While he doesn’t explicitly say so, that seems to be my main man Haviv Rettig Gur’s analysis of the Israeli election results.
Lots to unpack here. Let me splice in my dictated notes from memory.
While technically Likud is still the largest party, its Knesset representation has dropped precipitously. After looking at the absolute numbers, it actually seems that Likud gained about 50,000 votes. [Fact check: According to the Central Bureau of Statistics, eligible resident voters increased by about 333,000, or 5.4%, since the previous election.] However, quite aside from natural population growth voter participation was much larger in both the Jewish and especially the Arab sectors this time around. That said, even if all Arabs had stayed home, the coalition bloc still would be barely short of a majority.
The one party in the coalition that did really poorly was Shas, which dropped from 11 to 6 seats and lost about one-third of its vote, when, based on the demographics of its base, it should have gained about 10% more voters. Similarly, while there is significant demographic growth in the voter base of United Torah Judaism, this did not translate into any growth in actual Knesset mandates.
Haviv attributes this to two factors. One, there is an increasing tendency among the base of these two sectorial parties to vote for mainstream right-wing parties, because they no longer feel that Shas and Yahadut HaTorah represent them. Second, apparently the refusal to perform military service is so ingrained in the identity of the hardcore members of the Shas community that those who change their mind on this specific issue will no longer vote for the sectorial parties, but for Jewish right-wing ones instead, including, alas, Itamar Ben-Gvir.
Haviv also points out that the Shas base is much more likely to come from families with mixed levels of religious observance, and hence Shasniks are much more likely to have close relatives who are currently serving in the IDF (or who may even have been war casualties) than UTJ voters, who tend to come from more homogeneous families.
In fact, there is another demographic factor that should have helped the coalition, if I may backtrack: there has been a certain net emigration from Israel since October 7, predominantly of people with high-tech backgrounds, with very movable professions, who tend to vote for the opposition parties, which, by the way, cannot automatically be described as left. There is one left party and three center to center-right parties.
So, in fact, Netanyahu had all the demographic factors working in his favor, and he was unable to exploit them. But that does not mean that the other camp has a lot of reasons to be cheerful either.
There was lots of anger among the public about the unwillingness to take any form of responsibility for the October 7 pogrom, or for the catastrophic security failure that led to it, as well as the legitimization of Ben-Gvir and the seeming willingness to defer to the ultra-Orthodox parties on the issue of military service.
So, in principle, the opposition bloc should have done quite well, but it didn’t. It held its own, it grew a little bit, but nothing resembling what they were expecting. And perhaps these parties need to do a certain amount of soul-searching on why they can’t do any better. Perhaps they fundamentally misunderstand their target audience, and they fundamentally misunderstand demographic trends.
There is also the major issue of Iran, which looms very large in the public consciousness. Specifically, there is a relatively short window of opportunity, while Trump is still in the White House, to finish the job concerning Iran. There is a very real possibility that whoever succeeds him will be less friendly toward Israel, [whether it is someone from the looney-left faction that has taken over the Democratic Party or a neo-isolationist like J.D. Vance. These are my terms, not Haviv’s.]
Bibi supposedly argues that he knows how to deal with Trump. Haviv also speculates that the reason Netanyahu did not carry out an attack on Iran before the elections was that Trump placated him with his endorsement, which, frankly, is unlikely to have much effect on the typical Israeli voter.
And then there is all the infighting among the opposition parties, which really did not help matters in any way.
The claim that supposedly Qatar bought the election: it is quite possible that they did bankroll some get-out-the-vote efforts, but there was no better recruiting engine to get out the Arab vote than Itamar Ben-Gvir.
At the end of the day, we’re in gridlock. It may well be possible that there are only two real options: a national unity government with elements of both government and opposition, or alternatively new elections.
***
For his part, our mostly-ceremonial head of state, President Isaac Herzog, has invited the parties to consultations and has urged against another election, and for the rival camps to have an open mind about working with each other. He is clearly nudging toward a broad-based national unity government of some sort. https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/herzog-invites-factions-to-coalition-talks-wednesday-urges-against-another-election/
Now what about the idea of including Arab parties in the coalition? Despite the protestations of some of my more stridently leftwing “Haaretz-reading” colleagues, the Joint Arab List is a non-starter in both directions (it would be electoral suicide both for them and for any coaltion that took them in) — but the moderate Islamist Ra`am not only has already sat in the Bennett government, but we know that Netanyahu himself was courting them in an attempt to “get to 61” [MKs, i.e. a majority].
And true to form, Netanyahu posted “the platform of [Ra`am party chief] Mansour Abbas” https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/netanyahu-posts-old-raam-platform-falsely-says-it-is-mansour-abbass/ while neglecting to mention that the program dated from some two decades before Abbas took the helm of the party:
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posts a Ra’am party platform from more than two decades ago and falsely attributes it to MK Mansour Abbas, who only took the helm of the traditionalist Arab party in 2018 and backed away from some of its earlier Islamist views.
According to the Israeli Democracy Institute, the document shared by Netanyahu is the Ra’am party platform from Israel’s 1999 elections. The party was established in 1996 as a political arm of the Islamic Movement’s Southern Branch.
Among the positions contained in the old Ra’am platform are “ending the Israeli occupation and establishing a Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem,” “granting a right of return to all Palestinian refugees in accordance with international law,” “releasing all Palestinian prisoners,” “canceling the racist Law of Return” that lets Jews automatically become citizens in Israel, and “legislating a constitution in Israel that recognizes its Arab citizens as a national minority, and changing state symbols accordingly.”
“This is Mansour Abbas’s platform. No government can be formed with him,” writes Netanyahu, who lost his parliamentary majority in Tuesday’s election on the heels of unprecedented Arab turnout that has made Ra’am and the Arab-majority Joint List kingmakers.
In fact, since taking the helm of Ra’am, Abbas has declared that he was severing ties with the Islamic Movement, and that “Israel was born as a Jewish state and so it will remain.”
He also ran in Tuesday’s election with a Zionist former lawmaker and senior police officer, Yoav Segalovitz, at No. 2 on the Ra’am candidate slate.
Under Abbas, Ra’am also conducted negotiations on joining a Netanyahu-led coalition after the 2021 election, but the move was nixed by Religious Zionism chief Bezalel Smotrich and Ra’am ended up joining the so-called “change government” that unseated Netanyahu in 2021-2022.
Abbas responded to Netanyahu’s false post: “Netanyahu is well aware of the Ra’am platform and its demands” since they were enshrined in their 2021 coalition agreements that failed to materialize and in the 2019 memorandum of understanding that Abbas has said Netanyahu tried to woo him with.
