Three and a half weeks after the election and at the height of the coronavirus crisis, Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have finally cobbled together a majority.

He has done so by convincing his main rival Benny Gantz to join him in an emergency unity government, with the promise of replacing him in 18 months as prime minister. 

On Thursday morning it still seemed that Mr Gantz, along with the rest of the opposition, had gained the upper hand.

Ten days earlier, he had received the mandate to form a new government, endorsed by 61 members of Knesset and on Wednesday, after a bruising fight with the High Court, Likud’s Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein had resigned, rather than hold himself the vote for his replacement.

The vote was to go ahead on Thursday afternoon with Labour leader Amir Peretz — in his capacity as the longest-serving MK — in the speaker’s chair. 

Then suddenly, at noon, things began to go awry.

The opposition’s agreed candidate for speaker was Meir Cohen, a member of Mr Gantz’s Blue & White list, but more crucially, a founding member of the Yesh Atid party within Blue & White.

Yesh Atid, under its leader Yair Lapid, has been steadfast against accepting Mr Netanyahu’s offers of a unity government.

His appointment as speaker, Mr Netanyahu and his proxies warned, would be tantamount to ending any prospect of unity. Reports began to emerge that Mr Gantz would be putting himself forward as speaker instead. 

But why would Blue & White’s candidate for prime minister want to become Knesset speaker instead?

The intention was clear: Mr Gantz was signalling to his rival that he was not only ready to do business, but he was breaking cover and publicly acknowledging his disagreement with his Yesh Atid partners.

From there, things began to move very quickly. The other opposition parties announced they would not be voting for Mr Gantz as speaker, while Likud and its coalition allies, who had hitherto boycotted the procedures, ordered their MKs to turn up and vote for the man who until that morning they had vilified.

Within hours, Yesh Atid and Telem, the other component of Blue & White which opposes a Netanyahu government, announced they were splitting with Mr Gantz’s Israel Resilience party.

Blue & White, which had existed for 13 months and three elections, was no more.

The vote was finally held and 74 MKs supported Mr Gantz — the Netanyahu coalition and Mr Gantz’s 15 loyal Resilience MKs. From next week, they will serve as the parliamentary basis for the new Netanyahu government.

In his inaugural speech, the (temporary) Speaker Gantz said: “these are not normal days and they necessitate unordinary decision. I intend to examine and further in every possible way an emergency national government and, just to pursue every possibility, I decided to put myself forward today for speaker of the Knesset.”

Mr Netanyahu and his allies remained silent while later that evening, Mr Gantz’s former partners, Mr Lapid and Telem leader Moshe Yaalon, lambasted him in a televised statement for “crawling in to a Netanyahu government”.

Mr Gantz’s loyalists tried to explain on social media that he was fulfilling Blue & White’s campaign promise to put “Israel before anything else” and that refusing to join a unity government at that point would inevitably mean a fourth election,  which would be unthinkable at this time of coronavirus crisis.

They did not have to add that the polls being carried out in recent days show Mr Netanyahu’s Likud surging, as many in the public see his leadership as key to fighting the virus.

The Gantz camp explained that under the terms of the coalition agreement, one of them would serve as justice minister in the new cabinet and that there would be no question of Mr Netanyahu avoiding his — for now postponed — trial for bribery and fraud. 

But the coalition agreement has yet to be signed and Mr Gantz, who began Thursday morning as leader of an opposition with a majority of Knesset seats, ended it as leader of mid-sized party about to be swallowed up by a rampant Netanyahu coalition.

The agreement between them, at least in its current draft form, gives Mr Gantz’s party half the posts in cabinet and a promise to replace Mr Netanyahu as prime minister within eighteen months. But now that he is dramatically weakened and isolated from the rest of the opposition in the speaker’s chair, he has much less power to insist on the details.

Especially with the country in near-total lockdown and the death-toll from Covid-19 slowly beginning to rise. 

Mr Gantz, still a newcomer to politics and exhausted from three consecutive elections, has chosen to join the government of the man who orchestrated a relentless smear campaign against him over the past 14 months.

It remains to be seen whether this was an altruistic and wise move, sacrificing his own party to end Israel’s political deadlock at a time of acute national and global emergency, or whether, like others who came before him, he has been outmanoeuvred by Mr Netanyahu in to capitulation and political irrelevance.

As things stand, few are willing to put any money on Mr Gantz actually replacing him as prime minister in September 2021.