Yedioth Ahronoth on Tuesday featured a cartoon potently underlining the breathtaking ridiculousness of Israel’s current coalition crisis. It shows Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara frozen in horror beneath a caption that reads “Existential Threat.” To their left are arrayed incoming rockets from Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas. But these mounting threats to Israel are not the cause of the cartoon Netanyahu couple’s concern. The “Existential Threat” they are staring at, to their right, is a TV anchor named Geula Even-Sa’ar, reading the nightly news on behalf of what is supposed to be the new state broadcasting corporation, which is scheduled to launch on April 30.

Netanyahu is in China this week, upgrading relations with a key world power. On Saturday night, hours before he took off, he initiated a coalition crisis by zigging once more on the matter of the new corporation. He posted on Facebook that he had “changed his mind” and no longer backed its establishment — despite having himself voted for the legislation under which it was set up — since he had internalized afresh that hundreds of workers at the outgoing state broadcaster, the Israel Broadcasting Authority, would lose their jobs, and that the new service would be no cheaper. In which case, he asked plaintively, “Why set up the new corporation?”

If Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon won’t cancel the new broadcaster, Netanyahu has reportedly been telling some of his closer Likud ministerial colleagues, he’ll call new elections — barely two years after the last ones (which, in case you’ve forgotten, were held two years after the previous ones, because Netanyahu fired two of his ministers, Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni, for ostensible disloyalty).

Read the full article in the Times of Israel.