The End of the Netanyahu Era?
As Israel heads towards the most consequential General Election in its history in October, Eric Lee examines the diverse parties challenging the far-right coalition of Benjamin Netanyahu
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Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s longest serving Prime Minister, having first been elected back in 1996. He has clung to power tenaciously, partly to avoid going to jail on numerous corruption charges. But it now seems clear that time has run out for him and his extreme right-wing and ultra-Orthodox coalition partners.
While this is certainly good news, the bad news is that it’s not certain to happen.
There are currently ten parties with seats in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Five of them are part of the ruling coalition, including Netanyahu’s Likud, two far-right religious parties – Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) and the Religious Zionist Party – and two ultra-Orthodox parties – Shas and United Torah Judaism. Israel has always been governed by diverse coalitions.
The opposition consists of four diverse groups united only by their opposition to Netanyahu.
The largest, according to polls, is a new centrist party Yashar (meaning Straight) headed up by former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot. Other than the fact that Eisenkot is not Netanyahu, not much is known about what he stands for. Eisenkot’s party has surged ahead of the Together coalition led by Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid, both former prime ministers. Bennett represents the centre right and Lapid the centre left.
Avigdor Lieberman leads yet another opposition group, Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) largely rooted among the Russian immigrant community. Though not exactly a left-winger, Lieberman is a fierce opponent of the religious parties and personally detests Netanyahu, who he used to support.
While those parties don’t offer a clear, pro-peace alternative to Netanyahu, a new force in the opposition camp brings real hope.
The Democrats, led by the former general Yair Golan, have emerged as a powerful new contender. Golan is part of the reason why. A former deputy chief of staff in the IDF, Golan jumped into his car when he heard the news about the 7 October Hamas attack on Israel. He drove to the border, located many terrified young civilians and brought them to safety.
The party he leads, the Democrats, is built on the ruins of the old Labour party and the left-wing Meretz, the parties that ruled Israel for the first 30 years of the country’s existence. Polls consistently show Golan’s Democrats winning up to 10% of the vote and taking 12 seats of the 120 in the Knesset. In the last Knesset elections, Labour barely squeaked in and Meretz failed to reach the 3.25% electoral threshold.
The Democrats have decided to hold open primaries to choose their list of candidates and invited people to join the party, paying a membership fee. Incredibly, over 100,000 voters signed up in just a few weeks. Considering the size of the country, this is a staggering number. It offers hope that, unlike the other opposition parties which have celebrity leaders, the Democrats may have an actual base and the ability to mobilise voters.
But here’s the problem: Polls generally show that the four opposition parties together can win exactly half the vote – getting 60 Knesset seats. They need 61 to govern.
Netanyahu’s bloc wins 50 seats.
The other 10 seats go to parties identified with Israel’s Arab minority, who have the right to vote but usually don’t turn out in large numbers. (If they ever did, winning over 20% of the votes, they’d hold the balance of power.) Obviously, it is in their interest for the Netanyahu government to fall. But the centrist leaders of the opposition – Eisenkot, Bennett, Lapid and Lieberman – have been rejecting the idea of a government including those Arab parties.
Only Yair Golan of the Democrats has been clear that he welcomes Arab parties into the Israeli government.
At the moment, it looks like we are less than 100 days away from the end of the Netanyahu era. But plenty of things can still go wrong. Polls are notoriously inaccurate in Israel, often underestimating Netanyahu’s strength. There will be attempts at voter suppression – including recently-leaked news that the Government is trying to find a way to block Israelis living abroad from coming home to vote. And no one puts it past Netanyahu from staging an event – perhaps a new war – to shake things up and maybe even delay an election.
On top of all that, one of Israel’s most successful campaigning organisations, Standing Together, which promotes Jewish-Arab peace and reconciliation, is planning to create a party and compete with the Democrats and the Arab parties for votes. If they do that and if they don’t win at least 150,000 votes, all those votes go to waste and could lead to Netanyahu being re-elected. Standing Together has come under fire by many on the Israeli Left for taking such an unnecessary risk.
If the opposition wins it will be the first good news from Israel in a very long time. Realistically, we can’t expect a new government to be as bold as the Labour Government headed by Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s. Rabin and his Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, took steps toward peace with the Palestinians that no other Israeli leader had ever attempted before. It is unlikely that a new government headed by the parties of the centre-right will do anything like that.
Still, any government without Netanyahu and his ultra-right collaborators, especially the aggressively anti-Arab West Bank settler ministers Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, will be an improvement. A chance will open up for the first time in a generation for new thinking. Israel has never before had to live with an unending war on several fronts, and with the home front taking a battering from time to time. People have had enough.
A new government, especially one in which the Democrats have influence, will not be able to create a sustained cease-fire with the Palestinians and renew the peace process, at least not on day one. But a government without Netanyahu may, over time, do things that the current far-right government – and even most Israelis – would never contemplate.
Eric Lee was a kibbutz member and an activist in the Israeli peace movement. He currently lives in London where he is the founding editor of the LabourStart website.