Your Israeli Elections Questions, Answered
What happens if there's a tie? Why does Netanyahu's base still support him? How will his indictment play out if he wins? And much more.
Polls close shortly in Israel tonight at 10pm, or 3pm EST. Lots of you have sent in questions about the election, by email and on social media. So here’s my attempt to answer as many of them as I can.
Who’s going to win?
As a journalist, I report on the present, not the future, so am not in the business of making predictions—especially about the Middle East, which tend to make folks look very foolish. But if you want a sense of the possible outcomes of this election, I recommend this piece by Anshel Pfeffer.
If two or more parties tie for most seats, who gets to make the governing coalition?
Israel’s Knesset contains 120 seats, so 61 are necessary to form a majority government. No party is projected to get close to that many seats by itself. This means that any potential prime minister will have to cobble together a coalition with several other parties. So, how does that potential prime minister and his party get anointed? After the returns are in, Israel’s president—in this case, Reuven Rivlin—asks the leader of each party who they recommend as prime minister. Based on the results, he then picks the party that has the best chance of forming a government and offers them first crack at it.
This means that even if two parties are tied in seats, the one with more support in the Knesset will get the nod. In very rare instances, this can even result in a party winning fewer seats than the competition, but still getting the premiership. Thus, in 2009, the centrist Kadima party led by Tzipi Livni actually won one more seat than Netanyahu’s Likud, but because the overall Knesset make-up favored the right, she was unable to form a coalition and Netanyahu triumphed. (A similar scenario is possible this election, with the centrist Blue & White playing the role of Kadima.)
If a party doesn't pass the election threshold, what happens to the votes that went to that party? Are they redistributed? If so, by whom or what method?
Israel has a 3.25% electoral threshold for getting into the Knesset. If a party fails to get that percentage of the overall vote, all its votes are effectively wasted. They do not get redistributed to any particular party. Rather, the Knesset seats are apportioned proportionately to all parties that made the threshold.
How would Bibi’s indictment proceed if he is re-elected? What would this mean for his capacity to govern and what are the legal ramifications?
On February 28, Israel’s attorney general Avichai Mandelblit announced that he would move to indict Netanyahu on three corruption charges, one for bribery and two for breach of trust. Notably, Mandelblit was Netanyahu's own cabinet secretary and appointed on his watch, so despite Bibi’s protestations, this was no partisan hit job. Several of Netanyahu’s own aides turned state’s witness against him and were granted immunity in exchange for their testimony. Netanyahu has argued that the will of the voters should decide whether these charges have merit, but that won’t stop the Israeli court system. So, what happens if he wins?
Normally, Netanyahu would next face a hearing to confront the charges, and the attorney general would then decide whether to prosecute the case (which seems likely, given the evidence assembled). However, Netanyahu has previously floated legislation that would immunize a sitting prime minister from prosecution, dubbed “the French law” after similar legislation in France. The proposed law was rebuffed by Bibi’s previous coalition, but he could make it the fulcrum of his new one, offering various bribes and inducements to get all of his new partners to agree to immunize him. Given that many of those potential coalition partners are small hard-right and ultra-Orthodox parties, they would have tremendous leverage over Netanyahu, and potentially be able to extract many concessions from him, from annexation of the West Bank to control over religion and state. Needless to say, this would not be healthy for Israel’s democracy and could cause a serious crisis.
At this point why is anyone voting for Netanyahu? Why Likud?
Many foreign readers, watching Bibi’s demagogic campaign and corruption cases from afar, sent in some variant of this question, baffled by how Netanyahu continues to persevere. The reasons why Bibi maintains a core base of support—some 34% of Israeli voters told pollsters they want him to stay prime minister—are naturally varied and depend on the voters. Here’s just a couple:
1) They don’t trust any of his rivals with the responsibility of security and statecraft. Netanyahu has been in power for 10 years and quashed all internal and external options to his rule, ensuring that few have the credentials to match his. In that time, he has also forged close relationships with many world leaders from Trump to Putin to India’s Narendra Modi, and become one of the most recognizable politicians in the world. His voters believe that no alternative can match his stature. (I wrote a rejoinder to this claim here.)
