The Israeli election that I previewed here has now occurred, the results are 90% or more tabulated, and the result . . . inconclusive, again. But it appears that Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party slipped. First time around, it won more votes than any other party, but not a majority, and the do-over election was called after Netanyahu could not make a deal with any allied party to form a governing majority. This time around, the two leading parties switched places: without winning a majority of seats in the 120-member Knesset, the more moderate Blue and White party appears to have won two more Knesset seats than Likud, and to have outpolled Netanyahu's party by about one percent of the vote.
For Netanyahu, this result is roughly analogous to taking a mulligan after a bad golf shot and then hitting one that, from the tee box, looks to be if anything even worse. After the vote last April, he couldn't or wouldn't make a deal that would have been unsavory to him personally and to his hard-right constituency. Instead he gambled on a new election, and now it's Benny Gantz, the leader of Blue and White, who might—might—be able to form a government with himself as prime minister.
I'm not diving into the weeds of the different factions and the difficulty of forming a governing coalition after a split vote because
a) I am insufficiently informed; and
b) from what I can tell, becoming sufficiently informed is a fool's errand, since the only people who really understand have been inhaling and exhaling the complexity of Israeli politics for years and an outsider might as well undertake to teach himself Hebrew in late middle age.
Nevertheless, the high-level outlines of the debate are interesting to me, partly because they resemble the political fault lines here in the US. Israel has Arabs and the dispossessed Palestinians; we have brown-skinned immigrants with or without papers. The question is how accommodating we should be toward these others. Both Trump and Netanyahu, with nothing even resembling delicacy, assert that the others are an inhuman menace and that the party of accommodation is weak, unpatriotic, a grave risk to national security. There is a large audience for this message in both countries and, what might seem odd, its voting constituency includes the unusually high percentage of religious zealots within the respective populations—conservative Christian evangelicals in the US and ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel.
But these blocs, while large, are not a majority. In both countries, the divide is geographical and cultural. In our country, the wingnuts complain of the "coastal elites" who, in Israel, have their counterpart in the residents of the urban centers along the Mediterranean coast, from Haifa to Tel Aviv. These Israeli Jews are educated and generally secular in outlook—Tucker Carlson might say that they are "cosmopolitan." They like the warm weather, Starbucks, smart phones, and, in general, the modern, interconnected world. It's conceivable that one could be a baseball fan, in which case he'd have more in common with me than he'd have in common with settlers trying to eke it out for God and country in occupied territory. The Israeli "elites" aren't against national security, but the ultra-Orthodox party that's aligned with Likud would like to shut down all commerce on the Sabbath, including even public transportation, and you can imagine the disdain with which they regard that prospect. In Tel Aviv, lots of people like to go out for dinner and drinks on Friday night.
There are so many political parties because there are so many different opinions among Jews in Israel. They may agree that Israel should be a Jewish state without agreeing about what makes the state Jewish. The power base of one of the minor parties, Yisrael Beitenu, is made almost entirely of secular-minded Russian Jews who moved to Israel after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They are wary of non-Jewish citizens, hawkish on defense, and support the settlement movement and the annexation of disputed territory into Greater Israel. In all these respects, Yisrael Beitenu is a natural ally of Likud, and could after the first election have supplied the extra seats to allow Netanyahu to form a government. Yet it didn't happen, and one factor among others was that the party of Russian Jews of secular sensibility would not make common cause with a coalition that included the ultra-religious ultra-Orthodox. It's really hard to form governing alliances across party lines when there is a reason these different parties exist.
I've tried to emphasize the difficulty of conforming the idea that Israel is a democratic state with the idea that it is a Jewish state. American support for Israel is so strong, almost reflexive, that it sometimes seems we have no interest in what goes on one side of the scale and what on the other. Here is Paul Mirengoff of the right-wing Power Line blog analyzing the results of the election:
In view of the results, I see three possibilities going forward: (1) a government led by Netanyahu that would rely on support from right-wing and Orthodox religious parties, (2) a government led by his opponents that would rely on support from Arab parties, and (3) some form of coalition party in which power is shared between Netanyahu's party and the center-left opposition.
The second option seems untenable. It would make the government of the Jewish state hostage to Arab interests, which are inimical to a Jewish state. Israeli Jews could not be expected to tolerate such a situation.
This is somewhat candid if only one notices that the last sentence, though intended to read smoothly, is the functional equivalent of: "Israeli Jews cannot be expected to tolerate equal citizenship rights for non-Jews under a democratic government." Is that really what the US supports, too? Remember that the people for whom a democratic Israel barely attains the status of a talking point are the same ones who want to annex all the disputed territory, thereby foreclosing on a two-state solution as well. It isn't clear to me what they expect the sojourning strangers mentioned in Leviticus 19:34 to do.
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