Basically, we’re most likely headed to a fifth election! Woo Hoo!!!!!!
From Anshel Pfeffer who wrote the political biography of Bibi:
updated my @haaretzcom exit-polls analysis to take latest developments in to account https://t.co/DuGU27KPsN
— Anshel Pfeffer אנשיל פפר (@AnshelPfeffer) March 24, 2021
It’s almost 4am in Jerusalem and time to get a few hours of sleep. Only 20 percent of actual votes counted so far and it’s too early to predict major changes from the exit-polls. Tomorrow’s story is likely to be an attempt by Likud to delegitimize the result. But that’s tomorrow.
— Anshel Pfeffer אנשיל פפר (@AnshelPfeffer) March 24, 2021
From Noga Tanopolsky at The Daily Beast:
After initially showing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party with a slight advantage, updated exit polls now show that no major parties have a clear path to forming a new government.
But that didn’t stop Netanyahu from claiming a premature victory. “You gave a huge victory to the right and the Likud under my leadership,” he said in a statement posted by the Likud immediately after polls closed at 10 p.m. “It is evident that a clear majority of Israeli citizens are right-wing, and they want a strong and stable right-wing government to preserve Israel’s economy, Israel’s security and the land Israel.”
A five percent reduction in voter turnout—possibly mirroring exhaustion among the Israeli electorate after four successive elections in under two years—has left open the possibility of an ongoing stalemate and a fifth election in the coming months.
From The Times of Israel (emphasis mine):
Barely two hours before presenting his exit poll as voting ended in the Israeli elections, Channel 13 pollster Kamil Fuchs declared that he’d “never seen such dramatic and decisive results.”
Dramatic, they may have been. Decisive, they were not. After two years of turmoil and paralysis, after the fourth election in two years, they did not point to a smooth, clearcut route out of Israel’s political crisis.
Published on the stroke of 10 p.m., Fuchs’ exit poll, as well as the exit polls presented by rival Channels 11 and 12, achieved the extraordinary feat of unanimously predicting that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would be able to retain power, by mustering the narrowest possible majority — 61 of the 120 Knesset seats — provided he was able to woo Naftali Bennett’s Yamina party into his coalition.
In contrast to the endless surveys in the run-up to election day, the TV exit polls are historically fairly accurate — give or take a seat or two here or there. And there’s the rub. A seat or two moving here or there could change everything.
And so it proved: Within three hours of the 10 p.m. surveys, Fuchs had amended his findings, and was now showing a 60-60 deadlock between the pro- and anti-Netanyahu camps, while Channel 12 had the anti-Netanyahu camp ahead, 61-59. More shifts seemed certain as the actual votes began to be tallied — a process which could take several hours, or even, whisper it, days.
On the basis of the exit polls, Netanyahu’s Likud performed reasonably well, slipping from 36 seats in last year’s election to 30-33 — despite having to fight off the additional challenge of his own former Likud ministerial colleague Gideon Sa’ar, who broke away to set up the New Hope party. New Hope would appear to have been one of the biggest election day losers, heading to just five or six seats when it was polling twice as well earlier this month. Bennett’s Yamina also stalled, at 7-8 seats — having been targeted relentlessly by Netanyahu in the campaign’s final days.
Netanyahu’s dependable allies — the ultra-Orthodox Shas and United Torah Judaism, and the new Religious Zionism alliance — significantly outperformed the pre-election surveys, however, mustering 22-23 seats between them. If those results hold true, one of the very big winners of these elections is the far-right Religious Zionism, which includes the Otzma Yehudit party, headed by Itamar Ben Gvir, an adherent of the late racist rabbi Meir Kahane. All three polls showed Religious Zionism winning 6-7 seats, which would mean a place in the Knesset not only for Ben Gvir, but also for Avi Maoz, the avowedly anti-LGBT representative of the extremist Noam movement.
Netanyahu brokered the Religious Zionism alliance, paving Otzma Yehudit’s path to parliament, but then said he would not include its members in his government. If the final results give him a path to re-election that depends on Ben Gvir, he may have no choice.
Ben Gvir has indicated he would seek ministerial office; heading a party six or seven strong, he could demand the Justice Ministry, from there to advance legislation he has already promised aimed at halting Netanyahu’s corruption trial, and to attempt a radical “reform” of Israel’s judiciary.
The exit polls point to successes in the anti-Netanyahu camp as well, with Benny Gantz’s Blue and White, Labor and Meretz all outperforming the most recent surveys.
