Lieberman’s challenge to Netanyahu is personal. But the matter of principle he chose to base his challenge on threatens the power structure that has kept Netanyahu’s party, Likud, in power—its steadfast alliance with the religious parties. As a condition for his nationalist party joining the government, Lieberman demanded that the new Knesset pass a law setting quotas for the number of yeshiva (Jewish religious seminary) students drafted into the army. Ultra-Orthodox parties that had already allied with Netanyahu demand the right of students to continue studying uninterrupted.

For a country where most (Jewish) Israelis are compulsorily enlisted, the exemption for yeshiva students has been an issue all governments have wrestled with and compromised on. In making it a wedge issue, Lieberman has put in question the political alliance between the right-wing and the religious camps. He repeatedly said his party was “prepared to serve in a national government. Not in a Halacha [rabbinical law] government.” It’s a cynical, even hypocritical, move by a veteran politician who has served in many a cabinet over which the rabbis held considerable sway. He senses that Netanyahu’s reign is almost over and is striking at the base of the alliance that has kept the prime minister in power to hasten his downfall.

For the past decade, in which Netanyahu has governed uninterrupted, religious parties have seemed an almost integral part of the right wing: When the Israeli media present polling or actual election results, they now automatically include the Knesset seats of the two ultra-Orthodox parties in the right-wing bloc. This is a relatively recent development. From the first Zionist Congress in 1897, the main parties were led by secular Jews. This was true of the Socialist-Zionist parties that dominated the Zionist movement from the 1920s onward and were the main force in the foundation of Israel in 1948, as well as their rival, the right-wing Zionist-Revisionist movement, the forerunner of Likud.

Israel’s right-wing majority

The smaller, religious parties fell into two groups. There were those, referred to in Israel as “national religious” and among American Jews as modern-Orthodox or just plain Orthodox, who believed the Zionist ideal of rebuilding a Jewish state in the historical homeland was compatible with traditional Judaism. Their politicians were initially moderate, allying themselves in coalition with the mainstream Socialist-Zionists. In 1967, when the cabinet debated whether to embark on what would be known as the Six-Day War, the national-religious ministers unsuccessfully urged restraint. The war would see Israel occupying the biblical heartlands of the West Bank, releasing a more nationalistic sentiment among the younger members of the national-religious community, the vanguard of the settler movement. On the political field, this meant sharply veering to the right, abandoning the “historic alliance” with the Labor Party, and placing themselves firmly on the right as Likud’s partners.