Israel’s third election in twelve months is scheduled for March 2nd. In the previous two, neither of the two major parties—Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud and Benny Gantz’s Blue and White—won enough seats in the hundred-and-twenty-seat Knesset to organize a coalition government. If the polls are right, in a process that defies insanity, Israelis will likely vote on Monday the same way they did twice before, yet produce a different result. That’s because the person who held the balance of power after the first two elections, and will probably hold it again after the third—Avigdor Lieberman, the head of the secular but hard-line-nationalist party Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home)—now seems determined, above all else, to replace Netanyahu, against whom he bears a personal grudge, with Gantz. Netanyahu’s trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust begins on March 17th. Lieberman seems confident that, by then, Gantz, with his help, will have corralled enough Knesset seats to earn a mandate from the President, Reuven Rivlin, to at last form a government. Lieberman has promised that there will be “no fourth election.”
Given the numbers, there is only one way for that promise to be kept. The most recent polls show that Blue and White and Likud are still essentially tied, with around thirty-four seats each. Likud, of late, has been surging; Netanyahu’s critics are feeling a sense of dread. Nevertheless, in every poll since September, the bloc of parties that want to see Netanyahu’s government fall is predicted to get to a majority of between three and five seats. This bloc includes Blue and White; the mainly Israeli-Arab Joint List, which is now polling at around thirteen seats; Labor-Gesher-Meretz, a leftist union, polling at around ten; and Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, at around seven. That is sixty-four seats; Netanyahu’s bloc of Likud and national-Orthodox, settler-messianist, and ultra-Orthodox parties seems likely to get about fifty-six.
Gantz’s problem remains, however, that, although Lieberman’s secularism puts him at odds with Netanyahu’s ultra-Orthodox supporters, his anti-Arab bigotry puts him at odds with any coalition that would include, or too obviously depend on, support from the Joint List. Nor is Lieberman Gantz’s only problem—not, at least, where the Joint List is concerned. Blue and White is itself a brittle coalition, which includes a hard-right faction controlled by the former Likud defense minister Moshe Yaalon, who would be no more willing than Lieberman to rely on the Joint List. The Joint List itself is a coalition of mainly secular and liberal members—such as its leaders, Ayman Odeh and Ahmed Tibi—but also contains a number of anti-Zionist Arab nationalists, residual Communists, and even a few Islamists.
Lieberman, crucially, has dropped a demand he made after the September elections for Blue and White and Likud to form a national-unity government with his party. He and Gantz still prefer that arrangement, but Blue and White leaders have refused to sit under an indicted Prime Minister, and most Likud leaders, fearing retribution from the rank and file, refused to ditch Netanyahu while he was leading the government.
Lieberman is signalling that, instead, he’s open to forming Israel’s version of a minority government, led by Blue and White. His path to it seems clear: as in most parliamentary systems, Israeli governments stand—or fall—on the results of a vote of confidence in the Knesset. The Knesset can defeat a sitting government only when sixty-one members, an absolute majority, vote for a bill of dissolution. Weirdly, however, seating a government requires only a simple majority—which can be less than sixty-one, if some members abstain. (Perhaps half of Joint List members would abstain, because they regard Blue and White’s center-right policies on the peace process and the interests of Israeli Arabs as only marginally better than Netanyahu’s.) If, say, Gantz gets the Presidential mandate and, with the leftist union, Lieberman’s party, and a few members from the Joint List, can win fifty-seven members’ votes to Netanyahu’s fifty-six, a Blue and White government can take office.
Likud would then be forced into the opposition—and, eventually, Netanyahu would be forced out of the Likud leadership, because, even more weirdly, an indicted member of the Knesset cannot serve in the cabinet, except as Prime Minister. Netanyahu’s tenure would end when Gantz takes office, and, once that happened, Likud could again be part of the negotiations. As Gantz told Ynet, if Netanyahu were gone, “there would be a national-unity government in ten minutes.” Lieberman concurs. “More than half of the Likud faction dreams of choosing a new chairman,” he said last week. “They are dreaming of the day when this nightmare will end.”
Yet getting to even a minority government will be tricky. An increasingly desperate Netanyahu is claiming that, since Gantz likely cannot assume power without assistance from the Joint List, he is about to sell out Jews to “terrorist” sympathizers. (Likud’s slogan, “Bibi or Tibi,” is pretty much its whole campaign.) That is a transparent slur against the Joint List’s leaders, who have condemned Palestinian terrorism. Still, Gantz would prefer to assemble a minority government that represents a majority, however slim, of Jewish voters.
The straightforward way to do that would be to poach a few seats from Likud’s bloc, which he could only do by projecting Blue and White’s rightist credentials—the three former military chiefs of staff in its leadership and its insistence that Palestinians, in and out of Israel, endorse the idea that Israel is “Jewish and democratic,” even though that idea, in effect, has meant that members of the Jewish majority are privileged in ways that members of the Arab minority are not. It also means, for Gantz, a somewhat meaner and more personal campaign than he ran the first couple of times.
Challenged by Netanyahu to a public debate, Gantz said that “the serious debate Netanyahu must prepare for is with the prosecution witnesses at his trial.” Last week, a Netanyahu-appointed acting state attorney, Dan Eldad, opened a criminal probe into Fifth Dimension, a cybersecurity company that Gantz ran for three years, before it went bankrupt, in 2018. Staff attorneys working for the prosecution accused Eldad of abuse of power. Gantz erupted in an uncharacteristic show of anger. “This spin against Fifth Dimension is a lie, first word to last!,” he said. (Nevertheless, many commentators credit this “spin” with moving the polls in Likud’s favor.)
Gantz has also got cozy, at least publicly, with the Trump Administration’s peace plan. Netanyahu used it, cynically, to promise legislation to annex the Jordan Valley and other occupied territory—only to have Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and adviser, embarrass him by preëmpting any unilateral action before the election. Gantz, for his part, is embracing the plan’s justifications for Israel holding occupied territory to assure its security. “This is a historic opportunity to shape Israel’s borders and future,” he said. “As Prime Minister, I will work to implement the plan in all its steps.” But, he added, “Hasty and irresponsible actions that are not coördinated with Jordan, Egypt, and moderate Arab countries endanger the ability to implement it”—a qualification that he may hope wavering Likud voters won’t pay much attention to.
“You have to distinguish here between politics and policy,” a former senior diplomat who knows Gantz told me. Gantz “is on the same page” as more moderate advocates for a renewed peace process with the Palestinians; the posturing is just part of the job. “He has to be elected, and to be elected he has to keep his party together.” Still, posturing has its own risks. Gantz’s rightist turn has meant a rather too adamant distancing from the Joint List, whose implicit coöperation he may well need. Before the September election, he met with Odeh for “serious talks” and included him as a speaker at a rally with other opposition party leaders. But, two weeks ago, Gantz told Channel Twelve, “I will not sit with the Joint List and I do not need their support.” As for his partnership with Lieberman, Gantz was ebullient: he and Lieberman had had “great negotiations” and “achieved unprecedented achievements in understanding about religion and the state.”