Yair Lapid’s main opposition party Yesh Atid seems to have fared a little worse than expected, at 17-18 seats — in part because he didn’t try to draw votes away from Labor and Meretz. And the conservative Islamic party Ra’am was seen below the threshold in all three exit polls, its breakaway from the Joint List apparently a failure.
Depending on the final results, Netanyahu may try to pry a defector or three from rival parties. But other party leaders may also try to galvanize all manner of other coalitions; no sooner had Channel 12 placed the anti-Netanyahu camp ahead, than Lapid was pledging to try to build a “sane government.”
Gideon Saar is a younger, more extreme version of a Likudnik than Bibi. His only real advantage is that, at least based on the reporting, not corrupt like Bibi, but he’s not interested or in favor of a two state solution, nor is he any better on any of the issues that Bibi is so terrible on. For some bizarre reason the original Lincoln Project principles thought he was a paragon of liberal democracy and small “c” principled conservatism and agreed to help his campaign. Which underscores the dirty little and largely unspoken secret of American campaign professionals, especially on the conservative/GOP side of the aisle. When they’re not working on campaigns here in the US, they’re doing the same thing in Israel, Britain, Canada, Australia, and several other countries. Which is one of the reason why all the conservative political campaigns and politicians are all starting to sound just like the ones in the US.
Back to the election results, we’re basically either facing Bibi muscling together another coalition government or, failing that, staying in power as the caretaker Prime Minister while the other parties and party leaders all run around trying to form a coalition to oust him, which would be the only thing they might all agree on, all while he undermines their coalition building and a fifth election is held in a few months. And since any coalition Bibi puts together, which will have as its primary intention protecting Bibi from criminal prosecution and liability, that coalition will actually be much more extreme than any of his previous ones given the results for the Religious Zionism Alliance and the Kahanists within it.
I don’t have much more to say other than at this point Israel is politically just a mess. There is no real viable center left to left of center parties. The centrists are doing better, but that’s not saying much. All of the vibrancy is on the right of center. And all that vibrancy is a one way ratchet pulling Israeli politics farther and farther and farther to the political, social, religious, and ethno-nationalistic extreme. Israel has always had a political identity crisis. It has tried to be both a small “l”, small “d” liberal democracy while at the same time having to be a garrison state. Those things are not just in tension, they’re completely at odds and I think we’ve pretty much reached the point that as long as the garrison state can keep the Israelis fat and happy, then the parliamentary liberal democracy just isn’t all that important.
I expect that things will get worse before they get better. And that we’re likely to see another election in a few months.
Netanyahu ally @Zohar is the first to foresee 5th elections: "If we do not reach 61 [out of 120 Knesset members] we will go to another election. We're not counting on defectors."
— Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) March 23, 2021
Update: The Bibists are now all talking #IsraElex5. For the Likud, its either Netanyahu or elections 4evah. No one else can legitimately rule Israel.
— Noga Tarnopolsky (@NTarnopolsky) March 23, 2021
Open thread!
Cheryl Rofer
They keep doing this
Adam L Silverman
@Cheryl Rofer:
dmsilev
I'm shocked that Bibi gets along so well with our Republicans. I mean, it's not like they have anything in common.
Alison Rose
It’s so weird to observe this stuff as an American Jew who is–as the majority of us are, no matter how much the GOP wants to insist or demand otherwise–a liberal Democrat. And it makes me laugh when people assume I’m super pro-Israel just because I’m Jewish. I want Israel to exist, but not in the way it does now and not under the fuckers who’ve been running things for too long, and I certainly don’t feel any kind of personal attachment to the place. Especially since that one asshole said Reform Jews aren’t real Jews.
Shalimar
Put Bibi in prison and Likud might actually win one of these elections outright.
Adam L Silverman
@Alison Rose: I’m over due for a post I promised some people about how we’ve not got Jews, both American and Israeli, who have decided there are real Jews (basically devout/Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox) and “ethnic” not really real Jews (every other Jew). The former deserve to be protected from anti-Semitism, the latter really aren’t Jews so who cares. Bibi has been a major part of this dangerous stupidity.
I’ll try to get to it this week.
Adam L Silverman
@Shalimar: I think what these four elections have clearly shown, is that there is no Likud without Bibi. Bibi remade the party into the Bibi Netanyahu Party. They can’t win with him, but there’s no actual party without him as the central organizing principle. There’s a lesson there for Republicans, but I doubt they’d even recognize it, let alone learn from it.
John S.
