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A lot of people have a visceral antipathy towards Boris Johnson. Maybe you, dear reader, are one of them. But how far would you go to oust him as Prime Minister? He is clearly the dominant

political leader of the day, as is demonstrated by his landslide election victory two years ago — a result endorsed by the voters last month. Yet the Tories owe their 80-seat majority to the

first-past-the-post electoral system. But suppose that the UK had proportional representation and that no party could hope to hold power alone. Would you support a coalition whose sole

raison d’être was to remove and exclude Boris Johnson from power at any price? That is what is happening in Israel. There an unprecedented coalition from across the political spectrum is on

the brink of ousting the man who has led the Jewish state through thick and thin since 2009, having previously held office from 1996-99: Benjamin Netanyahu. It is hard to conceive of

anything like this happening here. Imagine that Sir Keir Starmer, Sir Ed Davey, Ian Blackford, Caroline Lucas and Edwin Poots agreed to sit in the same Cabinet, with Nigel Farage elevated to

the Lords so that he and Starmer could take turns to be Prime Minister. The sole aim of this motley crew would be to get Boris Johnson out and keep him out. Other than that, the coalition

partners would have virtually nothing in common. Something like that is taking place in the Knesset — except that the spectrum there is even broader. The man who is likely to replace

Netanyahu is Naftali Bennett, the leader of Yamina, a religious nationalist party that represents, among others, many Israeli settlers. He will sit round the Cabinet table with Mansour

Abbas, leader of Ra’am, the Islamist party that represents Israeli Arabs and supports a Palestinian state. In between these extremes will be various parties of Left and Right, secular and

religious, the largest of which is the centrist Yesh Atid. Its leader is Yair Lapid, who would take over as Prime Minister in two years’ time — assuming that the anti-Netanyahu coalition

lasts that long. Given that Israel has had four elections in the last two years, not even those who have cobbled together this coalition would bet on that. Unsurprisingly, Netanyahu isn’t

taking this latest attempt to depose him lying down. Himself a master wheeler-dealer, the Prime Minister is trying to frame the new coalition as a “dangerous Left-wing government” with which

no decent politician of the Right should have anything to do. Yet he himself had tried and failed to strike a deal with Mansour Abbas, who has broken with the traditional refusal of Arab

Israeli leaders to work with Zionists. That possibility was scuppered by Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, who provoked a war last month over the sensitive issue of the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.

Now Netanyahu’s fading hopes of clinging onto office rest with the dissident factions that have split his own party, Likud. Like the Conservatives in Britain, Likud has been the main party

of government in Israel since the 1970s. Unlike its British counterpart, Israel’s once-dominant Labour Party has declined into a minor player with just seven seats. But some ambitious Likud

ministers have grown impatient with Netanyahu and have joined the coalition to bring him down. As well as Bennett, once his chief of staff, they include two former Likudniks: Gideon Sa’ar,

leader of New Hope, and Ayelet Shaked, who is likely to become Interior Minister. If any of these three Right-wing and religious nationalists were to fall out with their centre-Left, secular

or Muslim partners, the new government would disintegrate. Netanyahu is working night and day to woo them away from an administration that looks less like a rainbow coalition than a

pantomime horse. Here in Britain we are unfamiliar and usually uncomfortable with coalitions, which usually — as in 2010 — come about by accident rather than design. In a famous Budget

speech in 1852, Benjamin Disraeli launched a powerful critique that is still quoted today. After the Tory party had split over the repeal of the Corn Laws, he found himself a member of a

minority government which had lost the argument on free trade and whose days were numbered. He knew that it would soon be outvoted by a coalition of Whigs, Radicals and Peelite Tories: “But

coalitions,” he warned, “although successful, have always found this, that their triumph has been brief. This too I know, that England does not love coalitions.” Israel does not love

coalitions either, though its attachment to PR gives voters no choice. Even so, Netanyahu — still vigorous despite his 71 years — is a hard act to follow. Countries that do not face an

existential threat — of which Israelis have just been reminded by the thousands of Hamas missiles raining down on their cities — can afford to dispense with the kind of tough, wily and

bullish leadership that Netanyahu has offered over his long and chequered career. Jews in the diaspora tend to dislike him and point to the corruption of which he stands accused in court.

Like Boris Johnson, he faces former advisers who say that he is unfit for office. His enemies, at home and abroad, depict him as the devil incarnate; Barack Obama and Joe Biden have both

given him the cold shoulder. But the Israeli public is reluctant to drop their pilot. “Bibi”, like Boris, is the devil they know. It remains to be seen whether the opposition will succeed in

permanently excluding him from power. The novelty may wear off quickly. Israel may have fallen out of love with Bibi, but can it ever learn to love this Frankenstein’s Monster of a

coalition? Will the apprentices manage to govern without the Sorcerer?