The Bennett-Lapid reunion has unquestionably jolted Israel’s electoral race. But even the article announcing that alliance makes the larger point impossible to miss: the path to unseating Benjamin Netanyahu remains “elusive as ever,” with the opposition still dependent on unresolved variables such as Gadi Eisenkot’s next move and the possibility of a breakaway “Likud B” faction. In other words, even when Netanyahu’s opponents consolidate, the central fact of Israeli politics does not change: he is still the fixed point around which everyone else must maneuver.

That reality is not an accident. It is the product of experience that few leaders anywhere in the democratic world can match. Israel’s own government biography records Netanyahu’s first term as prime minister in the late 1990s and his........

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