A months-long struggle for control of the Likud may have finally come to an end Wednesday as the party’s key decision-making body approved a compromise between party leader Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his would-be challenger, Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon. The agreement leaves Netanyahu emphatically in charge of the ruling party’s political machinery.

Danon, a favorite among the party’s right wing, chairs the powerful, nearly 4,000-member Central Committee. In recent months, he has led a coalition of disgruntled hawks and other constituencies in a campaign against Netanyahu’s longstanding control of party institutions, trying to pass amendments to the Likud constitution that would turn the Central Committee, and by extension its chairman Danon, into the most influential policymaking body in the party.
While the fight has been waged in the less-than-exciting arena of procedural debates and lawsuits — including before the High Court of Justice — the stakes were far greater than control over the party itself. Among the constitutional changes sought by Danon was an attempt to allow the party’s institutions to set the agenda for Likud’s elected officials, including on key diplomatic and security issues such as the peace process.

Put simply, the measures proposed by the right wing of the party would have made a possible peace deal with the Palestinians, brokered by a Likud leader, dependent on the approval of the party’s internal institutions, where the West Bank settlement movement enjoys broad support.

The deal between Netanyahu and Danon, brokered last week and formally approved in a vote at the Likud Conference on Wednesday, effectively ended the insurgency against the prime minister, buying him much-needed intra-party quiet as he deals with the fallout — both internationally and in the Knesset – from last month’s collapse of peace talks.

Read the article in full at Times of Israel.