Israel swings right, posing a challenge to Western allies

Media reports and exit polling painted a picture of an Israeli election finely balanced between the nationalist right and a moderate political center, but that was before voters had their say. Tuesday’s election victory by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — the strongest showing by his Likud party in more than a decade — looks set to give Israel the most conservative government in its history.

Likud won 30 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, up from the 19 seats that put Netanyahu in power in the previous election. His nearest challenger, Isaac Herzog, who headed the center-left Zionist Union alliance, netted 24. Netanyahu is now on course to be Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. While he still needs at least one centrist coalition partner to top off an otherwise natural alliance of religious and far-right parties, the margin of his victory makes the task of courtship considerably easier; after all, he is almost certainly the only game in town. There is little to stand in the way of the nationalist government Netanyahu promised on the campaign trail.

As predicted, the Joint List, comprising parties favored by Palestinian citizens of Israel, finished a strong third, with 14 seats, and centrists Yesh Atid and Kulanu won 11 and 10, respectively. Settler leader Naftali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi won eight seats, the ultra-Orthodox Shas, seven; United Torah Judaism and Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu, six each; and left-Zionist Meretz, four. 

Bennett, a challenger to Netanyahu for leadership of the right, was the biggest loser, shedding one-third of the vote he achieved in the last election — apparently to Likud. Netanyahu cannibalized Bennett’s vote by smothering him in a bear hug, assuring voters that Bennett had a place in a Netanyahu Cabinet regardless of how many seats he won but warning that only a large Likud vote would guarantee a right-wing government that would include Bennett.

Netanyahu assured his victory by tacking sharply to the right, dispensing with even his rhetorical commitment to the two-state international consensus by declaring that if he was re-elected, there would be no Palestinian state. On election day he resorted to race baiting, warning voters that “Arabs were heading to the polls in huge numbers” and urging Israelis to prevent a “left-wing government supported by the Arabs.”

And he continued the drift to the right Wednesday morning by revealing his list of preferred coalition partners: Habayit Hayehudi, Shas, United Torah Judaism, the far-right Yisrael Beitenu party of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu. Despite President Reuven Rivlin’s desire to see a national unity government, Netanyahu has shown no interest in accommodating Zionist Union or Yesh Atid. Some analysts predicted that Netanyahu might seek centrist allies to ameliorate the diplomatic impact of his swing to the right, but thus far he appears set on building a narrower, more ideologically cohesive coalition.

While the election results will ease his ability to govern at home, his preferred array of partners won’t help him repair his country’s image in the international arena. Much of Israel’s international standing — particularly with the European Union, Israel’s largest trading partner — is contingent on its commitment to a peace process that results in the creation of a Palestinian state. By vocalizing the rejection of Palestinian statehood that has long been implied by his actions, Netanyahu will amplify growing calls in Europe for economic pressure on Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian territories.

Palestinian officials condemned his rejectionism and demanded international action. Ironically, perhaps, his renunciation of the two-state paradigm may provide a veneer of nationalist legitimacy to the Palestinian Authority, which has increasingly become viewed as an integral part of administering the occupation status quo.

Netanyahu’s decisive victory signals the collapse of the traditional Israeli left. The Zionist Union won just three seats more than its two component parties, Labor and Hatnua, previously registered, and Meretz barely scraped over the threshold. The Joint List’s impressive 14 seats was perhaps the most meaningful development in this election, but its impact is less likely to be felt in the Knesset — where it can achieve the status of official opposition only if the Zionist Union is invited into a Netanyahu government — than in providing a platform for a broader Palestinian struggle for civil and national rights.

Despite reaffirming Israel’s status quo, Tuesday’s election signaled several important shifts. Netanyahu has become more powerful and less inclined to hide his right-wing instincts than ever before. But he will preside over an Israel more internationally isolated than it has been in decades — a problem he exacerbated by antagonizing the White House and the Jewish American mainstream.

Palestinian citizens of Israel, emerge as newly emboldened political players who, if they sustain their unity, can have a greater influence over the national political agenda than at any other point since the founding of the state of Israel. For the battered and bruised Israeli left, it has triggered a season of self-reflection, with activists and public intellectuals calling on left-wing parties to acknowledge their alienation from the needs and ambitions of the vast majority of Israel’s working poor, especially recent immigrants and Jews from Arab lands.

More than anything, Tuesday’s vote sent a painful message to those inside and outside Israel looking for a change of course in the country’s foundational conflict with the Palestinians: The Israeli electorate has chosen the status quo.