Israel: Has Netanyahu’s gamble failed?
This could be the end of the Benjamin Netanyahu era, said Tal Schneider and Dan Zaken in Globes. After failing to build a governing coalition following the indecisive April elections, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister finagled an unprecedented repeat vote rather than let the opposition have a go at forming a government. Israelis went back to the polls this week, but once again Bibi’s right-wing bloc fell short of a majority in the 120-seat Knesset. According to partial results, the centrist Blue and White party, led by former Army Chief Benny Gantz, came in first, with 33 seats, Netanyahu’s Likud was second, with 32, and the Joint List of Arab parties vaulted up to third place, with 12 seats. A unity government between the top two vote getters is the only obvious solution, but Gantz says he won’t sit in a government with Netanyahu. “Would the Likud be prepared to ditch Netanyahu?” There’s already talk of another lawmaker taking the party’s helm.
The prime minister’s former ally Avigdor Liberman will now play kingmaker, said Jeremy Sharon in The Jerusalem Post. His ultranationalist Yisrael Beiteinu party, which represents mostly ethnic Russians, looks set to claim eight seats and could propel either faction to power. Weeks of coalition negotiations lie ahead, but Liberman says he wants to be part of a national unity government with both Likud and Blue and White. The former defense secretary campaigned “exclusively on secular concerns,” having refused to join Netanyahu’s coalition after the last election because the prime minister—who needed the additional support of ultra-Orthodox parties— refused to support a bill that would allow more ultraOrthodox seminary students to be drafted into the military. This time around, Liberman’s goal of forming a “government without the ultra-Orthodox or religious parties” looks attainable.
Netanyahu’s election campaign was the most “violent, false, racist, inciting, and base” Israel has ever endured, said Yossi Verter in Haaretz. Bibi is facing possible indictments in three corruption cases, and he was desperate for a decisive win that would let him pass new immunity laws to keep himself and his wife out of prison. That urgency led him “on an insane, almost psychotic blitz of running around and telling lies.” A message on his Facebook page declared that Israel’s Arab citizens “want to annihilate us all—women, children, and men.” He accused reporters of committing “a terror attack against democracy.” He even announced plans to annex a third of the West Bank, which would enrage Palestinians and alienate the international community. Netanyahu’s unhinged viciousness “led tens of thousands of sane, moderate voters to flee Likud,” and in the end, his party lost seats.
Whoever ends up in government must “heal the wounds of Israeli society,” said Orit Lavi-Nashiel in Maariv. As President Reuven Rivlin warned in 2015, Israel has splintered into four tribes— secular, religious, ultra-Orthodox, and Arab—and this campaign pitted each against the others. We will need “a deep reckoning” to overcome these hatreds and restore trust in one another.