Today is Election Day in Israel. It's a "do-over" necessitated by the inconclusive outcome of their last election held only last spring. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party got the most votes, but not a majority, and Likud then failed to strike an agreement with any of the minor parties that would have allowed Netanyahu to forge a governing coalition in the Knesset. Without any such coalition, the Knesset dissolved itself, and Netanyahu had to call for a new election.
Does that sound odd? I do not know what happens in the event of another inconclusive outcome. It seems as if Israel could have a Groundhog's Day election season with Bill Murray as Bibi Netanyahu. Who has changed their mind since April?
A good preview of today's election, and of the political climate generally in Israel, is "Why Bibi fears Arab voters," by Yardena Schwartz, in The New York Review. One of her main points is that, while people may not have changed their minds, they may be changing their voting strategies, especially the non Jewish part of the population that has in the past voted for minor Arab parties—or, more frequently, just not voted at all. In this way, they have succeeded at making themselves politically irrelevant, a significant achievement considering that there are close to 2 million of them in a country of less than 9 million.
But that may be changing, the principal factors being:
- The policies pursued by Netanyahu and Likud—preeminently, the drive to annex all the territory on which a second state might plausibly be established, thereby foreclosing the possibility of a two-state solution—are detested by Israel's Arab citizens
- Netanyahu and Likud could be ousted, with relative ease, if Arab voters marked their ballots for the centrist Blue and White party, the main Jewish opposition to Likud
I guess we'll see whether anything like this happens. There are obstacles that will remove from possibility the "relative ease" part. One is that Arab Israelis don't particularly like Blue and White, either. Another is that the very prospect of a coalition of Arabs and Jewish moderates permits Netanyahu to stoke the fire on the right. It's rather like Trump huffing and puffing at his MAGA rallies. Even the subject matter is similar. Netanyahu's Jewish political foes are unpatriotic and are making common cause with the debased Arabs, whose polling stations should be monitored by cameras in order to detect their cheating. Et cetera. There is no evidence of Arab cheating, however—only of their nonparticipation, which, if Likud is to prevail, must persist. In his personal affairs, Netanyahu is possibly as corrupt as Trump, and has in fact been indicted for bribery.
Schwartz's article—I'll link to it again—has the strength of bringing into view an essential fact, or dilemma. Israel is meant to be a democratic, Jewish state. But these two characteristics exist together in tension. If it is truly democratic, it loses its Jewish character, for non-Jews are then free to exert their due influence. The two-state solution is a way out of the box. But Likud doesn't want that, either. To achieve the dream of a "Greater Israel," it wants to annex all the disputed lands on which another state could be established. It's not hard to see why Arab Israelis should conclude there is no place for them in the Likud scheme of things.
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