The final tally of the election for Israel’s 26th Knesset is in, and neither those who support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor those who backed the “anybody-but-Bibi” alliance of parties are happy about it. Both blocs of parties fell short of winning a majority of seats. And while anything is possible once the negotiations begin to form a new government, there is no easy path to power for either the prime minister or his main opponent, former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff, retired Gen. Gadi Eisenkot. The prospect of an ongoing stalemate and ultimately new elections looms as a very real possibility.
But the main thing roiling the liberal and leftist media in both Israel and elsewhere is not Eisenkot’s failure to win as they hoped and expected he would. What they really can’t fathom is the ability of Netanyahu, despite losing ground since his 2022 victory in the last election, to emerge with a plurality as the leader of Likud, the largest party and bloc in the new Knesset.
Are Israelis naive?
To his many detractors, and indeed, the not-inconsiderable number of journalists and pundits suffering from Netanyahu derangement syndrome, his survival isn’t just frustrating. For them, it’s almost inexplicable that so many Israelis were still willing to rally around him after all these years in power. That’s especially true of the first election held since the catastrophe of Oct. 7, 2023, which happened on his watch but for which the country’s entire military, intelligence and political establishments also bear responsibility.
Rather than ponder whether their own assumptions about Netanyahu and the Israeli electorate are incorrect, they prefer to put it down to the prime minister’s bad character and the gullibility, if not the mental and moral weaknesses of the voters.
This attitude was summed up in an article in The New York Times, published in the aftermath of the vote, by its Jerusalem bureau chief, David M. Halbfinger, headlined: “How Netanyahu Used Fear, Again, to Win More Votes Than Anyone Else.”
Halbfinger conceded that Netanyahu “outperformed expectations”—which is to say that he showed, as his supporters assumed all along, that the polls published in liberal Israeli outlets were not merely inaccurate but deliberately skewed.
But for the Times and many other publications, such as Haaretz and Britain’s The Guardian, which published similar pieces, the only explanation is that Netanyahu’s fear-mongering worked again to manipulate feeble-minded voters into casting their ballots for his Likud Party and its allies.
This analysis of the results isn’t based solely on dismissing the prime minister’s focus on the ongoing threat from the Islamist regime in Iran and its terrorist proxies—Hamas in Gaza as well as Judea and Samaria, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen—as overblown and unjustified. It is also intended as a way to delegitimize arguments against Eisenkot and his bloc allying themselves with the two Israeli Arab political parties that won a record number of seats—19—in the Oct. 27 election.
The truth about the Arab parties
For them, the opposition bloc’s reluctance to make common cause with either Ra’am or the Joint List isn’t just racist. It’s also the result of hyperbolic and unrealistic fear-mongering about the two parties.
Despite efforts to make itself acceptable to Israelis with a Jewish Knesset member and its willingness to prop up the only government not led by Netanyahu since 2009, Ra’am is an Islamist party with origins in the Muslim Brotherhood. The Joint List is a coalition of secular Arab nationalists. Both have failed to condemn the Oct. 7 attacks. They’re also opposed to the idea of a Jewish state altogether.
Yet to those who are trying to define Netanyahu as a rabid alarmist rather than a shrewd politician or even one of his country’s greatest statesmen, none of that matters.
They’re also eager to simply tune out the concerns about Qatar injecting money into the election and the possibility that such fraudulent and illegal activity influenced the outcome. As for that, Dean Livne, the Acting Central Elections Committee director general, dismissed claims of widespread fraud. But Noam Sohlberg, the Israeli Supreme Court deputy president who chairs the country’s Central Elections Committee, instructed David Zini, the head of the Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet), to investigate suspected foreign funding.
The truth of the allegations about illegal donations or the purchase of votes is yet to be determined. But to dismiss out of hand the notion that Qatar would be spending large amounts of money to impact Israeli opinion is ludicrous. The emirate has spent billions seeking to purchase influence in American academia and many other sectors of U.S. society. It would be surprising if it wasn’t also trying to influence Israelis and their elections.
No matter what that investigation produces, it’s unlikely to invalidate the election results. But it will play a part, as it should, in the discussion about whether the Arab parties should be part of a new government.
Debating a Palestinian state
The issue here isn’t so much about fraud or how people feel about a prime minister who’s been a national figure for decades and has accumulated many political enemies as well as loyalists. It’s whether there’s something wrong with Netanyahu warning Israel’s voters that they live in a very dangerous world with threats arrayed against them outside their borders as well as inside them.
What sort of threats? One is the possibility of a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria being imposed on Israelis.
According to Halbfinger, the entire discussion of a Palestinian state is “a transparently bogus argument.” He says even to raise the possibility is out of bounds since his opponents weren’t campaigning in favor of one.
It is true that, as the Times noted, even the most left-wing of the Zionist parties running for the Knesset—the Democrats (HaDemokratim), whose members are composed of the remnants of the once-dominant Labor Party and its even more radical ally, Meretz, who have combined forces to survive—said the time wasn’t right to discuss the possibility. And Eisenkot’s Yashar Party and its other allies said they were opposed to it.
