The political math favors Netanyahu, with or without Benny Gantz.

On Sunday evening, Israel’s government was hit with its biggest internal shock since October 7. Benny Gantz, a centrist opposition leader, announced his party’s departure from the country’s emergency war government. In a prime-time speech to the Israeli public, the former general rapped Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for putting his personal interest ahead of the national interest, saying that “fateful strategic decisions are met with hesitation and procrastination due to political considerations.” Gantz’s move made news around the world, as many observers asked if it heralded the beginning of the end of Netanyahu’s rule. But there is less to this drama than the headlines suggest.

The reason for this is Israeli political math. At a glance, the numbers would seem to favor Gantz: The parties in Netanyahu’s current coalition are unpopular; they did not receive a majority of the vote in Israel’s November 2022 election, and only took power thanks to a quirk of the country’s electoral system. Well before October 7, polls were finding that Gantz’s party would receive the most votes if new elections were held, while Netanyahu’s Likud party would lose much of its support. Since October 7, large majorities of Israelis have said they want early elections, and most surveys find that Gantz—a political pragmatist, Biden ally, and former chief of the Israel Defense Forces—leads Netanyahu as the preferred candidate for prime minister in those elections. Sixty-two percent of Israelis say they won’t vote for any party that backs Netanyahu for leadership.

But Netanyahu doesn’t have to worry about any of these numbers, because he has the only figure on his side that matters: 64. That’s how many seats his coalition holds in Israel’s 120-seat Parliament, and it’s enough to prevent the body from calling early elections in the first place.