Netanyahu's Last Leverage: Manufacturing Crisis to Avoid the Dock

With Eisenkot closing on 67 seats and corruption trials looming, Netanyahu's unity calls are a survival play. The real question is whether he can engineer a security emergency before a government forms.

Benjamin Netanyahu is negotiating from the weakest position of his career. The October election delivered a Knesset majority to the opposition, President Isaac Herzog has tasked former Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot with forming a government, and the arithmetic is moving against the incumbent. With United Torah Judaism reportedly preparing to back Eisenkot — giving him 67 seats in the 120-seat chamber — Netanyahu's decades-long mastery of coalition horse-trading may have finally met its limit.

The prime minister's sudden pivot to unity rhetoric is pure tactical positioning. Days after an election campaign defined by personal attacks and bitter polarization, Netanyahu published videos warning of civil war if Arab parties helped form a government, then pivoted to calling on opposition leaders to join him in a single national government — under his leadership, naturally, and including his far-right allies Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. As former government adviser Daniel Levy noted: 'It's all a game at the moment. It's leverage, it's one-upmanship, it's psyops, it's spin, it's counter-spin.' The Ultra-Orthodox parties are the pivotal bloc. UTJ refused to endorse Netanyahu's selection by the President and is reportedly negotiating with Eisenkot. The calculus for figures like Avigdor Lieberman — historically hostile to both Arab parties and Netanyahu — has shifted: partnering with one haredi faction is more palatable than enabling Netanyahu's continued rule or triggering yet another election cycle. Netanyahu's former aide and pollster Mitchell Barak is blunt: 'He's negotiating from a weakened position. With the UTJ, Eisenkot's got 67 seats.' What makes this more than a standard coalition drama is what Netanyahu personally loses if Eisenkot succeeds. Multiple corruption charges are active. He has already preemptively petitioned President Herzog for a pardon — a move that signals how seriously he takes the legal exposure. Beyond the courts, the new Knesset is loaded with MKs who carry October 7 in their bones: bereaved parents, reservists, hostage advocates, and Eisenkot himself, who lost a son and two nephews. The opposition's first legislative priority is installing Matan Kahana to push a state inquiry into the government's failures before the Hamas-led attack. The October 7 accountability question is the structural driver beneath the coalition math. Allegations of missed warnings, prolonged war for political convenience, and sacrifice of captive welfare for electoral positioning have metastasized from opposition talking points into the institutional identity of the incoming Knesset. As analyst Nimrod Flaschenberg observed: 'For the first time in a long time, he seems a bit lost.' The most dangerous variable is Netanyahu's remaining lever: the security portfolio. UK press reported daily phone calls from Netanyahu to the Trump administration urging renewed war on Iran. Levy's assessment is surgical: 'There's no appetite on the other side to go in with Netanyahu for a unity government. The only real circumstances under which that happens is if he can create a security emergency.' A prime minister facing prison who retains interim command authority and a direct line to Washington is not a spent force — he is a cornered one. The next weeks will test whether Israeli institutions can complete a democratic transition while the outgoing leader retains both motive and limited means to disrupt it. The Knesset swearing-in on Tuesday begins a clock that Netanyahu cannot afford to let run.