Netanyahu sees a path to reelection with new fascist/racist bloc that includes ‘Jewish Power’

Israel is heading towards its fourth election in two years, March 23. Here is what we may reasonably expect this time.

Midnight yesterday was the deadline for declaring parties. There were mergers and droppings-out on the right and on the left. In Israeli politics, a governing coalition needs to principally garner a majority of 61 seats out of the 120 Knesset seats, and this is done by coalitions of smaller parties. Yet there is a threshold level of 3.25% (4 seats) which is an incentive against being too fragmented, because if a party falls below the threshhold, its votes may be lost.

The biggest single party in Israeli politics today is Likud, by far. It currently polls at around 30 seats. It used to have a rival bloc called Blue and White. That centrist bloc, led by Benny Gantz (who came into politics two years ago boasting of having bombed Gaza back to the “stone age” as army Chief of Staff) is now not even clearing the electoral threshold in the recent poll. In the last elections (April 2020) Blue and White were still at a formidable 33 seats, challenging Netanyahu’s Likud which had 36. But Gantz broke his promise to never serve under a Prime Minister facing indictment, entered a ‘rotation agreement’ with Netanyahu going first as PM, and his bloc splintered over the reversal. Gantz’s turn to serve as PM was due later this year, but most Israelis came to understand that he’d never get the chance (they know Netanyahu always has a trick or two up the sleeve).

Another heroic attempt to challenge Netanyahu from the center-left came just a month ago, from longtime Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai – with the ominous party name “the Israelis”. But after a short-lived hype, the party began falling below the electoral threshold, and Huldai declared yesterday that he is dropping out of the race.

Huldai’s idea was to provide new life to the old-time Israeli Labor politics, because the Labor party itself, once the main representation in Israeli politics, was now below the threshold. But less than two weeks ago, Merav Michaeli, a labor politician also popularly known from her time as a TV anchor, set out to revive the old Labor spirit. She became the new leader of Labor on January 24, and from that point on Labor began clearing the threshold again, recently polling at 6 seats. Huldai’s numbers were falling as Labor’s were growing, and he eventually opted to “let others lead the effort for the restoration of the country”, as he said yesterday.

Michaeli has reportedly rejected overtures to merge with her party from both Huldai as well as Ofer Shelah who had split off of Yair Lapid’s centrist party Yesh Atid, so she is now the sole leader of Labor.

And Labor and Meretz are now the two parties representing the Zionist Jewish left. Meretz polls at about 5 seats, so the two parties together clear about 11 seats.

The rest of the spectrum features the Joint List, representing mostly Palestinian Israelis, and then center, right and far right Zionist parties. The Joint List, which won a historical 15 seats in the last election, has suffered splintering since, and many of its voters are disillusioned, since even the liberal Gantz did not want the Joint List’s political support– in the firm tradition of No Israeli government ever including Palestinian parties historically. The Joint List now polls at a mere 10 seats, and for the Zionist Jews, “Arabs” are “not part of the equation”, as Netanyahu said last year.

So what’s left on the equation? Not much left really, but a lot of right.

The center-to-right spectrum of Israeli parties, from the centrist Yair Lapid (centrist even though his principle is “maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians”) and all the way to the Kahanist Otzma Yehudit party — Jewish Power– is a whopping 99 seats.

It’s good just to reflect upon that figure for a moment, before looking at how these people will join together, and under what politics.

That Jewish supremacist center-right spectrum is ostensibly diverse, since there are those who will go with Netanyahu, and there are those who are avowedly opposed: “Just not Netanyahu”. The bloc that Netanyahu is now eyeing as a dream scenario, consists of Likud at the helm, joined by the ultra-orthodox Jewish religious parties Shas and United Torah Judaism (representing respectively Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews, with about 15-16 consistent seats between them), Naftali Bennett’s religious-nationalist Yamina Party (‘Rightwards’) with about 12 seats– and then some other right-wing party. Netanyahu would need “some other rightwing party” to cross the threshhold of 60.

But what would that other right-wing party be?

The Kahanist Jewish Power party, led by Meir Kahane’s disciple Itamar Ben Gvir (who is said to have a poster of the 1994 Hebron massacre terrorist Baruch Goldstein in his living-room), has been courted before by Netanyahu in these forever-elections – and Netanyahu is reportedly doing so again. He is said to be promoting a merger between Jewish Power and Bezalel Smotrich’s faction Religious Zionism. In this deal, he offered Smotrich a ministerial portfolio if he merges with Jewish Power. Smotrich is an extremist himself: the author of the “decision plan” that offers an ultimatum to non-Jews of total surrender to Apartheid, or expulsion.

Jewish Power needs Smotrich. These followers of Rabbi Meir Kahane, the former Jewish terror leader who was even too much for the Israeli parliament (Kahane’s Kach party was outlawed in 1988 after first being elected to the Knesset in 1984), have a considerable following. In the September 2019 elections, they won almost 84,000 votes. But recent polls up to two days ago showed Jewish Power failing to clear the electoral threshold. As Smotrich’s party was also failing to clear the threshhold.

But if they joined their 2% each, they would clear it that threshhold. And they did that yesterday, with Netanyahu’s help. Recent polling gives this combined Jewish-fascist party 5 seats!

If the latter holds, we can do the math: Likud with about 30, religious parties with about 16, Yamina with about 12 and Jewish Power with Religious Zionism at 5.

That’s 63. If you can count to 61, you lead.

The “Just not Netanyahu” bloc, even if it includes an impossibly wide spectrum from Meretz to Gideon Sa’ar’s New Hope Party, which is arguably to the right of Likud, only makes a meager 50 seats.

The Zionist left now prominently represented by Merav Michaeli is the depressingly bigoted and hypocritical vein of ‘liberal Zionism’. Here she is on Boycotts Divestments and Sanctions – the international campaign that is the only game in town to bring Israeli Apartheid to an end – speaking to AIJAC (Australia-Israel Jewish Affairs Council):

I think it’s for a long time now been very clear, that a lot of the BDS movement is good old anti-Semitism in new clothes… It’s definitely not good for anyone, other than those who really want to harm Israel and harm Jews.

See how smooth that is: ostensibly, it’s not the whole BDS that is antisemitic, but “a lot” of it. And yet, BDS is only good for antisemites who are also anti-Zionists.

So how is one supposed to fight Apartheid? Oh, Michaeli won’t call it that, unlike the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. She’ll speak of the “two sides”:

For sure, those who want a peace agreement between Israel and Palestinians, as do I, need to support the progressive forces on both sides.

So you see, you can be progressive, but you can’t actually take Israel to account. We just need talk and ‘peace process’.

Michaeli is great for J Street as well the Biden administration. They can cling to their two-state, two-sides and two-regime delusion, while protecting Israel from any sort of sanctions and keeping any differences “behind closed doors”.

But that’s just status quo, upholding the illusion of Israel as a “Jewish democracy”.

So, back from the liberal veil to the reality of Israeli politics: It is overwhelmingly Zionist, and mostly either centrist or right-wing at that. The “progressive forces” hardly have a chance.