Still, it’s rich for a newspaper that continuously publishes articles demanding such a state to say it’s wrong for someone to speak of opposing the idea. The Democratic Party in the United States and its liberal cheerleaders in the press are adamant that the “two-state solution,” which the Palestinian Arabs never wanted and which has been proven to be a chimera by the events of the last 33 years since the Oslo Accords were signed, must be imposed on Israel.
Leaders break their promises
Moreover, Netanyahu is on firm ground in reminding Israeli voters that leaders and parties that campaign on pledges never to allow a Palestinian state or to accede to demands for concessions, including territorial withdrawals, often break their word.
That’s exactly what happened with Yitzhak Rabin when he was elected prime minister in 1992 and reassured voters that he would not negotiate with the Palestine Liberation Organization and its terrorist leader Yasser Arafat, let alone empower them in the territories. But then, he did exactly that.
In 2003, Ariel Sharon was re-elected as prime minister by ridiculing his Labor Party opponent for proposing to withdraw from Gaza. Then Sharon, too, carried out the same policy himself in the summer of 2005 by pulling every Israeli soldier, settler and settlement out of Gaza, thus setting in motion the train of events that led to the creation of a Hamas terror state there and the tragedy of Oct. 7.
Moreover, as Haaretz consoled its left-wing readership over the summer, Eisenkot may have declared that he won’t accept a Palestinian state largely in order to curry favor with the voters. But in doing so, he was, the newspaper said, “running away from what everyone knows he believes.” That is probably true. The former general’s statements while he was chief of staff and those made by his advisers all point to acceptance of the Oslo mindset about the imperative of Israeli territorial withdrawals and the creation of a Palestinian state.
Under the circumstances, it’s far from unreasonable for Netanyahu to point this out and to speculate about whether a government led by Eisenkot would resist the inevitable pressure from foreign governments—possibly including the United States once President Donald Trump leaves office in January 2029—for a Palestinian state.
Nor is it fear-mongering to point out that a repetition of Sharon’s catastrophic blunder of withdrawing from Gaza in the far larger and more strategic Judea and Samaria would raise the likelihood of more Oct. 7-style attacks on Israel. Hamas, which would be certain to seize control of a state from its corrupt and feeble Fatah Party rivals who currently control the Palestinian Authority, has promised as much.
Nor is Netanyahu conjuring up imaginary threats when he speaks of the need to finish the process of eliminating Hamas in Gaza and defeating the Islamist regime in Tehran. Israelis know all too well that their enemies are not figments of their imagination on which an unscrupulous prime minister is preying.
And he isn’t making things up when he describes the radicalism of both the Arab parties that did so well in this week’s vote.
Halbfinger is correct that Ra’am has worked hard to sell itself to Jewish voters as a reasonable partner that can be trusted to be loyal to the state while standing up for the interests of Arab voters. Israelis may be proud to live in a country where the Arab minority enjoys equal rights under the law. But even if he served in the government led by Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid in 2021 and 2022, many, if not most Israelis know that its leader Mansour Abbas’s Islamists beliefs make it impossible to truly accept the legitimacy and permanence of a Jewish state. What’s more, they also know the larger Joint List won’t even pretend to give up their dreams of Israel’s eradication. That’s true even if they are willing, for the moment, to prop up a minority government that would end Netanyahu’s career, due to the fact that he is the greatest foe of those who wish for Israel’s destruction.
Should Eisenkot rely on them to keep a minority government in power outside of the cabinet or ask them to join it outright, he would be giving them an effective veto over future military action to defend Israel against Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis. Some on the left may think that’s a good idea. But in rejecting such a scenario, Netanyahu would not be exploiting fears as much as pointing out to Israelis that Eisenkot would be doing what the overwhelming majority of Israelis, regardless of who they voted for on Oct. 27, oppose.
The specter of the genocidal intent of Hamas and Iran, for which the atrocities of Oct. 7 were just the trailer for what they want to do to all of Israel, is no boogeyman that Netanyahu pulls out of his bag of tricks to scare Israelis. It is a clear and present danger that must be addressed by any government of Israel, no matter who is at its head, if it is not to betray the trust of its people.
A still dangerous neighborhood
If Israelis understand—their victories in the post-Oct. 7 war and the survival of the Abraham Accords, notwithstanding the global surge of antisemitism—that they still live in a dangerous neighborhood, it’s not because they are fearful. It’s because they have been paying attention to events and are able to judge what happens when their leaders succumb to the temptation of earning the respect of the Times and liberal pundits, and seek to trade “land for peace.” In each case, such policies were not only a betrayal of campaign promises but also wound up doing nothing more than trading territory for terror that led to the loss of thousands of Israeli lives.
If Netanyahu retains a large amount of support, despite the understandable fatigue with a prime minister who has held power for so long and the impulse to make him the sole scapegoat for Oct. 7, it is because Israelis respect and value his realism. For all of his faults and mistakes, he is still the only major Israeli leader of his era who did not fall prey to the magical thinking that led to Oslo and the Gaza withdrawal, and its betrayed promises of gaining peace in exchange for a Palestinian state that the Palestinians don’t want. Pointing this out isn’t scare tactics. It’s realism.
The prime minister’s critics should consider whether their desire to ignore or downplay the real threats to Israel is something worse than speaking to the fears of Israelis: a deliberate attempt to disarm and weaken them in the face of very real genocidal threats.
Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS. Follow him: @jonathans_tobin.
