I’ve been waaay too busy and worn out to write much about Israel’s 5th election circus in the space of 2.5 years.
I only wrote once about it, in July, explaining how and why this election came about. The wheels came off the hodge-podge coalition that to much fanfare and worldwide applause had “deposed” the interminable Bibi (while in retrospect, has only warmed his seat very temporarily). The Bibi-led opposition did not precisely manage to topple the government; but the latter decided to fall on its sword and call early election, in order to preserve the little-known “Apartheid Law”. This law provides “legal” (well, legal inside the Israeli system and only there) coverage for providing Israeli settlers in the West Bank with fully-privileged civilian lives, while subjecting the original Palestinian residents to harsh, hostile military rule with no rights. See the linked diary for details.
The outgoing coalition had an unprecedented center-right-left-Arabs composition. The bulk of electoral mass in it was from the center/left/Arabs, but you wouldn’t know it from how it ruled. As right-wingers do, these members of the coalition acted as if they owned the place, but even getting the prime-minister spot in exchange for a measly handful of seats wasn’t enough for some renegade right-wingers, who deserted the coalition and crawled back into Bibi’s camp.
Anyway once elections were called, neither the Zionist-left parties nor the Arab parties could agree on running together, leaving 5 smallish parties exposed to the risk of failing the draconian 3.25% electoral threshold for parliamentary representation.
Why a strange number like 3.25%, you might ask? Obviously it is not a round percentage. It’s also not a multiple of the percentage representing a single seat (5/6 of 1%). Nay — this number was chosen specifically to screw with the Arab parties. The threshold was raised from 2% to 3.25% in 2014, with the chief architects being Yair Lapid and Yvet Lieberman, who happen to be… also the the chief architects of the outgoing “change coalition”, which just now needed all 5 of those parties to get seats.
Oh bitter irony.
I just read that some of these parties actually begged Lapid — who is right now“caretaker PM”, possibly the shortest-tenured PM in Israeli history — to quickly pass a bill lowering the threshold back to 2%. But he refused. To make matters worse, his party actively campaigned to convince anti-Bibi voters to vote directly to it rather to these smaller ally parties. And indeed, his party’s vote share went up from 14% to almost 18%.
As expected by all polls, the smallest of the 3 Arab parties, Balad, fell short getting only 2.9%. It was in fact far closer than anyone had predicted, possibly the highest-ever percentage won by Balad running alone when the threshold was more forgiving (in previous rounds since 2014, it always ran together with Arab parties to evade being thresholded out). Now, Balad would never sit in a Zionist coalition of any stripe, but the non-Bibi Zionists still need its seats as a bulwark against Bibi’s bloc getting a majority of the 120 seats.
The other 2 Arab parties won 5 seats each, retaining the overall Arab-party seat count from the outgoing parliament. As far as bulwarking goes, it was perhaps not the record 15 seats from 2019-2020 when all Arab parties ran together, but the Arab voters held their end of the rope compared with the outgoing parliament, despite being the ones most directly and aggressively screwed over by everyone else.
Now here comes the doozy.
The progressive-Zionist party Meretz, established 30 years ago as an amalgam of 3 well-known liberal-progressive parties, and a powerhouse in 1990s Israeli politics, also failed the threshold, ending with 3.16%. This has never happened before.
(disclaimer: I voted for Meretz in most of my elections and even volunteered in its 1999 campaign. Israeli expats generally cannot vote unless they fly in-country to vote, so I haven’t voted in Israeli elections for a long while. If I could vote, nowadays I’d vote further left for the Hadash Arab-Jewish party).
Meanwhile, as hapless and gameless as the anti-Bibi parties were, so were the Bibi side and its voters savvy. Bibi’s multi-year project of both legitimizing the most extreme anti-democratic parties and elements of his coalition, and solidifying them into blocs that are sure to pass and even thrive, has finally matured.
The resulting electoral list, bearing the innocent-sounding name “The Religious Zionism”, is an amalgam of 3 parties for whom the term fascism would be a gross understatement. These are fundamentalist, ideological Jewish supremacists of the worst type. The official #2 but really the most charismatic figure and main mover and shaker is Itamar Ben-Gvir (pictured on top), a Jerusalem kid who was a fan and follower of the notorious Kahane already as teenager. Ben-Gvir now lives, naturally, in the Jewish settlement at the heart of Palestinian Al Khalil / Hebron. At age 18 the Israeli military deemed him too extremist and dangerous to even be conscripted. Now at age 46, the entirety of Orthodox Zionist population sees him as its leader, and he can be a senior cabinet minister if he so chooses.
Ben-Gvir’s worse-than-fascist list won 14 seats, a record for any Orthodox-Zionist electoral list (such lists have been present in every parliament since the first one in 1949). So it is both the most extreme ever of its kind, and the largest ever.
Sneakily, another supposedly rival Orthodox-Zionist right-wing list was headed by the secular Ayelet Shaked, outgoing Interior Minister and another frighteningly evil politician. But the “rivalry” was full of winks and nods. Shaked, a good-looking media darling, apparently only ran in order to attract confused votes from the center. All the actual right-wing Orthodox Zionist voters got the message and voted for Ben-Gvir’s list, with Shaked getting only 1.19%.
Altogether, Bibi’s bloc will now have 64 seats out of 120, plenty enough to rule in what will yet again break the record for the most right-wing governing coalition ever. Many point out that had the 6% “electoral avalanche” (Meretz+Balad) on the left not taken place, the result might have been another dead tie between the blocs.
But that’s missing the forest for the trees. I’ve written here a lot about that forest — maybe I’ll write a follow-up piece sometime explaining it again, with a focus on Meretz’s demise. The forest is indeed as hinted in the 2nd paragraph, that Israeli voters don’t decide only for themselves, but also for >5 million Occupied Palestinians from whom they deny even the most basic of rights. Yet, the Occupation regime and how to end it are not part of Israel’s daily, monthly, or annual mainstream conversation, and are not even on the agenda of the anti-Bibi camp.
As in every election since 2001, Israel’s centre and centre-left have been mostly afraid of even talking about the Occupation. Meanwhile, the right-wing and far-right folks are all too happy to describe how they will make this regime harsher, and even tear away its last remaining “temporary” badges, badges that ironically and hypocritically enable the West to continue supporting Israel without supporting an explicitly permanent Apartheid regime. No. The Ben-Gvirians want to come out of this “temporary military rule” closet, and officially annex most of the West Bank as soon as they deem (diplomatically) feasible.
The forest is that when an entire camp refuses to run on the country’s most critical issue, or (even worse) largely adopts and parrots the opposing camp’s lingo and policies for it, and instead tries to run purely on socio-economic issues (which are of course, hugely affected by this critical issues) — or yet again even worse, for nearly a decade now stops running on any issue except for“defeating Bibi”— such a camp inevitably runs out of runway, juice, attraction to voters, cohesion, and savvy.
Sorry for not filling the diary with links and charts and photos, my time and energy are limited.
Happy Friday.