2019 Will Be a Fun and Normal Year for Israeli Politics

As 2018 drew to a close, Bibi Netanyahu dissolved his government and called for snap elections, which will occur in April. What's happened since then? Oh, many normal things:

• The Israeli attorney general announced that he is leaning towards indicting Netanyahu for various public corruption type offenses, and that he will formally do so before election day.

• Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked broke away from the Jewish Home party and announced the formation of a new right-wing party, which they've dubbed (creatively enough) "New Right". I am not the first to immediately think "Alt-Right" would have been more appropriate. Among their first pick-ups was far-right journalist Caroline Glick, who until now has mostly existed as living proof that I'm unfair to Liel Leibovitz when I call him the worst columnist writing in Jewish media today.

• Former IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz launched his own party. What does it stand for? Well, in his words, Gantz's positions are "politically flexible", and pretty much every story on him has noted how careful he's been to not stand for anything in particular in the election run-up. This development (relatively well-liked political cipher launches vaguely centrist political party) is, in fact, very normal and expected, and seems to happen at least once per election cycle.

• Meanwhile, on the left side of things, Labor leader Avi Gabbay unceremoniously ended his party's partnership with Tzipi Livni, dumping her on live TV without any warning. Apparently, he thought she was just too mean to him. I'm a long-time Livni booster, but she's never managed to fully gel with Israeli voters ("the best Prime Minister Israel never had") -- the overlaps with how a certain American presidential candidate has been treated are too stark to ignore. The question is, will this latest dose of seemingly brazen boorish misogyny finally spark a backlash that will redound in her favor (right now her Hatnuah party is just floating at the edge of the electoral threshold)? As for Labor, early polls show its support utterly crashing.

• Despite (or because) all of this, and despite the fact that pretty much nobody in Israeli likes him, Bibi is overwhelmingly favored to secure another term as Prime Minister. His opposition is hopeless fractured and the Joint List (representing Israeli Arabs) historically has refused (and, to be fair, has not been welcome) to join any government. Without them, there's virtually no math getting a viable left-of-center coalition into the majority (the only hope would be a truly uncouth Frankenstein's monster which stitches together some ultra-Orthodox parties into the coalition. But while that's worked before in the past, those parties has drifted more explicitly to the right over the years at the same time that the margin for error has shrunk).