Netanyahu pulls out all stops to win poll

The campaign for Israel’s September 17 election has been a low point in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long career.

The campaign for Israel’s September 17 election has been a low point in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long career. He entered the race reluctantly after former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman defected, leaving Netanyahu’s Likud-led coalition without the 61 Knesset votes needed to rule. Blue and White and other parties on the centre left swore never to join a coalition government led by Netanyahu.

Normally a happy electoral warrior, Netanyahu became frantic. He cut deals with the worst of Israel’s extreme religious and racist fringe. He warned the election would be stolen from him. He failed to control his son and unofficial adviser, Yair, whose vulgar Twitter attacks on the late Yitzhak Rabin besmirched the Netanyahu name. Financial backers began to bail, there was talk of grumbling at the Likud headquarters. Reports suggested US President Donald Trump had stopped returning Netanyahu’s phone calls.

Then a week before the vote, Netanyahu announced that if elected he would annex the Jordan Valley, a large slice of mostly uninhabited but strategic West Bank territory alongside Jordan. This, he said, would give Israel a “secure and permanent” border for the first time.

The valley would be just the start, he said. His “personal relationship” with Trump would enable him to also annex all Jewish settlements in the West Bank, making this a once-in-alifetime opportunity for voters.

It was a shrewd move. His opponents including the Blue and White Party, running neck and neck with Bibi in recently published polls, and Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party are committed to permanent Israeli control of the Jordan Valley and keeping most settlements in the West Bank heartland. They were reduced to accusing Netanyahu of floating empty campaign promises like those he broke in the past. But in the past he did not have Trump with him, and this time he does. Trump’s silence after the Jordan Valley announcement confirmed it. If Trump had a problem, it would have been on Twitter.

Trump’s support, which presumably will find expression in the still-to-come US peace plan, ends Palestinian Arab hope for independence in the West Bank and opens the way for Blue and White to join a Netanyahu-led government.

Blue and White vowed not to, but circumstances alter courses. If annexations are possible, then Blue and White head Benny Gantz and other party leaders have reason to go back on promises. They can proclaim that Israel’s destiny is at stake, that sitting on the sidelines is no longer an option.

Soon after making his announcement, Netanyahu went to the port city of Ashdod for a campaign rally. Hamas fired rockets in the direction of the gathering. Sirens blared. The prime minister was hustled off the stage by security guards.

His opponents are spinning this as a personal humiliation, but the country saw their prime minister and, vicariously, themselves, under enemy fire. Netanyahu used this. “I don’t know who was more gleeful about the attack, Hamas or Gantz and Yair Lapid [leaders of Blue and White],” he said. For the first time in weeks, he sounded like his old, self-confident self.

But Netanyahu and allies may still not win enough seats to form a government.

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