Mahmoud Illean/AP Photo
Ayman Odeh, Israeli Arab parliament member and leader of the Joint List alliance, waves to supporters during an election campaign event in the town of Taibeh, Israel, Febrary 21, 2020.
The news in brief: Israel held another election. More than half the country voted against indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Nonetheless, deadlock continues. A fourth election is possible, along with a further spike in Israeli tweets of Bill Murray waking endlessly on the same gloomy morning and smashing his clock in Groundhog Day.
There is an alternative. It would be one of the most radical, unlikely, and hopeful changes in Israeli politics.
In Monday’s election, the issue of all issues was Netanyahu himself. His Likud Party won the largest number of seats, 36. Add the votes of three religious parties aligned with the Likud, and the pro-Netanyahu bloc has 58 seats out of 120 in the Knesset. Four opposing parties won 62, as of the virtually final count. Hence, the majority of Israelis voted to end Netanyahu’s rule.
But the opposition is fatally fragmented and incapable of forming a coalition. This is what happened after last April’s election, and the rematch last September, and now after Round Three.
There’s been one major change over this year of bizarre politics: The Joint List, an alliance backed mainly by Israel’s Arab minority, has steadily risen in strength. Running as two separate tickets last April, its constituent parties won ten seats. United, they won 13 in September. This time, the Joint List got 15.
The largest factor in that success is greatly increased Arab turnout, driven by the hope that they can join the game of power in Israel, rather than standing on the sidelines. Anger, too, helped get out the vote: backlash against Netanyahu’s anti-Arab rhetoric, and against Donald Trump’s “Deal of the Century,” which proposes border changes to slice some Arab towns out of Israel and put them in a neutered Palestinian state.
Netanyahu explicitly says that the Joint List does not count. In a post-election meeting of lawmakers supporting him, he proclaimed that the “will of the people” had given the opposition only 47 seats, because the Joint List’s 15 were “not part of the equation.” Any bid to keep him from forming a new government, he added, was undemocratic.
To zoom out for a moment: A multiparty system can be wonderfully flexible. More parties mean more possibilities for coalitions. If parties A, B, and C are unable to form a government, parties B, E, and G might do so. If all cooperation breaks down, you don’t have to wait until an arbitrary date to hold a new election. You let the public vote, shuffle the cards, and start over.
In Israel, however, the flexibility has vanished. Parties have narrowed their options, for good reasons and bad. The largest opposition party in the Year of Three Elections has been Blue and White, led by ex-general Benny Gantz. The glue holding it together is the desire to end Netanyahu’s corrupt reign. Most of the erstwhile supporters of the historic left-of-center parties, Labor and Meretz, voted strategically for right-leaning Blue and White in the hope of ridding the nation of Netanyahu. So as long as Netanyahu leads the Likud, no grand coalition with Blue and White is possible.
The religious parties, free agents in an earlier era, know that only the Likud will continue to satisfy their demands. Ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the small Israel Is Our Home party, is a secularist no longer willing to accept dictates from the religious parties. So now he’s part of the anti-Netanyahu bloc, despite his hard-right views.
But the thing that really makes a multiparty system break down is when one party is blackballed by all the rest. The bigger the boycotted party, the less stable a country’s politics. The classic example is Italy in the Cold War. The reason governments fell constantly wasn’t some Latin cultural quirk. Rather, in every election the Communists got between a quarter and a third of the vote—but no other party wanted to share power with them. Coalitions were cobbled together out of the remaining two-thirds to three-fourths of parliament, and inevitably included a range of parties too diverse to agree for very long. Governments continually collapsed, and were formed again.
The thing that really makes a multiparty system break down is when one party is blackballed by all the rest. The bigger the boycotted party, the less stable a country’s politics.
In Israel, the founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, pronounced an excommunication of both the far right, led by Menachem Begin, and on the Communists. The ban on Begin crumbled; eventually, he became prime minister. The tiny Communist Party drew most of its support from Arabs. The boycott then changed form: It became a veto on any party representing the Arab minority. By the 1980s, this was making it harder to create a left-leaning government.
The only major-party politician who ever defied the boycott was Yitzhak Rabin. He was able to take power in 1992 by striking a deal with the two Arab-backed parties that then held five seats in parliament. It was an arm’s-length partnership: The Arab parties did not have cabinet ministers, but supported the government, reaped benefits for their constituents, and helped pass the Oslo Accords.
Today, the Arab minority votes overwhelmingly for the Joint List. And for three campaigns, Netanyahu has used the Joint List to bludgeon Blue and White. Gantz would only be able to form a coalition with the help of the Arabs, who are “supporters of terror organizations,” in Netanyahu’s rhetoric. Gantz’s answer was to affirm the boycott and insist he’d find a different path to a coalition.
It was a poor answer, as a matter of both principle and practicality. The election results make clear that Gantz can’t put together a government while ruling out both Netanyahu and the Joint List.
In the few days since the election, a new idea has caught fire: The 62 members of parliament opposed to Netanyahu will pass a law banning a person under indictment from forming a government. It might apply only after the next election, with the expectation that the next election isn’t far off.
Due to parliamentary rules far too byzantine to explain here, though, the only way to get such a bill through the legislative pipeline may be to actually form a government under Gantz. That’s an incredibly difficult task. Gantz would have to swallow his words, and ask the Joint List for its support. But the latest reports are that Moshe Ya’alon, an ex-Likud minister and the leading rightist in Blue and White, has endorsed a Rabin-style partnership with the Arab party.
Lieberman says he supports the proposed legislation blocking Netanyahu. If he’s serious, though, he’ll have to recommend to the president that Gantz form the government—knowing that such a government will depend on Arab backing. The same Lieberman has built his career on proposals to disenfranchise Arab citizens, by one means or another.
Joint List leader Ayman Odeh said in a radio interview that his party would back Gantz—if he shows he “has a different approach since the election … if there’s a change truly in the direction of equality and peace.” But he added that his party would never lend its hand to making Lieberman a minister. Given Lieberman’s long record of hostility toward the Arab minority, this makes perfect sense. But unless Gantz can find a way over this hurdle, there’s no government.
A government held up by Lieberman and the Joint List would be likely to measure its lifespan in weeks. Yet it would accomplish two things: It would push Netanyahu off the stage. And it would bury the boycott. It would open up a host of new possibilities in Israeli politics—most of all, Jewish-Arab partnership.
Then again, the whole plan for a Gantz-led coalition could collapse by the weekend. In which case, we might have another election.
