Kingmaker Bennett says Israel is overwhelmingly rightwing — so don’t worry about Lapid

On Tuesday next week, Israel will be going to its fourth elections in two years. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has expressed certainty that there will not need to be a fifth election – but such confidence appears premature. Center-right blocs could well be deadlocked again. Here is an overview of who’s in the race, who might be out, and what the likely prospects are.

Netanyahu’s claim that the election will be definitive came Saturday in response to polls suggesting that no bloc may get a certain majority of 61 seats in the 120-seat parliament, or Knesset, unless leaders break election promises about possible alliances. For example, Netanyahu’s Likud-dominated bloc might be able to go over 60 if a conservative Palestinian party, Ra’am, which split from the Joint List of Palestinian representative parties, teams up with Netanyahu’s Likud. Ra’am has a kinship to Likud in its anti-LGBTQ values, but Ra’am is teetering around the electoral threshold of 3.25% (4 seats) and has sunk below it in several polls. But Netanyahu’s allies from the far-right party, Religious Zionism, which includes the racist Kahanist Jewish Power faction, have ruled out sitting with Arabs. And Religious Zionism is polling considerably better than Ra’am; it reached a record 6 seats in Sunday’s poll on Channel 13.

On the other side, the anti-Netanyahu bloc, the biggest polling party is Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid (‘There is a Future’), but leaders of two other big parties in that potential governing coalition – Naftali Bennett and Gideon Sa’ar, who are to the right of both Lapid and Netanyahu– have said that they won’t accept Lapid as premier.

Bennett, leader of Yamina (‘Rightwards’) has said he could go either way, and has not ruled out making a coalition with Netanyahu. But he says he won’t form a coalition with Meretz, from the Zionist left. In any case, Meretz is teetering on the threshold, very similarly to Ra’am.

So the prospects are somewhat unclear, in the anti-Netanyahu bloc.

As far as the Netanyahu bloc is concerned, if that 61st seat is reached, without Ra’am, Netanyahu will have a very quick track to a new government. Another poll from Saturday (Kan 11) already portrays this possible scenario, and it is this:

Likud gets 31; Ultra-orthodox religious parties Shas and United Torah Judaism get 15 between them; Yamina gets 11; Religious Zionism gets 4. That makes 61.

In that scenario, Bennett is the kingmaker. He will no doubt be offered a lot, but probably not the rotation of premiership which he covets (and which Netanyahu has already ruled out). And negotiation with Bennett is likely to be the key issue, in the days after the election.

But it’s rare that Likud polls as high as 31. Is average in the past week is just under 29, and that makes it a very tight race, and not at all as certain as Netanyahu insists.

The not-Netanyahu bloc

On the other end, there are various factions, most of which are anti-Netanyahu. So who are these parties and leaders?

Yair Lapid leads Yesh Atid, which is a centrist Zionist party, polling at around 20 seats. That’s by far the largest party besides Likud. Lapid served as Finance Minister under Netanyahu in 2013-14, but was fired in late 2014 together with centrist Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, throwing Israel into new elections. Netanyahu said the two were acting as an “opposition within the government”. Livni claimed that her firing was directly related to her support for a bill to curb circulation of the Adelson-funded, Netanyahu propaganda daily Israel Hayom.

Lapid seeks to portray himself as a liberal centrist, but that’s inside the relativity of Zionist racism. Yesh Atid’s foundational party platform from 2012 includes “Jewish majority” and “all Jews are responsible for one another” (Palestinians are not even mentioned in the credo, not even as Arabs). It speaks of “equality”, but as apparent lip-service. At times, Lapid has been more explicit, as in 2016:

My principle says maximum Jews on maximum land with maximum security and with minimum Palestinians.  