It’s amazing how quickly Benny Gantz imploded into irrelevance. But that’s what happens when you piss off your base, and do exactly the opposite of what you campaigned on.
West of the Rockies
Is Net-That-Yahoo sort of like Trump: adored by 40% and loathed by 60%, making him the only man for the party, but not able to win the general? That is my very casual and uninformed take
Ah, I see Adam addressed this at #7.
Yutsano
@Adam L Silverman:
I’ll let the chemistry teacher who wouldn’t let me out of an exam for Yom Kippur know that. She’ll be happy to know her bias was confirmed.
Adam L Silverman
@Yutsano: We do strive to be a full service blog…
Adam L Silverman
Alright, I’m going to go and give the four foots some scritchees and watch some TV.
SiubhanDuinne
Well, it’s fairly depressing, but not at all unexpected. Many thanks for taking time to put together this report, Adam.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Isn’t the test very simple? Can you refuse to eat this on religious grounds or must you refuse on grounds of “ugh?”
Brachiator
If it’s Tuesday, it must be time for an election in Israel.
And is this another shining example of why the US should have a parliamentary system? Election -a-palooza!
Alison Rose
@Adam L Silverman: When I hear that stuff from Orthodox Jews, I just want to ask them, “You think Nazis care if I keep kosher or not?”
It ticks me off, but it also makes me sad. For some of my own to turn on me rather than all of us banding together against the people who hate us…it’s very dispiriting.
Adam L Silverman
@Omnes Omnibus: Both.
Adam L Silverman
@Alison Rose: Unfortunately.
Keith P.
@Brachiator: Israel already had its Infrastructure Week during the BC era, so it’s Election Weeks for the foreseeable future.
Omnes Omnibus
@Adam L Silverman: Right, but I only get one of those excuses. It funny because I was talking about weird foods with someone earlier this evening and I mentioned that I had come across this item in another context over the weekend, and her first response was “That’s so not kosher.” That had not been where my mind went.
eddie blake
@Alison Rose:
i live right next to borough park in brooklyn. there is a SERIOUS, significant MAGA element among the chasids.
forget banding together, THEY hate us.
eta- and they ARE us.
Alison Rose
@eddie blake: My brain just really doesn’t want to accept that, even though I know it’s true. And it breaks my heart to say this, but Lord am I glad my grandparents didn’t live to see all of this. Especially since, as born and raised New Yorkers until their late 60s (when they moved to Florida, as is The Law for retired New York Jews), they HATED Trump with a passion.
Viva BrisVegas
Then they would turn to Stephen Miller and ask, “well?”.
ruemara
Humph. Well. I see the lessons of “fuck the results until they’re the results we want” are very well learned.
Alison Rose
@Viva BrisVegas: LOLSOB
FelonyGovt
@Alison Rose: Exactly. My parents were very pro-Israel and that’s how I was raised. As a (non-religious) liberal Jew, I can no longer recognize the scrappy, resourceful, brave country I once admired.
Steeplejack
West Coasters and anyone else who’s still up: Lawrence O’Donnell rerun is starting on MSNBC now. He does an excellent job of destroying the “border crisis” myth. With facts and figures. Highly recommended.
Mary G
Every time I see some idiot saying that all America’s problems come from the two-party system we have and we need to switch to a parliamentary plan. I laugh and refer them to the messes that Bibi and Boris Johnson have created and say no.
There is a big problem brewing for the economy. West Coast ports haven’t been working at full power during the pandemic and there is a huge flotilla of cargo ships coming from China sitting waiting offshore.
ETA: Adding a quote from the story: ETA2 moving quote
Now also, too a giant container tanker has gotten itself wedged sideways in the middle of the Suez Canal and hasn’t gotten unstuck all afternoon and evening, so cargo ships are piling up at either end.
I’m never taken so much as Economics 101, but to my eye this could be a BFD. I hope I’m wrong, but I’m thinking of selling some more stock tomorrow.
eddie blake
@Alison Rose:
yeah, my gramma lived in manhattan, across the street from one of derp furor’s properties. she hated that fascist fuck with a passion.
Amir Khalid
While you’re here, Adam:
Have you heard about North Korea abruptly ending diplomatic relations with Malaysia last week? Do you have any thoughts on it?
ronno2018
Great post and very informative. I sure hope the country can move forward towards peace. I think it can happen…
Amir Khalid
@Alison Rose:
The establishment of modern Israel involved a grave injustice: a colonial power, Britain, awarded the land from under the feet of Palestinians to Jews from Europe. I have no dispute with Israel’s need and right to exist, but the way it was set up solved one people’s existential issue by inflicting it on another people.
mdblanche
@Mary G: Hopefully this blockage will get resolved more quickly than the Yellow Fleet did.
joel hanes
@FelonyGovt:
To be scrupulously fair, I no longer recognize the United States.
https://www.gocomics.com/doonesbury/1974/12/13
Kent
Am I the only one who just has Israel fatigue now and just doesn’t give a fuck about any of this anymore?
