I wanted to give you a brief update on and impressions of the Israeli election which is on Tuesday. An overview of the polls suggests that the opposition bloc may get a few more seats than the Netanyahu bloc but that both will fall far short of the 61 seats required to form a government. Most polls have shown both blocs in the low 50s while the remainder of the 120 seats go to two Arab parties/coalitions. One of those is Ra’am, which is probably now best termed “non-Zionist” since it accepts Israel as a Jewish state and sat in the brief non-Netanyahu government in 2021-22, and the Joint List, which remains firmly anti-Zionist and probably wouldn’t sit in any government and also wouldn’t be invited to any. What this amounts to is high odds for a stalemate in which neither side can form a government and new elections have to be called. In that case, you have several more months in which Netanyahu remains in office as “caretaker” prime minister.
Three stories have jumped out at me from the Israeli press over the last two or three days. The first, just today is that Netanyahu posted an AI photo of a nuclear blast over Tel Aviv saying that his election is all that can prevent it.
Next is a story I just saw, also today, which is that Netanyahu is asking Trump to do a second endorsement of his campaign before voting starts on Tuesday because the first endorsement about a week ago didn’t seem to change anything.
Finally, a couple days ago Netanyahu said that Israel should accept that crippling sanctions on the country are coming and that Israel will survive by some kind of use of crypto-currency which he didn’t specify. The opposition parties, the central bank and the financial sector all reacted with a mixture of aghast and mockery. Needless to say, when you’re facing international sanctions of the severity that you need to start trying to run international economics with crypto or some kind of national “Silk Road,” you’ve pretty clearly lost the game. More broadly, this fits with a standard Netanyahu strategy which is essentially: the results of my policies are dire and I’m the only one who can protect us in such a dire situation.
It’s an uncanny mix of indicators. Each of these gambits reads as frantic and desperate. In a way they’re like things we’re seeing right now from Trump. And yet Netanyahu’s electoral situation isn’t nearly so dire. It’s very hard to see where he will be able to win. (The final poll from Maariv shows his bloc all the way down to 48 seats.) But he doesn’t actually need to to hold on.
