The Guardian view on the Israeli elections: Netanyahu debases his office – again
Israel is not a state of all its citizens, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu declared on Sunday. His words should be shocking, but in truth they made explicit the message of last year’s nation state law, rendering Palestinians in Israel secondclass citizens. They would be shameful if he were capable of shame. Mr Netanyahu’s campaign for re-election in the face of a bribery and fraud indictment shows he is not. He has prospered by fostering division.
This latest act of cynical bigotry is simply par for the course. The same is true of Mr Netanyahu’s awful turn to far-right parties for support. Mr Netanyahu orchestrated the merger of the racist anti-Arab Jewish Power and the pro-settler Jewish Home parties to help them pass the electoral threshold and him put together a coalition. Jewish Power includes followers of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach party was outlawed in Israel and is designated by the US and EU as a terror organisation.
Now Mr Netanyahu is inviting Kahane’s heirs into government. They call, among other things, for the expulsion of Arabs from Israel. Even the staunchly pro-Netanyahu American Israel Public Affairs Committee attacked the decision, calling Jewish Power “racist and reprehensible”. Israel’s attorney general recommended that their leader, Michael Ben-Ari, should be barred (though the electoral commission disagreed, while on the same day banning some Arab candidates).
But those who vote for Mr Netanyahu know what they are getting. He won the 2015 election in part through his despicable last-minute warning that “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves” – that is, by inciting hostility towards citizens exercising their right to vote. Meanwhile, he embraces antisemites abroad and alienates swathes of the Jewish diaspora. His embrace of the US president speaks volumes.
Should Mr Netanyahu survive into the summer, he will overtake David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. But the attorney general’s announcement that he plans an indictment in relation to three corruption cases initially shifted polls clearly towards the new Blue and White grouping, fronted by former army chief Benny Gantz’s Israel Resilience party and ex-finance minister’s Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid party. The alliance is defined not by what it stands for, but whom it is against.
This election is a referendum on Mr Netanyahu. Yet there are already signs of voters are swinging back, and the right generally under-polls; it will almost certainly do better at turning out the vote. Even if Blue and White pulls ahead of Likud on seats, Mr Netanyahu has stitched together a coalition. In any case, Mr Gantz has positioned himself as the not-Netanyahu rather than anti-Netanyahu candidate. Campaign videos boast of his role in bombing parts of Gaza “back to the stone age” in 2014. Neither of the two main parties openly support a two-state solution to the ongoing crisis with the Palestinians.
Mr Netanyahu’s supporters believe he has provided security and prosperity despite the region’s turmoil, and are prepared to overlook or reward his bigotry. Israeli institutions could yet do what voters should have done long ago. Regardless of the outcome on election day, Mr Netanyahu still faces legal proceedings – though he could attempt to change the law so that sitting prime ministers can’t be indicted. But neither the courts nor Mr Gantz will reverse the country’s rightwards lurch and the damage it wreaks upon Palestinians, including Palestinian citizens of Israel, and Israel itself. That will only happen when the electorate develops the appetite for the change so desperately needed.