evidence: Netanyahu has been Israel’s dominant political figure for a generation, serving as Prime Minister for an unprecedented fifteen years. In 2021, though, he was sidelined by a parliamentary coalition that, for the first time, included an independent Arab party. During the elections last year, Netanyahu returned with what one legal scholar described as "a knife between his teeth." To secure a winning coalition, he orchestrated an alliance between Jewish Power and another far-right party, Religious Zionism. The alliance ended up winning the third-largest share of seats in parliament, outperforming expectations so radically that Netanyahu now faced the disagreeable prospect of sharing power with Ben-Gvir—a man whom the former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described as a more imminent danger to Israel than a nuclear-armed Iran. Rather than give him a sinecure, Netanyahu named him the national-security minister. In Israel, the embattled left wing stopped asking whether a figure as divisive as Ben-Gvir could reach the highest levels of power. Instead, the question became: Can he be contained?