In the updated platform on their website, Yesh Atid has 27 sections in the Hebrew version, but only 10 in the English version. Ostensibly, the Hebrew version needs to be more detailed. But the English version is missing a crucial section, one which should interest international readers a lot. That section is the Hebrew section titled “State-Security”. Here, it says (my translation):

The settlement blocs will remain part of Israel and the united Jerusalem will be its capital. Israel will under no condition accept the Palestinian right of return, since this would mean the end of the Jewish state.

It’s as if Yesh Atid thinks that if you’re not a Hebrew reader, you wouldn’t really want to know about its dedication to the settlement project, seemingly trying to stay on good terms with American liberal Zionists.

There used to be a contender in this bloc, to rival Lapid – Gideon Sa’ar, a longtime Likudnik who broke off from Likud and established the ‘New Hope’ party in early December. His party got a lot of hype at first, polling up to 20 seats in December, then began dwindling and is now featuring in the single-digits (9 seats in Sunday’s poll).

Then there is Naftali Bennett again, polling rather consistently around 11 seats. He, too, is to the right of Netanyahu. Neither Bennett not Sa’ar would accept Lapid as Prime Minister, they say – he’s too ‘leftist’ for them – but it may not make sense otherwise, because Lapid carries a plurality of the seats.

So, what would such a potential governing coalition look like?

Yesh Atid with about 20 seats; New Hope with, say 10; Yamina with 11; Avigdor Liberman’s Israel Beitenu with about 7; Benny Gantz’s Blue-White at 4 (a shadow of what it was last year); Labor with about 6. That gets them to 58. And let’s say Meretz is in with 4 seats; then Bennett is out. That is, if Meretz even makes it.

In the off-chance that Bennett compromises on Meretz and Meretz makes it, there might be a slight chance of such a coalition; but it’s a very long stretch ideologically from Yamina to Meretz, as far as those Zionist parties are concerned, and it might cost Bennett too much political capital to be that much a of a joker in Israeli politics.

No one really considers the Joint List as a part of the possible equation. They’ve never been part of a government for the Jewish state and are regarded toxic. Last year, following the March elections, Benny Gantz entertained the idea of forming a government with the external backing of the Joint List (simply having them vote for him as PM). The Joint List was on board, but rejected. Yair Lapid, then part of Blue White, tried to minimise the issue of merely obtaining support from the Joint List, saying that “contrary to the lies that Bibi [Netanyahu] is spreading, the Joint List would not be part of this government… They will vote once from the outside [to back the government], and there it will end.” But by the end of the process, Blue-White was in tatters, Gantz broke his word and signed up with Netanyahu.

This is all part of the same story: since Palestinian legislators are a toxic idea for the Zionist parties, they keep squabbling over how to form governments without them. And the mere prospect of having their minimal external support is an explosive issue.

50 shades of left, but no left

It is worth noting, that from Labor rightwards, there is denial of Israeli war-criminality– adamant opposition to the recently-announced International Criminal Court investigation. In a recent conference by Ha’aretz and Commanders for Israel’s Security,  Labor chair Merav Michaeli said that an ICC investigation is “really not good”:

I don’t think the court has the authority to investigate Israel… Israel does not commit war crimes. It complies with international law governing war, unequivocally. Israel has a strong, independent legal establishment that faces terrible attacks, but that’s what protects us from these things.

Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem, which recently authored a report on Israeli Apartheid “from the river to the sea”, commented:

The meaning of the phrase ‘I have full confidence in the IDF’ and therefore oppose it being investigated by an external body, is not only an expression of confidence in the lies that the IDF is caught telling countless times, but also in the idea that the Israeli security apparatus works on principles of justice… Such a claim can only be interpreted in two ways: either the believer denies the systematic policy of expulsion, dispossession, discrimination and violation of human rights, executed by the army in the occupied territories, or he is justifying it.   

Michaeli distances herself from the view of Meretz chair Nitzan Horowitz, that the Israeli government is responsible for the ICC investigation. Horowitz tweeted:

The settlements and the right are dragging Israel to The Hague… The ongoing construction and threats of annexation are embroiling Israel in accusations of war crimes. The settlement obsession must stop and the peace process with the Palestinians must be restarted. Not just to prevent legal proceedings, but to advance the Israeli interest.

