Government virus decisions may stave off another election after all

Last week ended under a cloud of political dysfunction. There were more and more calls for elections and laments that the coalition cannot stay together with so much infighting.

There were reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was considering not bringing any budget proposal to a vote so that an election would automatically be called for November.

However, Sunday’s cabinet meeting sent a signal that Netanyahu and Alternate Prime

Minister Benny Gantz are at least going to try to keep it together.

For example, there was Netanyahu’s announcement that “the IDF will have a significant role in the important mission.” Setting aside the medical significance, this is politically meaningful.

From the time the coronavirus outbreak began and Israel snapped into action in late

February, then-defense minister Naftali Bennett called for the IDF to play a greater role in the response. Netanyahu, who is known to despise Bennett, mostly ignored him.

Gantz, who is now also defense minister, called for the IDF to take a larger part in the pandemic-busting efforts as well.

“The Home Front Command is a system that was born to act in events such as the one we are in,” Gantz said in a coronavirus cabinet meeting on July 2. “The whole operation needs to go to the Home Front Command and the Defense Ministry. We have to move to a model of action in which the political decisions are made in the cabinet, the Health Ministry decides the regulations, and the Defense Ministry is the executive factor.”

But he was met with opposition. For example, Health Minister Yuli Edelstein tweeted on

Kochavi and other senior defense officials, like Alternate Prime Minister and Defense Minister Benny Gantz, and the head of the Mossad Yossi Cohen.

Milley also spoke with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with Kochavi, over a video conference call, due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, and discussed the ongoing threats posed by Iran and the various security challenges in the region.

His visit comes amid a rise in tensions between Israel, the US and the Islamic Republic.

More than a dozen mysterious explosions and fires targeting Iran’s missile and nuclear program have rocked Iran in recent weeks. But Tehran has not pinned the blame on Israel and has tried to downplay the incidents.

Nevertheless, Iran has apparently attempted a number of cyberattacks against Israel – similar to an attack on the country’s water infrastructure facilities in April. They were all thwarted.

Iran’s nuclear and missile program tops the list of threats to the Jewish state and has long been a target of Israel’s national intelligence agency, the Mossad. The US and Israel have been reported to have carried out joint cyberattacks against Iran in the past, including “Operation Olympic Games” – one of the first known uses of offensive cyber attacks.

The attack, which unleashed a wave of computer malware using the Stuxnet worm in an attempt to slow Iran’s nuclear program, was considered one of the most ambitious attempts, with some estimates determining the destruction of more than 1,000 centrifuges.

But Milley’s trip, a trip that seems like it was a one-stop kind of deal, during such a busy period in the Middle East makes one wonder. The last time such visits occurred was in 2012, when US officials used to come to Israel on a regular basis in an attempt to walk Israel back from carrying out a military strike on Iran.

Netanyahu is in a tight political bind, and knows that there might be only a few more months left of the most pro-Israeli American administration in years. US President Donald Trump might not win the upcoming American election, and Netanyahu, while facing indictments and nightly protests over a crumbling economy following his mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis, might not survive another election if he calls one.

Could he maybe be wanting to take the chance to strike Iran, which is in the midst of a devastating economic crisis compounded with the deadly coronavirus?

Did Milley come to discuss these mysterious explosions? Or did he come to walk Israel back from any future action, perhaps non-cyber kinetic attacks?

Though it was likely not