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The mood was upbeat at the ruling Likud’s vigil overnight through Wednesday. Polls from all three TV channels were unanimous: the Islamist Ra’am party would finish well below the 3.25 percent mark, giving Netanyahu and his traditional partner a narrow majority in the Knesset, 61 seats to the 59 of the opposition. the morning Netanyahu arrived at the Likud vigil and won a stunning victory.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Photo: Ariel Schalit / AP
Islamist leader Mansour Abbas protested. He expected strong support from Israel’s Bedouins, most of them living in the southern Arava and Negev deserts. Forecasters, Abbas said, had missed these voters, many of them nomads or slums. He was correct. On Wednesday morning, the radio interrupted its broadcast with a flash of news from the electoral authority: the last few votes counted had overthrown the game and brought Ra’am to the Knesset by a wide margin.
However, all is not lost by Netanyahu. At the beginning of the election campaign, both he and Abbas broke a deep taboo: they made it clear that cooperation between the Arab parties and the Jewish nationalist right, hitherto unthinkable, is legitimate and possible. These tunes sparked fierce opposition from both Netanyahu’s allies and the three other Arab parties, with whom Ra’am has been on a joint list in the last election.
Differences within the Arab bloc could not be bridged, and Ra’am went to the polls alone, apparently doomed to disappear. But on Tuesday, the party garnered almost as many votes as the other three Arab parties combined, a dizzying result for both Arab party politics and Israeli politics in general. The Arabs of Israel have made it clear: they are tired of being in constant opposition, without influence.
An Abbas spokesperson stated on Wednesday:
– We have not yet decided which of the blocks we will support. At the core of our part is gang violence in our societies. It must be fought.
Photo: Ziv Koren
Ten percent of the votes in the elections, just over 400,000, are votes by mail, which will begin to be counted on Wednesday night. Most postal voters are soldiers, and the Arab parties cannot expect many votes from them. Ra’am’s term in the Knesset is certain, but if Netanyahu gets a couple more terms from the post-voters, Mansour Abbas could lose his spectacular role as leader of the wave.
Thus, a Netanyahu government is possible, but it is far from secure. However, a government without him and his Likud is absolutely impossible. The opposition is made up not only of left-wing, liberal and Arab parties, but also several Jewish nationalist parties that have vowed never to have anything to do with the corruption accused of Netanyahu. These parties, “The New Hope” of Gideon Saar, and “Israel our home” of Russian immigrants, refuse to participate in a government that depends on Islamist support.
A realistic setting it is the same stalemate as after the two 2019 elections. These elections favored Netanyahu, as he remained in his post as an expedition minister until the next election. But in one respect, 2019 was completely different in 2021: Netanyahu has not yet been charged with corruption. After previous deaths, he let time pass in peace while he and other candidates failed to form a government.
This time he’s in a hurry. Next week, his trial begins in earnest. In December, when he forced this election, he had one specific goal in mind: to win a majority in the Knesset for legislation that would end the trial and limit the powers of the Supreme Court. He also hopes, through appointments, to gain control of the Prosecutor’s Office.
Netanyahu does not speak openly about any of this. “I don’t do those things,” he says. But your closest continually works with that goal in mind. Therefore, he not only needs the passive support of Mansour Abbas, in the form of abstentions so that his coalition does not fall. He needs Abba’s active support, in the form of votes in favor of laws that exempt him from prosecution and clip the wings of the Supreme Court. For Abbas to lend himself to such radical measures, Netanyahu must promise him a lot and show him that he is truly prepared to deal with the gang violence in Arab cities, with all that comes with new and expensive police and special forces.
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