Benjamin Netanyahu Israel is heading towards its fourth election in two years, March 23. Here is what we may reasonably expect this time. Midnight yesterday was the deadline for declaring parties. There were mergers and droppings-out on the right and on the left. In Israeli politics, a governing coalition needs to principally garner a majority of 61 seats out of the 120 Knesset seats, and this is done by coalitions of smaller parties. Yet there is a threshold level of 3.25% (4 seats) which is an incentive against being too fragmented, because if a party falls below the threshhold, its votes may be lost. The biggest single party in Israeli politics today is Likud, by far. It currently polls at around 30 seats. It used to have a rival bloc called Blue and White. That centrist bloc, led by Benny Gantz (who came into politics two years ago boasting of having bombed Gaza back to the “stone age” as army Chief of Staff) is now not even clearing the electoral threshold in the recent poll. In the last elections (April 2020) Blue and White were still at a formidable 33 seats, challenging Netanyahu’s Likud which had 36. But Gantz broke his promise to never serve under a Prime Minister facing indictment, entered a ‘rotation agreement’ with Netanyahu going first as PM, and his bloc splintered over the reversal. Gantz’s turn to serve as PM was due later this year, but most Israelis came to understand that he’d never get the chance (they know Netanyahu always has a trick or two up the sleeve).