Bibi’s masterpl but it still may
HERE’S ANOTHER way of looking at Israel’s election this week. Instead of calling it Israel’s fourth election in two years, it would be more accurate to call it just the latest round of voting in one long election campaign. After all, since the dissolution of the twentieth Knesset in December 2018, there has been only one issue on the electoral agenda, and that is whether Benjamin Netanyahu can win another term as prime minister.
Since then, all the elections have been the same: inconclusive rounds of voting which have failed to decide Mr Netanyahu’s political future. This Tuesday’s round was no exception. Once again, there was no result. The Netanyahu bloc failed to win a majority in the Knesset, while the antiNetanyahu bloc has no prospect of transforming its majority into a functioning government under a new prime minister.
For the last 27 months, Israelis have been stuck in an interminable reality television show in which they can never vote the contestants off the island.
The only way to enjoy the show is for viewers to detach their emotions and neutralise their feelings, hopes and aspirations for Israel and simply marvel at the political machinations and the superhuman campaigning abilities of Grandmaster Netanyahu who, despite enjoying the support of a minority of Israelis, just keeps hanging on, round after round. And this latest round, number four, was indeed a masterclass of three-dimensional strategy.
Round Four was the longest so far. It took place over a year and three weeks, starting on the day after the 2020 election, when it transpired that despite a surprising comeback for Likud, after it lost first place in the second round to Blue and White, his bloc was still three seats short of a majority. Under the guise of trying form an “emergency national unity government,” Mr Netanyahu set about planning the next round.
This time it was to be total war. There were three stages to his strategy. First, he set about dismantling the opposition that had nearly unseated him. In 2020, the centreleft was relatively compact. It had run in three unified slates, Blue and White, Labour-Gesher-Meretz and the Joint List. Blue and White was split by pressuring an already exhausted Benny Gantz and appealing to his sense of national responsibility as the pandemic began spreading. Once Mr Gantz agreed to enter his government in return for a “rotation” agreement that Mr Netanyahu never intended to fulfil, Blue and White, which had never been a happy family, was finished as major centrist bloc. Yair Lapid and his Yesh Atid MKs remained in opposition and the party was irrevocably split.
Labour-Gesher-Meretz was an even easier target. The single Gesher MK, Orly Levy-Abekasis, defected early on to the Netanyahu bloc and is now a Likud MK. Once Mr Gantz had crossed the line, Mr Netanyahu preyed on the vanity and greediness of leader Amir Peretz and his number-two