I mean I vaguely care to the extent that I care about who wins the elections in say…Uruguay or Slovenia. But not more than that. And maybe less
At this point I tend to think that climate change is going to make the place uninhabitable before any meaningful change ever happens there.
Fair Economist
Netanyahu’s stranglehold on Israeli politics depresses me. I can barely imagine what it must feel like for a reformist Israeli, never mind a Palestinian.
James E Powell
I’m not quite to “don’t give a fuck” but I’m getting there.
sab
My first husband was Jewish and wanted to make aliyah. We moved there with our dogs. New wives (me) are stupid. Moshav in the northern Negev. Everyone knew I was a shiksa. Kids on the moshav wanted to know my dog’s religion. A dog! A shelter dog!, She was a shelter dog. They lost me and my sympathy at that point.
Farm kids who never farmed. Hired Palestinians from Gaza to do their work.
Fucking bigots. Also a very dysfunctional society.
Emerald
Someday I’m gonna ask someone to explain to me like I’m in kindergarten just why that shitass bastard is not in jail.
(Mind you, i know zilch about Israel or its politics, but I know he’s a shitass bastard.)
sab
@James E Powell: I am long since gone. I remember when they could barely cobble together a government. Then Bibi.
If Bibi is how you present yourself to the world then, Whatever. This is who you are.
John Revolta
A global energy supply chain that can be disrupted by one boat getting stuck is a bad global energy supply chain and should feel bad.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@John Revolta: Single points of failure are in general a Very Bad Thing, in my opinion and experience.
Geminid
@John S.: Benny Gantz caught a lot of flak for entering into a coalition with Netanyahu after the last election. Half of his coalition, the Yesh Atid party headed by Lapid, stayed out and denounced him. A Meretz MK castigated Gantz in a Knesset session, calling him “a Trojan Horse who spits in our faces!” which I thought was kind of a funny image.
Ultimately, the Gantz/Netanyahu coalition failed, hence the fourth election. But I count three positive results from Gantz’s move: the tenure of Gantz as Defense Minister, that of Gabi Ashkenazi as foreign Minister, and that of Nissenkorn as Justice Minister. Nissenkorn was a roadblock to Netanyahu’s drive to neutralize the criminal cases against him, and may have been the real reason the desparate Netanyahu engineered this forth election. And while Netanyahu made end runs around Gantz and Ashkenazi in his foreign policy initiatives, I think they were a counterbalance to adventurism Netanyahu might otherwise have engaged in. With Netanyahu’s increasing desparation over his criminal cases, and his patron Trump’s own political recklessness, the fact that the Defense and Foreign Ministries were in unfriendly and cautious hands the last six months may have made a difference.
While Gantz will remain in the Knesset with about six Blue and White MKs, Ashkenazi has stepped back from electoral politics.
debbie
@Adam L Silverman:
That kind of misbegotten thinking has been around for decades. I remember the outrage among Jews in 1980s NYC when, on the one hand, Israel was trying to get American Jews to emigrate there, even as religious authorities were loudly opining that those same Jews would not be considered to be Jews. “Please come. Let us demean, abase, and abuse you.” What a policy.
Geminid
@Geminid: Justice Minister Avi Nissenkorn has also stepped away from Knesset service, albeit unintentionally. When Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai announce the formation of “The Israelis” party this winter, Nissenkorn defected from Blue and White to join this new party, which initially polled at as high as 10%, or 12 MKs under Israel’s system of proportional representation. But Huldai’s party went up like a rocket, then came down like a stick, leaving Nissenkorn out of the Knesset.
Huldai and Nissenkorn were both formerly Labor Party members. Nissenkorn was Secretary General of Histradut, the trade union organization that used to be a cornerstone of Labor’s former electoral dominance. While recently the Labor Party seemed to be in danger of not crossing the 3.25% and falling off the political map, new leadership has revitalized the party, and it easily passed the threshold and seems to have elected as many as 7 MKs.
