly revelatory conversation. Israeli politics is unbelievably interesting

for anybody who's interested in politics. It's important to note two things, which is that one thing that Bennett said yesterday as he was saying goodbye to his prime ministership is that one of the things that he was proudest of was in handling the relationship with the United States, with the new Biden administration, wanting to re-enter the Iran deal and Israel opposing re-entry in the Iran deal in a way that did not jeopardize the Israeli-U.S. relationship. Obviously, a strong dig at Bibi for being so crosswise of Obama during the Obama presidency. But an interesting point, nonetheless, though, you know, I have to say that in my general estimation, of course, the minute that the war in Ukraine started, any idea that there was going to be a JCPOA,

as we can see this week with the revival of new sanctions and things that Tony Blinken has been saying and all that, that this was a fool's errand to begin with trying to restart the JCPOA given what Iranians were going to ask for and the fact that Iran is now hurtling toward nuclearization. But it's an interesting point. Bennett did not discredit himself in this year as prime minister. And he's young, and he's young, and Israeli – he's not that young? No, no, he is young. I don't know where he goes, but it's not like he's disgraced himself. It's not like he goes off like Golda Meir into the wilderness at the end of her political career. I would say that, but some friends of mine who are allies in Israel of Netanyahu

had made the point when they knew Bennett was, a little over a year ago, was contemplating, was deciding between joining Netanyahu in a government or forming his own with Lapid. They argued, and I was skeptical at the time, but they may have been right. They argued at the time that if Bennett is the kingmaker for Netanyahu's next government, and he's always positioned himself as to the right of Netanyahu and has a party that's

ideologically to the right of Netanyahu, he really becomes the heir on the right to Netanyahu. He's the best position to build and expand and grow the right in Israel after Netanyahu. And if he partners with Lapid and the Rom party, you know, the Muslim party, he'll never be able to inherit the right. And he's so he's gambling, you know, what they thought was at most he could be prime minister for a year or a year and change and then kind of be done because he will have compromised himself versus a longer term game, which was to, you know, to swallow partnering with BB for some period of time and then and then ultimately succeed him. And, you know, he may have been he may have had a longer, you know,

he in 2019, he got he didn't meet the threshold in those elections. He was he was wiped out of parliament and that could easily happen again. I will say one other thing, John, is one other enormous accomplishment, which we haven't spent time on, is many on the left and then the media and academia call Israel an apartheid state. And if Israel is an apartheid state, they're really bad at it, because this government was formed also by another kingmaker, as we've talked about, which was the leader of an Arab Muslim party. It is pretty extraordinary. And in Israel, in a Jewish state, the key to forming a government was an Arab Muslim party that basically they worked pretty well together for about a year, which is extraordinary. And

there are some who are going to say that the failure of this government has proved that that was unworkable, that an Israeli Arab party cannot be part of the Israeli government. And my only response to that is it is not true that an Israeli Arab party cannot be part of an Israeli government. It means that an Israeli Arab party probably can't be part of a government that's being held together with a one seat margin. So if an Israeli Arab party is going to be part of a government, they should probably have a little more cushion, 65, 66, 67 seats in the government, which would allow the Arab party to sit out certain votes and the government not fall. So the lesson isn't that Arab parties in Israel can't be part of the political process at that level. It's just if

they're going to choose to participate, they can't be holding the whole government together. Look, Bibi's 72 years old. If he becomes prime minister again, we're looking at a race in 2024 in the United States between an 82-year-old man and a 79-year-old man. So who's to say Bennett made a mistake? Like, you know, Bibi's a spring chicken by some of these calculations. And so the only thing that is preventing him from being prime minister forever or really interfered or interceded with his continuing prime ministership were these legal cases. And if they go away or he is found innocent or whatever, there's no stopping him. At the very least, the one thing you can say about Naftali Bennett is that when the history books are written, he will be in that list of people who served as prime minister of Israel.

And there just aren't that many of them. Right. You know, I mean, there are some that nobody remembers, like Levi Eshkol. Hardly anybody remembers the name of Levi Eshkol. But, you know, almost everybody. Yeah, he was prime minister during the Six-Day War. I know he was, but he is like one of the most obscure figures in Israel's history. And everybody else, anybody who was even mildly literate in Israeli history knows.

And so there is Bennett. And I guess Lapid, too, will find his name. Yeah. The person to watch now, I think, is I mean, Benny Gantz could be part of a future government. Ghidor and Saar could be a part of a future government. The person, I think, to really watch who is going to be super a key player and where things shake out is Ayala Chaked, who's the interior minister now, a top lieutenant to Bennett, the number two, worked for Bibi, like Bennett, like many people who ultimately run against Bibi,

worked for Bibi years ago when he was in the opposition. And she was in the Likud. She could come back to the Likud. And I think she will be a force in the right going forward, whether Bibi's prime minister or not. So, Dan Senor, as ever, as always, thank you so much for your insight and your analysis. And everybody go and subscribe to Dan's Call Me Back podcast.

You can hear musings on these subjects this week with Ron Dermer. Ron Dermer. Speaking of which, Ron Dermer. Right. It's Ron Dermer's plan for how Biden can get the Nobel Peace Prize by engineering a formal peace agreement with Saudi Arabia. Okay. So thanks. Dan is going to do the thing that people used to do on Johnny Carson when they were big stars and not hang around for the later segments because they have more important things to do. So with that, we will say goodbye to him.

Thank you, guys. because they have more important things to do so with that we will say goodbye to him and i will start talking about the x chair because that is what i have to do now is talk by the way john and my dream for a future guest appearance is i get to read do the ad read for the x chair oh oh you are on not you are on not today all right good seeing you that's all for my conversation with the commentary crew on the political meltdown in israel it's a topic i'll be returning to in the weeks and months ahead lapid netanyahu bennett ayelet shaked lots of interesting and important characters we'll be following it closely. Be sure to subscribe to Commentary Magazine, the website, and the Commentary Podcast, which is, it's more of a niche play, kind of a boutique podcast, unlike Call Me Back, but I still highly recommend it. And please continue to listen to the Call Me Back Podcast.

The podcast is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.