Editor’s note: News reports and exit polls from Tuesday’s Israeli election show Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his chief challenger, Isaac Herzog of the center-left Zionist Union, nearly equal in claiming seats in the Knesset in Tuesday’s election. However, Netanyahu has claimed victory with 28 seats for his party compared to 27 to the Zionist Union’s tally; he may well be in the best position to lead the next government.
Sixty-one seats are needed to form a ruling coalition in the 120-seat Knesset. We asked two scholars for their initial reaction to the election and its potential implications.
Short-term gains and long-term shifts
Gershon Shafir, Professor of Sociology, University of California San Diego
There is no doubt that Prime Minister Netanyahu has pulled an electoral rabbit out of the ballot box at the last possible minute. His Likud party is tied with the Zionist Union that, in the run up to election day, led in the polls.
He did so by cannibalizing the votes of the other parties of the right-wing, or nationalist, bloc. And herein lays his problem.
There is a decent, but far from certain, chance that he will be able to form a new government, his fourth. This would be a significant short-term accomplishment. But long-term trends threaten him and his bloc.
Since 1977, Israel has been electing right-wing governments, with two exceptions: that of Labor leaders Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak who were also generals in a country preoccupied with security. But now, for the first time, a civilian leader from the left, Yitzhak Herzog, presented a credible alternative.
Since the 2011 social protest movement, many Israelis have put their stagnant standard of living and the country’s growing economic polarization – among the highest in the world and comparable to the US – at the forefront of their concerns.
Another social justice candidate, Moshe Kahalon, also did surprisingly well. Netanyahu, by contrast, is focused on Iran, ISIS, Hamas, and other real and imaginary security threats. He remains vulnerable to the social protest camp.
The left bloc has several additional accomplishments to be proud of.
The United Arab Party will be the third largest party in the 20th Knesset and will wield a measure of influence Palestinian Arab citizens never have had before in Israel. It is equally significant that this new Arab party chose to emphasize the wishes of its mostly Arab voters for integration and equality with Jews and not for a separatist-nationalist agenda.
It is also the case that the momentum of several right-wing projects has been thwarted.
Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett who seemed poised to expand outside the Russian immigrant and national-orthodox camps respectively and shape new and more aggressive and religious-light Israeli identities, saw their parties rapidly shrink in these elections.
Finally, a truly troubling alliance of the ultra-orthodox with the most explicitly racist elements of Israeli society didn’t make it into the Knesset.
In the longer run, the recovery of the Labor Party (aka the Zionist Union) and the turning back of right-wing ideological projects, will lead to a different Knesset.
