In the runup to the Israeli election, American Zionists were surprisingly unified in an appeal to Israeli voters – don’t put Netanyahu back in as prime minister. Josh Shapiro and Rahm Emanuel and Kathy Hochul all said they hoped for Netanyahu’s defeat. The liberal Zionist group J Street issued one alarm after another about Netanyahu’s return, joined by the centrist Israel Policy Forum. Even Democratic Majority for Israel, a spinoff of the discredited Israel lobby group AIPAC, called for “meaningful changes” – no Netanyahu. Ron Lauder, a businessman once close to Netanyahu, said the PM is a “dictator” who has made Israel into a “banana republic,” and if his rightwing coalition keeps its power “Israel is doomed.”
These leaders don’t like Netanyahu because he has destroyed their ability to make their case for a Jewish state. His actions in Gaza and the West Bank have made Israel a pariah state globally. The Democratic Party base has turned solidly against Israel, and young Jews have joined anti-Zionist organizations.
A Netanyahu victory would be “a point of no return with American Jews,” Haaretz correspondent Etan Nechin explained in a panel at a Zionist synagogue in Brooklyn in October. While Hochul said that Netanyahu’s “overreach” in Gaza has placed American Jews at risk, and a Jew could not be elected president if Netanyahu is still a “lightning rod.”
Last week’s election was a giant blow to these Israel supporters. Netanyahu “emerged in the immediate aftermath as the biggest winner,” as one Israel lobbyist put it. At a time when the opposition had everything going for it, including 80,000 expatriates flying home to vote, Netanyahu’s party polled better than any other, and his coalition did better than expected, though falling short of a majority.
The mood among Israeli liberals was despair. “Existential dread. Shock,” says Neri Zilber of the Israel Policy Forum. He said many shared the sentiment: “How can we raise our kids here?”
The Israeli Jewish electorate continues to be overwhelmingly rightwing. “Ideologically rightwing parties” garnered 73 seats in the Knesset, according to pollster Dahlia Scheindlin. Netanyahu’s brutal militarism in Gaza, Iran, and Lebanon helped him at the polls. And he stoked ethnic division, fear, and hatred inside the Israeli polity for his own benefit, says Dan Rothem of the Israel Policy Forum.
“At the moment of truth people clung to tribal loyalties, feelings of identity and belonging,” Aluf Benn of Haaretz said.
That means Jewish supremacism. “There is clearly a large proportion of the Israeli electorate that is no longer committed to the Israel of the Declaration of Independence [with its claim of complete equality of social and political rights to all inhabitants],” says David Horovitz of the Times of Israel.
The ray of hope for liberal Zionists in the U.S. was that Palestinian citizens of Israel don’t care for Netanyahu, and they surged to the polls, delivering 19 seats to Palestinian parties. The leaders of those parties say they want to help build a coalition to end Netanyahu’s reign of terror. And their 19 seats would be enough to get the opposition bloc into power.
American Zionists have implored the Israeli opposition to seize the moment and make a government with the support of the so-called Arab parties.
“It is not enough to talk about ‘liberalism’; we need to act according to liberal values, foremost the value of equality,” writes Nadav Tamir of J Street. “To give the citizen from Nazareth and the citizen from Rahat the feeling that their voice has power and influence, just like the voices of the citizens from Kfar Saba and Dimona. That the ability to influence the state and the direction it will take is not reserved for Jews alone, but for all citizens of the State of Israel.” https://jstreetdotorg.substack.com/p/j-street-expert-analysis-on-the-israeli
Michael Koplow of the Israel Policy Forum said that if the Israeli opposition cannot integrate the Palestinians into the political process now, when Netanyahu is fomenting racist conspiracy theories and Israel is isolated internationally, the insult to Palestinians will reverberate for generations.
No doubt a governing coalition of Jews and Palestinians that evicts Netanyahu would help Israel’s image and slow the erosion inside the Democratic Party in the U.S.
But the experts agree there is slim likelihood that the opposition will take such a bold move. Many factors stand in the way:
- The president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, who plays a key procedural role in the formation of a new government, has indicated that he will urge Netanyahu and opposition leader Gadi Eizenkot to put aside their differences and form a “unity” coalition.
- If Netanyahu starts up his and Trump’s war with Iran again, there will be more pressure on Eisenkot to fall in line with a war-time PM (as he did before, after the Gaza attacks of October 7).
- The most likely outcome is that Netanyahu will manage to steal support from rightwing Zionist opposition parties in order to form the next government rather than go to another election, says Aluf Benn of Haaretz.
- Eisenkot and his ally Avigdor Liberman promised that they would not make a coalition with Palestinian parties, a racist pledge that has had force again and again in Israeli Jewish politics. As Mickey Gitzin of the New Israel Fund said on a J Street panel, a government formed with Palestinian support would be the “last resort for all the players.”
Only Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats Party with 7 seats (a blend of Labor and Meretz), is pledged to work with Palestinian parties.
“I wish the rest of the opposition were not so cowardly,” says Scheindlin.
But they are that cowardly.
I understand the hopes for a multi-ethnic coalition that are felt by Palestinian political leaders and liberal Zionists too. Israel is a pariah nation not because of “imagery” but because of its conduct. It is a country devoted to war crimes and attacking its neighbors and killing whole families in bombings of apartment blocs, to defend a rule of Jewish apartheid. When Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed refused to say which is the greater threat to the U.S. – Israel or Iran – many Americans agree.
How do we transform that society short of more calamity, genocide and regional instability? The surge of the Joint List seems to offer hope that Israeli leaders will experience the “de Klerk moment,” the realization in South African leadership in 1990 that a settler-colonial society must turn away from apartheid and include the indigenous people as stakeholders.
Sadly, nothing like this has happened in Israeli leadership. Israel is overwhelmingly rightwing and fearful, its Jewish society is alienated from the world and its neighbors and sees the persecution of Palestinians as essential for Jewish security.
The upside of the Israeli election is that it will make it harder for American leaders to do as they have done for more than 20 years, and deny apartheid. More Democrats will vote to cut off military aid, more young people will support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. The only thing that will get Israel to change is American pressure.
