Netanyahu wins big in Israel’s elections — but not enough to secure full control

The third Israeli election in less than a year has delivered a third inconclusive result. After two days of tense vote counting, results show neither incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his leading rival Benny Gantz winning enough support to command a clear parliamentary majority.

Yet Netanyahu’s right-wing side won more votes by a surprisingly large margin, despite the fact that he had been recently indicted on corruption-related charges. As such, Netanyahu is now in a much stronger position than Gantz is to put together a parliamentary coalition.

Winning a majority in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, requires control of 61 seats. Early estimates from Israeli election officials show Netanyahu’s Likud and other right-wing parties winning 58 seats, while Gantz’s Blue and White and other parties on the broader center-left win 55.

That obviously makes it easier for Netanyahu to form a government. One option for him forming an alliance with a faction of Blue and White that breaks with the party’s anti-Netanyahu position. Another is partnering with a party that splits Israel’s political divides down the middle, and could give either Netanyahu or Gantz a majority: Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) party.

Lieberman’s party aligns with the right on security issues and policy toward the Palestinians, but aligns with the left on issues related to the relationship between synagogue and state. In the past two elections, Lieberman has thus far been unwilling to back either a right-wing Netanyahu government or a center-left Gantz coalition — the former because it would require working with ultra-Orthodox parties, the latter because it would require working with Arab parties.

But it’s possible that after months of political deadlock, and an unprecedented three elections in a row, Lieberman might finally get over his objections and pick a side — most likely Netanyahu’s, given the right’s strong results.

If Netanyahu does cobble together a majority, the consequences could be extraordinarily significant. He’s promised to take the Israel-Palestine conflict into a dangerous new stage — and his push to protect himself from prosecution could end up doing serious damage to Israeli democracy.

Making sense of Israel’s election results

This third-straight inconclusive result isn’t all that surprising to observers of Israeli politics. For a while, it appeared that Israeli public opinion had largely ossified, with people committed to particular camps and unwilling to change their minds.

But Netanyahu’s surprisingly strong performance this time around shows that a “largely” ossified public is not a fully ossified one; his improvement relative to the September elections puts him much closer to commanding a majority.

The parties will now go into coalition bargaining to try to come up with a scenario in which one of the two major parties can cobble together 61 votes in the Knesset for their government. In theory, there could be some kind of compromise government in which Gantz and Netanyahu share power, perhaps with the former as a high-level cabinet minister while the latter serves as prime minister. But this has been politically impossible in the past.

Netanyahu would almost demand his partners support some version of a law protecting him from prosecution and imprisonment (at least while in office). Gantz has ruled out doing so, and focused much of his campaign on Netanyahu’s corruption. This could be solved if Netanyahu were replaced as leader of Likud, but he defeated a recent primary challenge decisively and, after this strong election performance, has most likely cemented his control over Likud.

The intractability of these decisions has so far produced a weak caretaker government, with Netanyahu hanging on as prime minister but lacking enough legislative support to enact major changes.

But while Israeli politics have stood still, the context surrounding them has changed a lot — ratcheting up the stakes at a time when Israeli voters couldn’t make up their minds.

The big policy stakes of the Israeli election

One major development has been the Trump administration’s long-awaited peace plan. The “Deal of the Century” was heavily weighted to Israeli interests, allowing it to annex so much land in the West Bank that the Palestinians would be left without anything like a viable state.

The wording of the document seemed to suggest that Israel could begin seizing this land even if the Palestinians never agreed to the deal’s framework — and just a day before Monday’s election, Netanyahu vowed to quickly annex the land if reelected.

Annexation “will happen within weeks, two months at the most, I hope,” he said in an interview with Israeli public television.

While Gantz has signaled support for annexing part of the West Bank in theory, it would be unlikely to happen if he took power with the backing of center-left parties that fundamentally oppose the idea.

That’s because, if it were to happen, it could force Israel down one of two unacceptable paths.

Option one would be to give the vote to Palestinians and make them full citizens of Israel, leading to an Arab demographic majority and thus ending Israel’s status as a Jewish state. This is not only a recipe for violence between Muslims and Jews but also unacceptable to Israel’s political, who care much more about the state’s Jewish character than its democratic one.

Option two is indefinite Israeli rule over Palestinians without granting them citizenship. There’s a word for keeping an ethnically defined part of your population in permanent second-class citizenship: apartheid.

So long as Israel is in political deadlock, the choice on whether to head toward such outcomes is basically on hold. If Netanyahu can’t win over a defector from another party and Lieberman continues to stay on the sidelines, Israelis and Palestinians won’t know whether they’ll hurtle closer to an existential crisis produced by Netanyahu’s annexations — or step back from the brink (most likely) under Gantz.

The second big change has been Netanyahu’s formal indictment in November, a decision that dramatizes just how serious a threat Netanyahu’s continued premiership poses to Israeli democracy.

The charges are serious, relating to three cases of financial and political misconduct, and carry the possibility of jail time.

His offenses include allegedly attempting to trade political and regulatory favors for favorable coverage in two outlets, the leading daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth (Latest News) and the popular news website Walla. He seems to have succeeded with Walla, allegedly reaching a secret deal to approve a merger that its parent company wanted in exchange for favorable coverage.

Using economic powers to bend the media to your will is a hallmark of authoritarian states, and reflects the many different ways that Israeli democracy has degenerated since Netanyahu’s current time in office began way back in 2009.

His government has worked to marginalize Arab citizens, implicitly slotting them into second-class citizenship by passing a bill formally defining Israel as a state for its Jewish citizens. It has launched an attack on the court system, working to undermine the separation of powers. It has cultivated allies in the private sector, NGOs, and the right-wing press (funded by in part by wealthy Americans) that aim to stifle and delegitimize dissent.

If Netanyahu figures out a way to gain control of the government, he’ll almost certainly work to immunize himself from prosecution — likely by passing the aforementioned law giving himself retroactive immunity (at least while in office). Gantz, by contrast, has vowed to challenge Netanyahu’s corrupt use of the top office.

“I want to ask you tonight: What would you say a few years ago if I told you we would have a prime minister with three indictments — for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust — who will drag the state into three election campaigns to escape trial? Would you believe it?” he said in one campaign speech.

“If I told you all these things five years ago, you would tell me it sounded like a fiction script; that there is no chance that this could ever happen in Israel — that’s [Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip] Erdoğan. But this is the State of Israel in 2020,” he said.

In Israel’s democracy, the choice is very clear: Netanyahu’s slide toward authoritarian rule, or a new course. Based on these results, it seems like voters are more comfortable with the former than many might have thought.