Election preview: Israel

Israel goes to the polls tomorrow to elect a new parliament, the current one having served its full four-year term. That itself is remarkable: the last time it happened was in 1984-88. It’s a particularly vivid contrast with the immediately preceding period of 2019-22, when Israel held five elections in the space of about three and a half years.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that the last four years have been uneventful. The 2022 election ended the instability by delivering a clear majority to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition. Since then that government has pursued its objective of replacing Israel’s flawed liberal democracy with an authoritarian and imperialist ethno-state – helped immeasurably by the murderous Hamas attack of 7 October 2023, which provided the cue for ethnic cleansing on a grand scale.

It’s with some reluctance that I included Israel yesterday on the list of momentous upcoming elections. The fortunes of one corner of the Middle East shouldn’t really concern the world as much as they do. But the fact is that Israel matters: partly because its powerful military (both nuclear and conventional) demands attention, but even more for the spell it exercises over American politics, illustrated this year by Donald Trump’s ill-fated war against Iran.

Although he leads a country of only about ten million people (not counting the subject Palestinian population in the West Bank and Gaza, which adds about another five million), Netanyahu is a key member of the worldwide axis of reaction that is dragging us all towards destruction. He probably ranks behind only Vladimir Putin and Trump himself in importance: last year I described him as “a sort of gateway drug for Putinism.” If tomorrow’s vote succeeds in removing him from power it will mark a significant shift.

At the 2022 election the parties of Netanyahu’s coalition won in aggregate 49.6% of the vote and 64 of the 120 seats – 32 for Netanyahu’s own Likud, 18 for two fundamentalist parties and 14 for the openly fascist Religious Zionism-Otzma Yehudit ticket. Another six tickets won seats: Yesh Atid (centrist) with 24, National Unity (centre-right) 12, Yisrael Beiteinu (far-right but secular and anti-Netanyahu) six, two predominantly Palestinian tickets, the United Arab List and Hadash-Ta’al, five each, and Labor (centrist) four.

Since then, as is normal in Israel, there has been some reshuffling of the parties. The two components of Religious Zionism-Otzma Yehudit are this time running separately; Yesh Atid has joined a ticket called Together led by Naftali Bennett, another former far-right leader who was briefly prime minister in 2021-22; Benny Gantz’s National Unity has split, with New Hope joining Likud and the remainder disappearing; Hadash-Ta’al has partnered with Balad to again be known as the Joint List; and Labor has joined with the centre-left Meretz to form the Democrats.

There is also one major new party, Yashar, a centre to centre-right party led by General Gadi Eisenkot. Opinion polls show it level with or slightly ahead of Likud, with the opposition as a whole perhaps twenty seats clear of the government parties, making Eisenkot the most probable alternative prime minister. But even if those numbers hold up, forming an anti-Netanyahu government will not be a simple task.

The biggest problem, and the one that contributed most to the pre-2022 instability, is that a dozen or so of the opposition seats will be with the non-Zionist parties, the Joint List and Ra’am, and most of the other parties are committed to pretending that those parties do not exist. (The far right has repeatedly tried to ban them from elections but has been blocked by the supreme court.) Ra’am did join Bennett’s coalition in 2021, but Eisenkot says he is determined not to repeat the experiment. Yet without their votes it’s not at all certain that he will be able to assemble a majority.

That problem is in turn symptomatic of a more general point: that most of the anti-Netanyahu forces see Israel’s problems in terms of divisions (which they hope to heal) within the Jewish community, averting their eyes from the occupation and the country’s growing isolation from the democratic world. By papering over their differences on Israel’s fundamental challenges, they may only put off the inevitable day of reckoning.

Nonetheless, change has to start somewhere. In 2021, when Netanyahu last faced eviction, I expressed it like this:

Some argue that personality change of its own is meaningless without policy change, but sometimes personalities have to change first before even the possibility of policy change can become apparent. While the prime minister’s departure is not a sufficient condition for Israel to start getting out of its current predica­ment, it is surely a necessary one.