After all the electoral dust had settled in Israel last night, it turns out that the party that overperformed expectations in this particular Knesset election was actually Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud. Bibi’s Wingnut Cavalcade came in a whopping 8-10 seats ahead of where last week’s polls (by Israeli law, no polling data could be released to the public after last Thursday) had put them, winning 29 or 30 seats to the center-left Zionist Union’s 24. Even the exit polls, which showed both parties winning 27 seats earlier in the day, turned out to be wrong. With that kind of margin, it’s unlikely that Netanyahu will have to go along with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin’s stated preference, that he form a national unity government with the ZU. He’s got a pretty easy path to a hard right Knesset majority without bringing the ZU into the government at all, let alone under some kind of power-sharing deal.
So what happened? As the results show, Likud didn’t really pick up those extra seats by winning over ZU supporters or even centrists; it mostly got them by “cannibalizing” (as Josh Marshall puts it) voters from other far right parties out of fear that Likud might lose badly enough to give the ZU first crack at forming a government. So Bibi’s total right-wing coalition looks to be about the size that the polls predicted it would be, and with the addition of the center-right Kulanu Party of former Likud MK Moshe Kahlon it will be large enough to run the country. After his big speech to Congress failed to win Likud any new voters (i.e., voters who might otherwise have voted for a centrist or left-ish party), Netanyahu spent the last days of the campaign making a naked appeal to voters who might otherwise have preferred harder right parties like Jewish Home or Yisrael Beiteinu but who were willing to vote Likud in order to prevent a ZU victory.
The way he made that appeal to the Israeli right could have some implications moving forward, though. For one thing, Netanyahu is now openly saying that there will never be a Palestinian state so long as he and Likud are in power. While this is certainly nothing more than the open acknowledgement of a position that Netanyahu already privately held, it does make it harder for the US and the Palestinian Authority to keep working with his government. Second, Netanyahu’s last ditch appeal to right-wing voters was blatantly racist fear-mongering about the threat of Arab Israelis exercising their right as Israeli citizens to, you know, vote in an election.Take these two things together and, as Chait says, you get the picture of an Israeli leader who not only refuses to engage the possibility of a future Palestinian state, but doesn’t even consider Arab citizens of Israel to be legitimate Israelis. When you combine those two policies, the system you’re left with has a name — apartheid — and Israel’s path toward it has never looked more inexorable than it does this morning.
As I said, this has implications for Israel’s working relationship with both the US and the PA. The PA, which was already “considering” (though not really) an end to security cooperation with the Israelis, may now have to actually consider it. Usually the PA is happy to collaborate with Israeli security because they share a common enemy, Hamas, and because doing so ensured a steady flow of American aid, so its periodic threats to end that collaboration have always rung hollow. After Netanyahu’s performance over the past week or so, though, it really will be almost impossible for the already credibility-deficient PA President Mahmoud Abbas to credibly say that Netanyahu is a viable partner. That doesn’t mean he won’t try, of course. As for the US, I wouldn’t expect anything to change right away; after all, Netanyahu and Barack Obama presumably hate each other’s guts at this point, but that hasn’t stopped the US from supplying weapons to the IDF when asked or using its UN veto to protect Israel from international punishment. In the long term, however, it will become more and more challenging for American politicians to remain on the side of a government that is openly committed to denying basic rights to the Arab populations both in the Occupied Territories and within Israel itself. Netanyahu’s efforts to make the US-Israel relationship a partisan issue will eventually come with a cost in this respect.
It’s worth noting that, if you’re concerned with the plight of the Palestinians, ZU leader Isaac Herzog was no prize either; this is, after all, a guy who hit Netanyahu from the right over his handling of last year’s Gaza operation, and his ZU partner, Tzipi Livni of Hatnuah, is wanted for war crimes over her role in the 2008-2009 Gaza campaign. And I haven’t even mentioned the Iran talks, which were going to be a political hot potato regardless of how yesterday’s elections turned out. Still, as it stands, Netanyahu has further dampened his relationship with Obama (via his Congress stunt), officially dropped any pretense of peace with the Palestinians, and publicly tied himself to the most racist elements of Israeli society, all because he was panicked about an election that, thanks to the overall strength of the Israeli political right, he was never worse than a 50/50 bet to win anyway. That seems like a lot of scorched earth to me.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 