Labor, along with Gantz’s Blue and White and the liberal Meretz, join Lapid’s Yesh Atid to form an anti-Netanyahu bloc of about 42 MKs. One could add Lieberman’s party’s ~7 MKs to this group. Lieberman’s “Israel is Our Home” party represents a lot of Russian immigrants, and is especially hostile to the policies that the Ultra-Orthodox parties, junior members of Netanyahu’s governments, impose on Israelis. And like many who have worked in coalition with the Likud chief, Lieberman hates Netanyahu’s guts.
Joey Maloney
Netanyahu has some of the same inexplicable mystique that Trump has. Bibi has fucked over everyone he’s ever worked with. The trail of backstabbed former partners leads straight to his door and yet – and yet! – there’s always a new sucker who thinks I’m special, he won’t betray me. Some people even come back for a second helping.
It’s a puzzle.
Hell, I live here and I feel that way half the time.
Ohio Mom
I’ve long said that one far off day the American liberal Jewish establishment will look back at the crumbling of our people and finally realize that centering everything on a foreign country instead of searching for ways to develop a meaningful contemporary American Judaism was a calculation several multiples away from catastrophic.
I want a religious community that speaks to my circumstances — for one example, not one that that thinks a highest and best use of charitable dollars is to send middle-class suburban teenagers (a privileged cohort if there ever was one) to summer abroad for free.That is just embarrassing to me.
I have tried to imagine myself in the historical place of post-WWII European Judaism, desperate for a safe place, looking to the metaphor of Jerusalem and Israel and finding comfort and inspiration there. I can almost do it but then everything else rushes in.
I remember all the nonsense slogans, like “A land without people for a people without land” — um, no, there always were people living there — followed by the contradictory, “There was always a Jewish presence there,” and “The settlers bought and paid for land” — as if this little square in southwest Ohio will become the nation of Ohio Family once we pay off the mortgage.
Would I feel differently if Israel really was a vibrant democracy, a place where Arabs and Jews lived in peace and prosperity? I see that as such a fairy tale, that was never in the cards. Meanwhile, I yearn for a spiritual community here in my country that reflects my deepest concerns.
TL/dr: This American Jew says, Israel, Schmisrael.
Geminid
Some late news of the Israeli election: while exit polling had indicated that the Arab-Israeli party Ra’am would finish under the electoral threshold of 3.25%, actual vote tallies show Ra’am winning 5 Knesset seats. This means a loss of one seat each for Meretz and Yesh Atid in the anti-Netanyahu bloc, and one each from Likud, Shas, and Yamina in the pro-Netanyahu bloc.
This development could possibly make Ra’am’s leader Mansour Abbas an unlikely kingmaker, and has caused a squabble within Netanyahu’s Likud. One Likud MK-elect talked up a collaboration with Abbas, then another denounced the idea. This started a twitter-spat between the two that was getting salty before Netanyahu banned further discussion of the election by Likud MKs.
Meanwhile, Likud election chairman Micky Zohar is imploring all Israelis to come together so as to avoid a fifth election in two years. Zohar did not mention that it was Netanyahu who engineered this fourth election, in order to wriggle out of his power sharing agreement with Benny Gantz.
Geminid
@Geminid: One interesting new MK is Gilad Kariv, elected on the Labor list. Kariv is both an attorney and a Reform rabbi. The latter makes Kariv objectionable to Ultra-Orthodox politicians, who call Reform Judaism “a cult,” and vow to shun Kariv in the new Knesset.
They are already upset at a recent high court decision that vindicated the right of Reform and Conservative Jews to marry in Israel, despite opposition by the Orthodox rabbinate that had a monopoly on religious matters. The decision was in a case filed over ten years ago. The high court was hoping the Knesset would give relief to non-Orthodox Israelis, but the Knesset has been deadlocked on this issue.
J R in WV
My family has no connection I am aware of to any Jewish heritage, ancestry, history, culture… nothing but an aunt by marriage, Aunt Beatrice. Yet I guess my Switzer-Deutch last name must be in a database somewhere, as we get repeated begs via snail mail from many Jewish agencies and groups.
But I was also a supporter of the Zionist movement as a youngster, having read many books by Leon Uris, then I grew up and read history about the people who lived in Palestine under the British Imperial colonial rule, and were ordered to accept a new people to rule over them by those British rulers.
And disallowing some Jews from being Jewish, based upon their Reform label… that’s pretty disappointing too!!!
On a happier topic — Spring is sprung: There are frog eggs about to hatch in the tiny (8’x12′) pond, and the ramps have sprouted above the forest floor yesterday!! Yay!!!