Horowitz’s claim, however candid in the Zionist political relativity, is alas a denial of the fact that the settlements are not only the project of the right, but also of the left. When Ehud Barak was Prime Minister in 1999-2001, his pace of settlement construction was faster than Netanyahu’s before him. Barak claimed that he was just expanding existing settlements. This is the basic ‘difference’ between the right and the left in Israel – it is about the speed of colonization, not about how to end it.

Thus, Michaeli does not rule out expansion of ‘settlement blocs’, because this is the supposed expansion of a consensus – a Zionist expansionist one. But she abhors those who support expanding too fast, with settlement outposts– because then the frog might jump out of the boiling water. Horowitz, on the other hand, blames the ICC issue on the right, and alludes to that evasive “peace process” under which Israel expands (as it did during the Oslo years in 1990’s), and where Israel can continue insisting on the settlement blocs, the united Jerusalem and say “not one refugee” (as the ‘liberal’ Tzipi Livni did in talks in 2008).

Noa Landau of Haaretz comments on the possible disappearance of Meretz:

If Meretz is not in the next Knesset, there will be no more representation for the Zionist left that recognizes the reality of the occupation and its implications, at a time when the proceedings in The Hague are likely to ramp up the [Israeli] persecution of anyone who dares to argue that there is a basis for investigating suspected war crimes in the territories. This would be the real effect of Meretz’s disappearance.

So Israeli crimes are being buried even further in the collective mechanism of denial, and it’s only a disappearing margin of the Zionist left that will even mention it. Now it’s about the big bad ICC that is threatening the Jewish and Democratic state, and every Zionist needs to unite under that fight.

“80 mandates to the right”

Last week, a session where Bennett instructed Yamina activists leaked to the press. He suggested that the “right” had 80 mandates, and that the “spin of the Likud”, that it’s a vote between Netanyahu and Lapid, should be “blasted”:

Currently, the spin of Netanyahu, Miri Regev, Osnat Mark and all those guys in the Likud is that there is now a ‘gewalt’ [Yiddish for ‘help!’] battle between Netanyahu’s rule of the right and the rule of the left by Lapid. That’s a lie because the whole left has 30 mandates and the right has 80. The battle is only within the right. These elections are about choosing between politicians who only think of themselves, who have acted with great negligence in the past year and would drag us without thinking twice into fifth and sixth elections, and Yamina which is a professional right-wing government which cares about the citizens. I ask that you fly this message in order to blow up that nonsense spin of the Likud.

Notice Bennett’s total – there are only 110 mandates in his count. Where are the other 10? That’s the Joint List. Bennett is not counting the “Arabs”, whom he has described as “shrapnel in the butt” and whom he has boasted of personally killing. He is counting just as Netanyahu did last year, when he said that “Arab are not part of the equation.”

So who are those 30 mandates of the “left” that Bennett is speaking of? Bennett is obviously considering Lapid as part of the “left” (with 20 mandates), and then adding in Labor and Meretz with their 10 mandates between them. He’s saying that it’s not a big deal that it’s Lapid. The country is right-wing anyway, he won’t be able to pull things left.

Sa’ar made the same basic point as Bennett last month, with somewhat less drama:

The camp on the left is a small camp in the public and in the Knesset. Most people are right of center, so it’s not possible to have a government headed by Lapid. It’s just not possible politically. Everyone who understands the political system knows this.

Bennett and Sa’ar do have a point. But I think that Bennett, in all his racist obnoxiousness, is overstating the number on the ‘left’. I don’t think Israel even has any left worth speaking of, in that Zionist spectrum. I would certainly not call Lapid a leftist, nor Michaeli. And as to Meretz – I think it’s full of denial, naiveté and contradiction – if it even survives. There is a left in the Joint list, but they are not part of the Zionist equation.