On the Israeli Election

It’s 3PM on election day in Israel. I’m in my mother’s house, because she has a scanner, and in my capacity as a party representative to the regional election commission, I may be called upon to sign and send writs appointing members to polling places (nothing so far, though). It’s a beautiful spring day, and very quiet since most people are out of work and there are few cars on the road. Next door, the neighbors have four generations over for a cookout. My brother is marinating steaks for dinner tonight. It would be lovely, if I weren’t so worried.

This has been a strange election season. I mean, all elections are strange, but this one has been notable for how little—and how much—it’s actually about. The first half of the four months since the election were called were spent primarily in the forming, splitting, and joining of parties. It was as pure an expression as you could ask for of how broken the current iteration of the Israeli parliamentary system is. No one votes for parties anymore. They vote for personalities. For several decades now, we’ve observed the phenomenon of the “mood party”, a list built around a big name who brings a bunch of his (it’s almost always a him) friends along and starts acting like he can run things. Almost inevitably, these parties score big for one election, and then disappear into nothing, but the electorate never learns. They just set out in search of the next quick fix. Some people my age blame the short-lived experiment from the 90s that split the party and PM votes into separate ballots—since that time, they argue, everyone thinks they’re voting in presidential elections. And the ubiquity of the US presidency in media and the cultural conversation probably plays a role as well. But personally, I think it’s something deeper. Israelis are desperate for a strong daddy to come and fix things. They want someone to clean up the mess so they don’t have to think about it—or take responsibility for their role in making it.

What this means is that despite being reviled by a large chunk of the electorate, acknowledged as unfit and with very few accomplishments to his name by many others, and facing several indictments for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, Benjamin Netanyahu is nevertheless the odds-on favorite to form Israel’s next government for the simple reason that when Israelis go to vote, they’re not looking for a party whose values and policies they agree with, but for a person they want to replace Bibi as PM.

Vying for that position is Benny Gantz, an ex-general who seems genuinely to believe that he deserves the job because he’s tall and clearly had a great head of hair back in the day. It’s been genuinely fascinating observing Gantz’s campaign (if you can even call it that). His tactic seems to be to amass around him a group of equally imposing middle-aged men—chiefly Yair Lapid, the former TV personality whose hair is still pretty impressive, and who has spent most of his time as an opposition MK racking up speaking fees in the US—and presenting them to the electorate in the belief that the sheer force of their rugged manliness will be enough to win the day. Every possible hint of a political stance has been carefully scrubbed from their embryonic party, right down to its name, Blue and White, after the colors of the Israeli flag. Critics, depending on where they’re standing, have tarred Gantz and his party as leftists (of which there seems to be very little evidence) and rightists (which is a little more justified, given the presence of people like Moshe “Boogie” Ya’alon, a famously bloody-minded minister of defense for Netanyahu, on the list), but the truth is that the party itself appears to have no goal besides replacing Bibi. For a lot of Israelis, that might be enough.

The second half of the election season has been marked by some of the ugliest, most divisive messaging I’ve ever seen. A lot has already been said about the rising fortunes of Kahanists, the far-right, and most recently some Jordan Peterson-inspired Judeo-libertarians, most of whom owe their existence to Netanyahu’s desperation to stay out of prison—anyone who promises to vote for his treasured “French law”, which will shield him from prosecution, has his support (meanwhile, he’s actively trying to drink the milkshake of right-wing parties led by politicians whose power he actually fears, such as Naftali Bennet). But the election has also featured both major developments in his various corruption scandals—including some surprising twists in a case that never made it to indictment, the purchase of several submarines from a German manufacturer who, as part of the sale, were given permission to sell equally advanced submarines to the Egyptian navy which no one in the military or intelligence hierarchy will admit to having signed off on; it now turns out that a major supplier for the submarines’ manufacturer is owned by Netanyahu’s cousin, and that he made millions in a stock deal that smells extremely fishy—and in the use of racist, inflammatory rhetoric. Both Israeli Arbs and the Israeli left have been tarred as traitorous and illegitimate. And some of the cherished tactics of the American right have seen copious use: paid social media accounts spreading canned messages, malignant lies about Netanyahu’s opponents, hacking Gantz’s phone. There’s even been an attempted Swift Boating, when it was argued that Gantz having seen a psychologist marked him as weak and unfit to lead.

What, if any effect any of this is having is hard to gauge. Polling in Israeli elections tends to be unreliable, to miss vast swathes of the population, and—most importantly—to downplay the degree to which Israeli voters tend to “come home” in the voting booth, no matter how loudly they crow about their independent-mindedness. I do, however, agree with the observation that Bibi is losing this election more than Gantz is winning it. I don’t think Gantz’s stolid non-reaction to the right’s smears and attacks has made him look good, but I do think Bibi’s palpable desperation has made him look bad, and despite the “LOL nothing matters” vibe of this election, I do think there are a lot of people who care about having a PM under indictment.

