After two good results to start the week, friends of democracy felt themselves let down by last Tuesday’s Israeli election. But they probably shouldn’t: although there are grounds for some disappointment, the main problem with the result was completely predictable.
Final figures will not be official until Wednesday, but there is no doubt about the outcome. The Likud-led far-right coalition has 53 seats (down 11 on 2022), the Zionist opposition has 48 (up two) and the Palestinian or non-Zionist parties 19 (up nine). On any sensible measure that’s a defeat for the far right, just like Serbia or Brazil. But it means that for Benjamin Netanyahu to be displaced, the other two groups are going to have to somehow work together.
It’s true that this was a better result for Likud – and for the non-Zionists – than the opinion polls had predicted, but not in a way that changes the fundamental arithmetic. Even if the Zionist opposition had won an extra ten seats, as the best of its polls suggested, it would still have been the case that no one group had a majority, and that therefore it had to decide which of the others it preferred to work with.
If the Zionist opposition had finished with more seats than the government, or if its main component, Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar, had won more seats than Likud (or both), that would have given it some extra moral high ground. And no group is monolithic: if the Zionist opposition was in the high 50s rather than the high 40s it would have had some prospect of picking off the necessary numbers from the other groups without going the whole way to coalition.
But perhaps it’s not a bad thing that it now cannot avoid the choice. Readers will probably be familiar with a certain sort of Israeli apologist who boasts about the rights of Israel’s Palestinian citizens, while carefully abstaining from criticism of the politicians who are constantly trying to curtail those rights. Now those people have their chance.
Because for anyone who cares about the welfare of all of Israel’s citizens (even leaving aside its subject population in the occupied territories or the other people of the region), the choice is utterly obvious. The claim that admitting the non-Zionists to a junior part in government would be somehow more of a threat to the country’s future than the continuation of Netanyahu in office is just not credible. It cannot possibly be sustained by anything other than crude, naked racism.
The non-Zionist parties, and their supporters in the west, need to decide if that is where they want to go and who they want to be. Or if they are willing to finally pay more than lip service to the idea of Arabs as members of Israel’s political community.
Such a government would still leave things very much in the hands of the Jewish majority. Nor would it be a progressive, much less a left-wing government; there is no majority for that either. Overthrowing Netanyahu requires ideological as well as racial breadth.
That too is not entirely a bad thing. A leftist government that brought the Palestinians within the tent would drive the differences in Israeli society even deeper, probably with violent consequences. Only Nixon could go to China, and only Zionist leaders – Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman – can take the decisive step to show that it’s time to treat the Palestinians as real citizens.
Will they do so? Watch this space.
The “anti/non” Zionists in the west (from truck wits such as Chomsky (Rushdie is the good man that the left pretends Noam is) to crude rabble rousers such as Schwartz and Kaiser) also need to state their plan for preventing the Islamic Republic of Palestine and for how they will disarm and defund the militias. There is a reason that the Druze have no desire for the Golan to be given to Syria.
My parents’ generation lost interest in what happened to people in the ex-RVN after 30-4-1975. Their children just as quickly lost interest in South Sudan.
Third time lucky?
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