The slogan, on election posters spread across Israel, is concise and rhymes in Hebrew: “Right or Palestine.” He is from Likud, the party of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the man who has been in power for the longest time (19) in the history of the country and who intends to increase that number in the elections on the 27th. Just ten days away, the polls draw even scenarios and difficult alliances, mainly because almost all the Jewish opposition parties have shot themselves in the foot by promising that they will exclude from a possible Government the two Arab lists, with which they would have a clear majority. Neither the Government partners (Likud, ultra-Orthodox and ultra-nationalists) nor the anti-Netanyahu bloc (mostly right-wing formations led by their disappointed or betrayed former ministers) are close to the majority, so cabals prevail over minority Executives, turncoats or unnatural alliances.
In this context of equality and mistrust, the campaign has become a mix of all against all, diluting the competition between the pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs. One of the main opposition leaders, Avigdor Lieberman (former Minister of Defense and Foreign Affairs and leader of the Israel Beitenu party), even this Friday accused the most powerful candidate of the opposition bloc, Gadi Eizenkot, of preparing an alliance with Netanyahu after the elections. He is the former chief of the General Staff, to whom almost all polls give victory.
Eizenkot's party (Yashar) has been aiming this week to secure victory, even at the expense of other parties in the same bloc. "We are working to make Yashar significantly larger than the Likud and to guarantee that the bloc has a majority. I do not see any contradiction between the two," he said on military radio this Tuesday. "We are making a big effort to attract voters from [Netanyahu's] coalition. This will also serve to legitimize my being given the mandate."
The force with the most votes does not automatically receive the task of forming a Government. The president, Isaac Herzog, awards it to whoever sees the most likely, after consultations with the groups. But he does give the initiative. And Herzog prefers a stable Executive of national unity. He promoted it in 2020 and now he has said that he will do “everything” to prevent a repeat election, like those that the country suffered five years ago.
Eizenkot's effort to “attract coalition voters” has generated a discouraging dynamic for those who hope that a Netanyahu defeat will give the Palestinians a horizon of hope. In one of his latest campaign videos, Eizenkot boasts of never having defended the creation of a Palestinian state, recalling that Netanyahu – who is firmly opposed – even mentioned it a decade ago for the gallery, under pressure from the then US president, Barack Obama. The video reminds you of this before turning the slogan “Right or Palestine” into “Benjamin [Netanyahu] is Palestine.” He has also promised that if he is prime minister, Hamas will not still be in power in Gaza for 18 months.
Things are, therefore, in a "tie", as Netanyahu himself admitted in his interview on public television on Wednesday, in which he clearly showed two concerns: the abstention among those who returned him to power in 2022 (before the Hamas attack in October 2023 broke his image as "Mr. Security") and Ofer Winter, a right-wing general with a will for loose verse.
Some polls give Winter's party, Amjá Israel, more than the 3.25% of votes needed to obtain parliamentary representation. The difference is key: below that percentage, all those votes go to waste. Above, you enter the Knesset with at least four deputies (out of a total of 120).
With a smug tone that did not hide his concern, Netanyahu took advantage of up to three questions to divert the response to a call to his bases to vote for Likud or the rest of the parties with which he forms the most right-wing coalition the country has ever had. Netanyahu urged “not to fall into the trap of fake right-wing parties,” in reference to Winter; and once again presented himself as a victim of the “deep state.” “It is clear that there is in Israel,” he stressed, very much in the style of Donald Trump and other populist leaders.
According to the well-known Israeli political analyst Mazal Mualem, Netanyahu is going “with everything, and sooner than in previous campaigns,” to win back the disappointed without trying to scratch votes in other people's fishing grounds. Four years ago it obtained 32 deputies. Now, he would remain between 20 and 22, according to the polls. Above all, for his political responsibility in the security fiasco that allowed the Hamas massacre (including warnings from Arab partners) and his refusal to have an independent commission investigate him.
