(Photo: AP/Sebastian Scheiner)
As the minutes and seconds left for Benjamin Netanyahu to form a government flashed on my screen Wednesday night, I passed the time by reading Daniel Kahneman on the futility of political predictions. "Reality emerges from many different agents and forces. ... Short-term trends can be forecast with fair accuracy from previous behaviors," writes the Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate in economics. "You should not expect much from making long-term forecasts."
Kahneman seems overly optimistic about even short-term predictions when it comes to the politics of his native land-though he could fairly answer that in Israel seven weeks is long-term. That's how long it's been since the Israeli election, when Netanyahu defeated both his left-wing challenger and all of the country's pollsters. Immediately after the vote, the impression among the public and most of the expert class was that his way was paved to a new coalition, stronger than the one that fell apart last fall.
Instead, Netanyahu had to use nearly every minute of the time allotted him to form a government. There were less than two hours left on the clock when he announced that he had succeeded. He has the narrowest possible majority-61 out of 120 members of parliament-and gave away the political assets of a ruling party to his new partners. The coalition negotiations looked like a bankruptcy auction.
In hindsight, after recovery from the false clarity of the morning after, some basic math helps explain what has happened. Netanyahu's Likud did become the largest party in parliament, but the bloc of right-wing clerical parties won only 57 seats, less than a majority. What made Netanyahu the candidate to lead the next government was an unwritten, nearly inviolable rule of Israeli politics: Parties representing the Arab minority are never invited to join the coalition, formally or informally.
The centrist parties in the newly elected parliament wouldn't think of violating that noxious tradition. For that matter, the more radical members of the Joint List, the alliance of Arab parties that won 13 seats, appear unwilling to cooperate with Jewish parties. This means a coalition needs the support of 61 out of the remaining 107 members of parliament to rule-not quite as difficult as getting the super-majority needed to end a filibuster in the U.S. Senate, but close. The left couldn't do it.
On the other hand, Netanyahu needed all or nearly all of the right-wing parties-plus the new centrist party Kulanu (All of Us), with its 10 seats. Here lies another anomaly of numbers. On paper, the Likud is three times larger, with 30 members of parliament. But in negotiations, the two parties were equal: Neither could be in power without the other.
Kulanu leader Moshe Kahlon ran on a platform that could be called free-market populism: He promised to improve life for working-class and middle-class Israelis by breaking up cartels. Netanyahu loves managing the economy nearly as much as he loves giving speeches about Iran. But to reach a coalition deal, Netanyahu gave Kahlon what appears to be near-total control of economic policy.
Next, Netanyahu negotiated with two ultra-Orthodox parties. He made every concession they sought. He promised to roll back small reforms made during the last term that reduced the power of the state rabbinate. He promised to end financial pressure on ultra-Orthodox schools to teach secular subjects, and to remove the threat of prosecuting ultra-Orthodox men who evade military service. Most of the public-most of Netanyahu's own constituency-will hate all of this.
But Netanyahu is the man for whom the Hebrew word lahitz-meaning "gives in to pressure"-was invented.
It was then, as the constitutional deadline for forming a government approached, that outgoing Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman announced he would not join the government. Lieberman may be sick of his former ally Netanyahu, as the political gossip columnists say. But that's irrelevant. Math is what mattered: Lieberman's party, Yisrael Beiteinu, had too few Knesset members to give Netanyahu a majority, or to keep him from getting one. That left Liebermanalmost no leverage.
But Netanyahu did need the right-wing religious Jewish Home party, led by Naftali Bennett-yet another ex-Netanyahu crony. As the hours ran out, Bennett upped his demands. Netanyahu met virtually all of them. He agreed to appoint Ayelet Shaked, the number-two figure in Jewish Home, to be justice minister. Shaked is an unbending rightist. Among her causes is breaking the power of the Supreme Court to overturn laws on civil rights grounds. She's an author of the Jewish nation-state bill, designed to perpetuate discrimination against Arabs. Her new title should be "injustice minister." Netanyahu also gave Bennett's party control of an agency that funnels money to West Bank settlements, and pledged to increase funding for the Israeli university in the settlement of Ariel. The full list of concessions is longer, and uglier. The agreement announced late Wednesday evening deeply damaged hope that Kahlon might impose moderation.
In the midst of the final countdown, veteran Israeli journalist Dan Margalit tweeted, "If this is how Netanyahu negotiates, maybe it's better that, against my desires, he doesn't negotiate with the Palestinians." It was a funny but false comparison: Netanyahu gives nothing in talks with the Palestinians because he doesn't want them to succeed. What does matter to him is staying in power. To achieve that, he created a government even further right than he is. And as blogger Tal Schneider pointed out (in Hebrew), the coalition agreements are utterly silent about a peace process, relations with the United States, or any other aspect of foreign policy. They are written for a small planet, a separate universe, consisting of Israel and the West Bank settlements.
So here's the paradox: The right as a whole was actually weaker after the election, and so was Netanyahu-and he has therefore formed his most hardline government ever, at least as it can be judged at its outset.
Will that government last? Any building inspector would condemn a coalition built on the foundation of five parties, with a narrow majority, as too unstable for habitation. Any of the constituent parties can bring it down. Any two members of any of those parties can do so, should they decide to defect.
Netanyahu's problems will arise when parties and individual members of parliament demand opposing concessions.
Twice in the past, his government fell when moderates and hard-liners could no longer get along-in 1999 over peace negotiations, and last year over the nation-state law. It could happen again.
But then, politicians who have just won parliament seats, committee chairs, and cabinet positions don't want to hold new elections-at least not till they feel they have something to show voters. That's the glue that holds shaky coalitions together.
Here's a statistical baseline: Israel has elected a parliament 20 times. Only five times has parliament managed to reach the mandatory date for new elections, in the autumn after it has completed four full years. The last time parliament filled out its term was in the mid-1980s. The average lifespan has been three and a half years. In the last two decades the average has been a bit lower-but still more than three years.
Besides the baseline, there are only uncertainties. How will the world economy affect Israel's? Will a lame-duck American president allow the Security Council to pass a resolution calling for a two-state agreement-and will that unite Israel's government or shake it? Will the European Union be too distracted by refugee ships and Greece's debt to impose new sanctions on Israeli settlements? Will the outcome of the UK election affect that? If the Syrian regime crumbles, will Hezbollah also fall apart, or will it try to regain credibility by attacking Israel? Just when will members of Netanyahu's coalition who were once his cronies and are now his critics decide that nausea is overcoming them? Beyond gossip, much of it spread by the Likud, is there a chance that more parties will join the coalition?
All that can be said with certainty is this: Netanyahu has bought a new term at a high price to himself and a higher price to Israel-or so the coalition agreements say. Beyond this, accept no forecasts. As Daniel Kahneman has written, "An expert on the Middle East knows many things, but not the future." Least of all the future.
