(AP Photo/Ariel Schalit)
If there is any credibility left in Israeli polls-a highly questionable proposition-Benjamin Netanyahu won a come-from-behind victory in yesterday's election. The final opinion surveys of the campaign, published Friday, showed the prime minister's Likud Party trailing challenger Isaac Herzog's left-of-center Zionist Union by as many as four seats in parliament, which has 120 members. Exit polls shocked the country by showing a virtual tie.
This morning, those of us in Israel who dared to hope for a change in direction awoke with a pounding political hangover. The nearly complete vote count showed the Likud winning 30 seats in Israel's parliament to the Zionist Union's 24. The right-wing bloc of parties as a whole emerged with either a strong plurality or an absolute majority, depending on whether you include the center-right Kulanu party in that bloc. A few days ago, it appeared possible that Netanyahu's career was ending. Now he is ready to start his fourth term and has the opportunity to form the stable right-wing coalition that eluded him last term.
To achieve that turnabout,
Netanyahu proved that he is the great communicator of one set of emotions-anxiety, dread, and panic
-and that the immediate goal of retaining power mattered more to him than any future price that Israel will pay. He has been democratically re-elected, but the final ugly days of his campaign cracked the foundations of the country's democracy, not to mention its foreign relations.
As soon as the Knesset voted late last year to hold early elections, Netanyahu seemed to lose control of the campaign. He wanted to focus on external enemies, especially Iran, and on the supposed perfidy of allies-the United States and Europe-and to present himself as the only bulwark against disaster. But the country preferred to talk about the unbearable cost of housing and daily living. Kahalon, a former Likud minister running against Netanyahu's "piggish capitalism," fit the mood into a slogan: "How many people do you know who left the country because of Iran?" He didn't need to state that everyone knows someone who left for economic reasons.
Netanyahu's first major bid to change the conversation was arranging the invitation from House Speaker John Boehner to address Congress. From that pulpit, he would preach the perils of the Obama administration's effort to reach an agreement with Iran on its nuclear program. To boost his chance of re-election, Netanyahu was willing to sabotage what was left of his relationship with Obama during his next term, and to turn support for Israel into a partisan issue-potentially for much longer.
But the speech had no effect on polling numbers in Israel; the Zionist camp's lead grew, even while the right-wing bloc seemed headed for more seats in parliament. Though the size of the left- and right-wing blocs normally determines who becomes prime minister, Netanyahu feared that if Herzog won significantly more seats, the challenger would get the first chance to form a government.
So in the final run-up to the election, his messaging was aimed entirely at convincing right-wing voters to trust him and abandon smaller parties. Hence the Likud announcement that Netanyahu's 2009 Bar-Ilan University speech, in which he said that he'd accept a Palestinian state under very limited conditions, was now "irrelevant." Netanyahu followed that by declaring that any withdrawal from the West Bank was out of the question. Visiting Har Homah, a Jewish neighborhood in East Jerusalem-that is, in occupied territory-he made explicit what critics have argued since his first term in the late 1990s: The neighborhood was built to divide Arab Jerusalem from the West Bank town of Bethlehem. It was all about preventing a contiguous Palestinian state; urban concerns had no part in planning.
Arguably, Israeli citizens and Western leaders who believed anything else about Netanyahu's intentions up to now were fooling themselves. Still, the statements matter. They made reconciliation with the White House less likely, and European economic sanctions more likely. More fundamentally, they rendered obsolete the implication of something temporary in the term "occupied territories." At least as long as Netanyahu is in power, the West Bank is Israeli territory-but territory in which the rules of democracy do not apply.
On Election Day itself, the sheer ugliness of Netanyahu's appeal to voters was stunning. On his Facebook page, he posted a message that spread instantly through the media: "The rule of the right is in danger. Arab voters are advancing in large numbers toward voting places. Leftist organizations are bringing them in buses." The meaning was straightforward: For the prime minister, Arab citizens of Israel participating fully in elections was illegitimate. Following a theme he'd been pushing for days, the left consisted not of political opponents, but of dark forces threatening the country's future.
For a large portion of Israelis, all this was part of the repeated pattern of Netanyahu losing his cool under pressure. But those weren't the voters he was seeking. Energized by his own horror at the thought of losing, Netanyahu crafted a message of fear of Arabs and of Jewish sell-outs that was deeply felt by his target audience.
The anxiety offensive may have swung a couple of seats from the center to the right, possibly by boosting right-wing turnout. But Netanyahu took enough votes from other parties of the right to make the Likud the clear winner. It's very small comfort that the most extreme right-wing party has apparently failed to make it into parliament, and that the hard-line Jewish Home party has lost some strength. Netanyahu has shamelessly adopted their rhetoric.
Obama now faces hard choices in how to deal with Netanyahu's government and policies. Similar difficult choices face European leaders. For Israelis who want a democratic and peaceful future, the task is clear: Get over the hangover quickly, drop the illusion that an economic platform is enough, and craft a coherent and pragmatic program for a peaceful and secure future-one that can persuade more Israelis to overcome fear.