In the end, however, none of this really matters. The question that determines whether Bibi can be gotten rid isn’t which party, Likud or Blue and White, gets the most seats in the Knesset—both are likely to hover around 30. It’s which of the two men, Bibi or Gantz, can come to president Rivlin in the days after the election with at least 61 MKs recommending that they be the one to form the next government. In that sense, both men are in a bind. They need to snarf up the votes of the smaller parties in order to be in the running for the premiership. But if they kill too many of their natural coalition partners, the other guy will get the job.

Which brings us to the beleaguered Israeli left, such as it is. The watchword for the last few months has been “we need to be strong so that Gantz looks to us to form a coalition”. Even in the rosiest of scenarios, however, that’s not very likely. Something in the area of 10-15 seats will go to the Arab parties (and this will be split between at least two blocks). And they’re unlikely to view Gantz (or more importantly, Ya’alon) as a viable partner—not to mention that the right has so successfully inflamed the racism of the Jewish population that a coalition with the Arab parties is seen anathema by many voters, and even a reason not to vote for Gantz. Which will leave Gantz with a much tougher needle to thread than Bibi.

Among the Zionist left-wing parties, I’ve been pleasantly impressed by the performance of Labor. Avi Gabbai, the relatively new chairman of the party, has fresh paint on his left-wing credentials, and spent a lot of the year leading up to the election season moving the party to the right (and in general Labor has been a lackluster opposition party, though several of their individual MKs do good work). But Labor’s campaign in the last few months has been squarely ideological, issue-driven, and left-wing. The party has trotted out well-made videos discussing what should be the burning issues of the campaign—catastrophic overcrowding in public hospitals, the erosion of the public transit system and resulting gridlock in most of the country’s major highways, and the plight of southern residents and farmers who have been carrying the burden of nearly a decade of conflict with Gaza that the Netanyahu government has no interest in resolving. Cynical commentators have suggested that this shift to the left was Gabbai’s last resort after his attempts to win center-right voters failed, but it’s honestly refreshing for at least one politician in this benighted campaign to remember what politics is meant to be about, and be saying the right things.

Then there’s the party I support and voted for, Meretz. I’ve been very disappointed with their behavior during this campaign, which has been sluggish to the point of indifference. It’s been nearly impossible to rouse the party center, and my local branch’s attempts to coordinate activities, for either the election season or election day, have been met mostly with silence. My branch head thinks that the party has decided its votes in the Jewish population are relatively secure (certainly my town is as much of a Meretz stronghold as it’s likely to be, and not likely to budge much one way or another) and that it’s putting its focus on Arab voters. I hope that’s true, because it would at least be a strategy, and right now it feels as if we’ve been left to flail.

That said, I don’t regret voting for Meretz and I think it was the only possible choice for me. As much as they’ve disappointed me during the campaign, they’ve upheld their principles, and the values I believe in, during their last four years in the opposition. They’ve planted the flag for equality, anti-racism, and the belief in the possibility of a diplomatic solution to the occupation, ideas that are given less and less space in the Israeli public square. If Labor have had a good campaign, Meretz have had a good term, managing to shepherd laws and policies even as a small opposition party. I know they’ll keep doing that in the next Knesset, in or out of the government.

So what do I think will happen? I’d say there’s a chance that Gantz forms the next government, though not as much of one as there was just a few weeks ago. And even if he does, I wouldn’t hold out hope for substantial change in the direction Israel is going on, especially when the Palestinians are concerned. Even with Meretz, Labor, and some of the Arab parties in his coalition (an extremely unlikely outcome), Gantz will still need to court some of the center-right parties to get to 61, which will almost certainly mean a continued stalemate (which could be shattered the next time the situation in and around Gaza heats up, a very likely eventuality since Hamas are perfectly happy with Bibi as PM and their control over Gaza undisturbed).

So the most I can hope for after today is minimizing harm. There’s value in getting a man who has made corruption and incitement the bywords of his administration out of office. There’s value in kicking out his partners, who have tarred the supreme court as an enemy of the state, from the corridors of power. And there’s value in restoring the norms of the rule of law and of accountability even for the highest positions in the land. If Gantz achieves any or all of those things, I’ll consider it worth all our time, not to mention something to build on. But it has to be acknowledged that the more likely outcome is that things will get worse, that Netanyahu will form the next government with even more fanatical partners, and that this country will continue to sleepwalk towards disaster.