UPDATE: Israeli Exit Polls Indicate Bibi's Days LIKELY Over

This is Act 10 in my Israeli Election 2019 Circus Act diary series. and it will be extremely short.

Polling stations officially closed 15 minutes ago (note to Americans: in Israel the standard in cities/suburbs is 15 hours, 7am to 10pm). Exit polls incorporating the vote through 8pm just came out.

They give Bibi’s hard-right coalition 54-57 53-55 seats out of 120 (in the dud April election they won 60). The emerging centre-right bloc composed of Bibi’s main rival Blue-White led by General Ganz, plus Lieberman’s formerly hard-right party are winning 41-42 40-41, and the balance goes to centre-left including the Arab-led Joint List, which has re-formed after splitting in April, and regained its spot as 3rd-largest List with 11-13 13-15 seats. 

The Kahanist ultra-right party, which the last polls showed succeeding in making the 3.25% cut and winning 4 seats, is not predicted to pass by any of the 3 exit polls. I was generally expecting that, since extreme-right voters tend to be over-represented in polls, possibly due to their enthusiasm.

4:15 PM update:

Israeli pollsters don’t just sit on their exit polls — as true results come in, in particular from the exit-poll locations, they always adjust the original polls. As the headline picture caption disclaims and as many of you painfully remember, almost always those adjustments drift right and in particular in Likud’s favor.

Well… tonight seems to be an exception. I’m keeping the headline pic as it is — reflecting poll-closing projections — but if you go to Haaretz site now you’ll see that Bibi’s bloc has been adjusted down 1-2 seats in each of the 3 polls. So he’s drifted further away from majority, a good 6-8 seats away.

Even sweeter, all the net inter-bloc movement in this adjustment is thanks to those mythical “Arab voters moving in droves”, whose votes Bibi has tried so hard to suppress. It’s seemed to backfired, big time: The Joint List has been adjusted up from 11-13 to 13-15. Its components only won 10 seats together in April. The Joint will be at risk of losing a seat when soldiers’ votes come in a few days from now, but very few observers have been expecting — and no pre-election poll has been showing — them repeating the 13-seat record from 2015, let alone exceeding it.

Another update: ….aaaaaand around 3am Israel time, Ganz called Joint List leader Ayman Odeh, and they scheduled a meeting.

Yes, it may be a new day in Israeli politics after all.

Since 1967, Israel has controlled the lives of the Palestinian people living in East Jerusalem, West Bank, and Gaza, without giving them citizenship; the vast majority have been forced to live as stateless, rightless subjects under military rule. Even now, as Occupation-tolerant advocates often deny and discount this basic reality (or are shamefully ignorant of it), Israel controls the freedom of movement of these territories' residents, in particular their ability to go abroad and return; controls their residency status; their airspace, currency, water supply, fuel supply, most of their electricity, and their ability to import and export products. All the while, deeply exploiting their day labor and natural resources — and further controlling their social and intimate lives via a secret police that extorts an extensive network of collaborators. THIS IS A VERY PARTIAL LIST.

This Occupation regime has continued unabated for nearly 52 out of the Israeli parliament’s 70 years of existence, covering the last 14 15 out of Israel's 20 21 general elections. Apart from a couple of elections in the 1980s-90s, no major Israeli party has campaigned on ending it.

As long as this continues,  the Israeli elections cannot be considered really democratic. That said, elections sometimes open the door to the Law of Unintended Consequences, in a good way.

Besides, it’s one of the world's most entertaining electoral circuses. So I'm writing this series.   

On a head-to-head level, Bibi’s Likud List is very close to Blue-White (31-33 30-32 vs. 32-34 32-33, Blue-White leading slightly). Results between exit polls and final generally trend right by 2-3 seats, but at present it seems that 61 seats recommending Bibi may be a bit out of reach. If Lieberman holds true to his word of recommending only a unity government led by Ganz, and ruling out Bibi as PM, then Bibi has no route to premiership and the most likely outcome is some sort of a unity government involving these two largest Lists, but with Bibi giving up the premiership.

Other outcomes are possible as well. If Ganz wants to secure 61+ recommendations outright, he will have to court the Joint List, who have already published their demands. Really scary stuff like equal rights, ending the Occupation, investments in infrastructure and community policing, etc. You know, the stuff nightmares are made off. He’d rather chew off his right hand.

Bibi did force every single Likud parliament member to sign an oath that they will not seek to replace him as leader in order to form a government, but political realities will tell, especially when he is due in a few weeks for hearings in a last attempt to avoid multiple corruption indictments.

This by no means is a turn to the centre-left and to Occupation-ending policies, but it would be welcome nonetheless. Hopefully the results don’t drift too far to the hard-right overnight — seems like they aren’t!, and when the “soldiers’ votes” (~4% of the total) are counted in a few days.