As I wrote last night, with dark humor but very seriously, the iron law of 21st century Israeli politics is that in the final analysis Netanyahu always wins and becomes the next Prime Minister. As indeed, he has. Another fairly fixed rule is that Israeli election nights end better for the right than they begin. This goes all the way back to 1996, with Netanyahu himself.
The simple fact is that there is a not terribly large but hard and durable rightwing majority in Israel. The Israeli Knesset has 120 members. So you need 61 seats to form a government. Recent elections have all gotten just a bit over 60. Yesterday’s election appears to have netted Likud and its ‘natural partners’ 65 seats.
It’s not even really correct to speak of an Israeli left or center-left at this point. The two parties associated with Israel’s various historic Labor parties and configurations (Labor and Meretz) appear to have netted a mere 10 seats together. The two traditional ultra-orthodox parties got many more (16 total).
Blue and White, the one-off party formed around Benny Gantz got 35 seats. That appears to be the same number as Likud. Blue and White is certainly not a party of the left and not even really a party of the center-left. It’s really just a centrist party, with a key secularist component.
But even this doesn’t quite capture it. Blue and White is really an anti-Netanyahu party. I don’t mean that in the sense that it’s just against him as a person or holds a unique animus against him, though that’s clearly the case in various ways. It’s more that Netanyahu so dominates Israeli politics – not just in the obvious way of remaining in power as PM but in shaping the very contours of politics across the ideological spectrum – that everything is really about him. Every party that isn’t controlled (either directly or indirectly by him) by him is one based on unseating him. People might want to unseat him because of his attacks on secularism or democracy or the country’s Arab minority or corruption or the occupation or whatever. But in a way it’s all about him.
With a party like Blue and White (which again is really just a one off for this election), you would really need to remove Netanyahu from the scene to get a sense of how many of its votes are centrist-secularist, how many that are really part of a center-left and how many are really center or center-right in the sense of the pre-Netanyahu Likud.
This is no less the case on the right. It’s not like the right would collapse without him. Far from it. But the right wing coalition gets a lot of its stability and fixity from him. In Israel it’s all about him.