2) They support the status quo and trust him to maintain it. As Netanyahu’s biographer Anshel Pfeffer has written, “Despite his image, Netanyahu is not a warmonger. He is the most risk-averse of Israeli leaders, averse to making war or peace.” During this election campaign, multiple rockets were fired on Israeli population centers from Gaza, including several that hit Tel Aviv and one that destroyed a family home and put a baby and grandmother in the hospital. If this happened in America, we’d have gone to war several times over. But Netanyahu, who prizes calm and stability above all, instead worked with Hamas in Gaza to reduce tensions and avoid a wider conflict. The flip-side of this is Netanyahu’s obstinate unwillingness to seriously advance a peace process toward a Palestinian state, fearing any change to the status quo. Many Israelis on the right object to Netanyahu’s aversion to conflict in Gaza, just as many on the left oppose his reticence on Palestinian statehood. But for his voters, many of whom have known years of terrorism and war, Netanyahu’s commitment to static and stability is a big plus.
Needless to say, none of these voters see the plight of the Palestinians as a pressing issue that should affect their vote.
Why has the popularity of the Labor Party, once the dominant center-left party in Israel, declined so dramatically?
As above, the reasons are manifold, as complex phenomena rarely have a single cause. Here are two:
1) The collapse of the left’s peace agenda. For years, Labor politicians promised a diplomatic agenda that would deliver both security and peace for Israelis. Instead, they got neither. The Oslo peace process was derailed by suicide bombings and intifada. The Israeli disengagement from Gaza—though not done under Labor—resulted in thousands of rockets raining down on southern Israel, as did the Israeli pullout from Lebanon. Discredited on one of the fundamental issues of Israeli politics, the party has never quite recovered, and failed to put forward a new diplomatic initiative.
2) The failure to navigate Israel’s identity politics. In America, the left is known for its sensitivity to the needs and history of the country’s minorities, while the right struggles to branch out beyond its largely white base. In Israel, the situation is reversed. Labor grew out of Israel’s Ashkenazi European elite, and though the face of Israel’s population has changed dramatically since the party’s founding, Labor’s face has not. Today, half of Israelis are Mizrahi Jews who fled Arab and Muslims lands. Traditionally, they were looked down upon and discriminated against by the Ashkenazi community and its politicians—until Menachem Begin’s Likud party began courting their votes. Netanyahu has continued this tradition, at least rhetorically, while Labor has struggled to match it, often fielding slates of largely Ashkenazi candidates. Recognizing this weakness, the party’s voters recently installed a new Mizrahi leader, telecom executive Avi Gabbay, but he has largely failed to attract Mizrahi voters to the cause.
Can someone explain to me what's going on with Israeli politics and the word “gevalt” right now?
Last election, when polls showed Netanyahu’s Likud losing ground to the opposition Zionist Camp party, he went on a last-minute media blitz warning right-wing voters that the right was in danger of losing power if Likud was not the largest party. Rather than project the confidence of a victor, in other words, Bibi cried “gevalt” and played the loser. It worked: a dead heat in the polls turned into a six-seat win for Likud.
This election, several of the parties have taken a leaf out of Bibi’s book, and are similarly warning their constituencies that they are in danger of either being eclipsed by others or even not making the electoral threshold entirely. While some of these warnings are undoubtedly accurate, at this point, these “gevalt” campaigns are more a get-out-the-vote tactic than an honest accounting of where the parties see themselves.
Questions? Comments? Illegal exit polls? I’d love to hear from you. Reply to this email, or drop me a line at yrosenberg@tabletmag.com. You can also find me on Twitter and Facebook. And be sure to tell your friends about this newsletter!