Liberal friends of Israel dejected by Election Day
— Wednesday was a hard day for pro-Israel liberals.
Some of the dejection arose from sheer surprise over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory. The pre-election polling showed Netanyahu’s Likud Party trailing Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union, the main opposition that allies Israel’s historic centerleft Labor Party with the smaller centrist party of former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
On Tuesday, the exit polling found Likud essentially tied with the Zionist Union. Netanyahu’s apparent 30-to-24 seat advantage over Herzog in Israel’s 120-member parliament emerged only when nearly all the votes had been counted. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., proclaimed on Twitter: “Congrats to Bibi — the comeback kid!”
But far more disturbing than Netanyahu’s electoral miracle was the way he brought it about. Seen abstractly as a matter of pure politics, his moves were brilliant. Viewed in light of Israel’s survival, they were reckless, or worse.
Netanyahu’s only path was to boost Likud’s vote and seat-share at the expense of smaller right-wing parties. He abandoned his support for a Palestinian state and engaged in what The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg saw as a version of the old Republican “Southern strategy” that had been aimed at consolidating white votes.
Netanyahu made reference to the relatively high turnout among Israel’s Arab voters and declared: “Right-wing rule is in danger. Arab voters are streaming in huge quanti- ties to the polling stations.” Goldberg translated: “The Arabs are coming!”
A “Joint List” that aligned various Arab parties in a single bloc emerged as Israel’s third-largest party. Yet as Goldberg noted, the Joint List was not the real threat Netanyahu faced. It was just an excuse for incendiary words to rally the right.
Polling analyst Mark Blumenthal noted the right-of-center and religious parties had been slated by the pre-election polls to win 57 seats — exactly where the current tallies have them. Days earlier, polls showed Netanyahu winning only 21 or 22 of those seats. He won 30. The Jewish Home Party, led by next-generation right-wing politician Naftali Bennett, ran three to four seats below the pre-election poll projections, while the far-right Together Party, once projected at four seats, appears to have been shut out of the Knesset, pending final returns.
So in electoral terms, Netanyahu’s gambits worked. But at what cost?
The Israeli center-left nearly succeeded in making the campaign about Israel’s social and economic problems and the country’s sharp class divide. Those will not go away. But in the end, Netanyahu made this into the one election he could win. As the political writer Anshel Pfeffer noted in the left-of-center newspaper Haaretz, the Israeli left needs a dose of populism to “truly engage with the Israeli working class.” Sound familiar?
Much will depend on Moshe Kahlon, a one-time Likud politician who was the other big winner. He broke with Netanyahu to form a new, more centrist party that secured 10 seats. The betting in Israel is that he will join Netanyahu’s coalition. But the side bet is that because he and Netanyahu dislike each other, the coalition won’t last long. This could mean another election soon.
Liberal friends of Israel are not going to abandon their commitment to the survival of a democratic Jewish state because of one extremely troubling election campaign. Yet neither will they give up on the idea that recognizing the right of Palestinians to their own state is in the interest both of justice and of Israel itself.
Netanyahu will not easily live down the way he chose to win.