This week all votes were cast from abroad. They are the exception (about 4,800 diplomats and envoys, plus their families), since the other hundreds of thousands of citizens who reside abroad cannot vote by mail, online or in diplomatic legations. The high participation (86%, compared to 69% in 2022) underpins the general feeling that there is a lot at stake.
Likud's collapse has not changed in the last two months. The state of mind, however, does. The enthusiasm in the opposition upon seeing how some polls gave him a majority without needing to rely on Arab parties has transformed into pessimism and, above all, disbelief upon seeing how Netanyahu is more involved than ever in the battle after a month of revelations that in other countries would have sunk any candidate.
First, the Haaretz newspaper reported that Netanyahu received, before October 7, 2023, an explicit warning from the president of the United Arab Emirates, Mohamed bin Zayed, that Hamas was preparing a major operation. Later, it emerged that Israeli authorities knew in advance the name of the Omani pilot who tried to crash a plane into Tel Aviv airport, Emirati investigators have concluded. The head of the Shin Bet (the internal secret services) at that time, Ronen Bar, has sued him for defamation, for accusing him of having chosen not to wake him up on October 7, and has shown that Netanyahu rejected a previous proposal to kill Hamas leaders. And, perhaps the most serious: his former military secretary, Avi Gil, broke his silence to denounce that the prime minister's team falsified his time record for that day.
The opposition, however, has not managed to translate the scandals into votes. One of the main political commentators, Ben Caspit, explains the electoral map in the newspaper Maariv, recalling that Israeli society “has not moved to the left, but has migrated en masse to the right”, where the majority of the opposition is. It is not, therefore, a fight between right and left.
What has changed the balance of power, he continues, are two phenomena. One is the appearance on the scene of two new right-wing parties (the aforementioned Amjá Israel and The Reservists), towards which part of the dozen former Netanyahu seats that previously gravitated towards the so-called change bloc go. The other, the growth of the vote of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.
In this context, Netanyahu incites racism. He already did it in the past, like in 2015, when he called on his people to vote because the Arabs were doing so “en masse.” But this electoral race is being particularly dirty towards the political representatives of Israel's two million Palestinian citizens, a fifth of the national population.
The Likud bases its campaign on hammering an idea: since the Jewish opposition parties are not given the accounts to govern, they will end up having to resort to Arab formations, as if they were led by Osama bin Laden himself, although they now reject him. The Likud takes Eizenkot's videos and adds to them with artificial intelligence Mansur Abbas (head of the United Arab List) and Ahmed Tibi, one of the Palestinian deputies most hated by the social majority. “Eizenkot tries to hide that he is going to form a dangerous leftist government with the Arab parties and Yair Golán (leader of the Democrats),” says a voice-over in a recent one.
On television sets, Netanyahu shamelessly plays the card of fear and lies. Voting for the opposition, he warns, will mean receiving through the back door the “autonomy” of the Galilee and the Negev (with an Arab population), withdrawal of Israeli troops in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza, and Mansur as Minister of the Interior. “Go find out what I would do,” he added.
Instead of reorienting the narrative, the opposition has assumed the framework and treats the Arab parties as plagued. Except for Golán, which advocates integrating them.
The bet is in line with an Israel that is more exclusive and intolerant since the Hamas attack (the bloodiest day in its history, with more than 1,200 dead), but it is full of paradoxes and contravenes the will of 61% of its voters, according to a Channel 13 survey. The main one is that the United Arab List has already formed an Executive, between 2021 and 2022, in the only period without Netanyahu in power since 2009. It was, in fact, the first Arab party to do so since the country's creation in 1948, and many applauded it.
He was included by almost the same people who now ignore him, such as Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid (who alternated as head of Government and now run together on Yahad's ballot) or Lieberman, despite the fact that Mansur also has a Jewish deputy chief of the Police, Yoav Segalovich, as number two this time.
