Israel

In these United States, there is always—or almost always—a kind of a lull in the frenzy just before Election Day in presidential election years. The candidates have or haven’t made their cases. The rallies are over. The officials charged with overseeing the voting procedure itself take over and make ready the polling places and the ballots or voting machines. The network news teams poised to cover the vote-counting run mostly background pieces so as to have the time to prepare for their Big Day. And the electorate, the actual people poised to cast the actual ballots, are thus given a bit of breathing space in which to reflect on their options and their choices as a way of preparing to exercise their franchise and, in so doing, to participate personally in charting the nation’s course in the coming four years.

The lead-up to the election earlier this week in Israel was nothing at all like that. Just the opposite, actually: from my perch here in the cheap seats, things actually appeared to be speeding up and becoming, if anything, even more frenzied in the days leading up to Tuesday’s election as the candidates displayed ever-heightened eagerness to step out of their own shadows and into a favorable enough light to win them the lion’s share of the votes about to be cast.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, for example, announced his theoretical intention to begin annexing parts of the West Bank. This, of course, would be impossible practically or politically, which reality was rather starkly mirrored by the almost complete lack of response to the proposal from the Palestinians themselves…or from any other quarter of serious consequence. But the P.M., still reeling from the Attorney General’s announcement last month that he, Bibi, is about to face the AG’s effort to bring charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust against him and taking a page from our own president’s playbook, chose to make his dramatic announcement as a way of playing to his own base…and making it clear that a vote for anyone but for himself will lead Israel directly towards the unpalatable, but without him inevitable, prospect of having a second terror state on its longest border. And any Israeli regardless of political orientation will agree easily that one is more than enough! 

For his part, Benny Gantz had his own challenge to face, namely convincing the public to look past the slightly troubling fact that he has no political experience at all and that holding the highest office in the land would thus be his first foray into politics. But—and this had to be the truly challenging part—he had to pull that off without making him sound like the Israeli Donald Trump. (That comparison wouldn’t have been all that fair:  before the incumbent was elected, the United States had already had four presidents who came to the presidency without ever having been previously elected to public office: Zachary Taylor, Ulysses S. Grant, Herbert Hoover, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Other than Hoover, however, all were war heroes. And Hoover served as Secretary of Commerce under Presidents Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge, which leaves Trump as the sole example of an American president with no prior record of public or military service at all.) Still, Gantz—and his slightly unexpected political bedfellow, Yair Lapid—gave it their all and, at least in my opinion, managed to make Gantz sound not like a dilettante or a last-minute dabbler but like a serious politician poised to lead the nation forward in a way that would both address its security needs (Gantz, a well-respected general, served as chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces from 2011 to 2015) and find a path forward to peace with the neighbors and their allies throughout the Arab and Muslim world. (Also not lost on anyone is the fact that Israeli law forbids a Chief of Staff from entering politics for a period of three years following his service to the IDF in that capacity, so this was actually Benny Gantz’s first opportunity to run for election—which only made him feel to most far like less someone who somehow arrived out of nowhere to run for the highest office in the land and more like a leader-in-waiting who had no choice but to bide his time until the opportunity to run finally presented itself.)  

And mixed into all of this were the side-show candidates, another way in which Israeli elections tend to differ from American ones: under our rules, candidates with no chance to win tend to fall away even before their parties’ conventions, while in Israel the fringe candidates remain vocally and fully visibly in the race until Election Day. Indeed, the Israeli political system itself more or less precludes the premature dismissal of almost anyone at all, including people with no real chance of winning, for the simple reason that it is generally understood that the chances any party at all has of winning a 61-seat majority in the 120-seat Knesset is basically zero. (This is historically so as well: in the seventy-one years since Israel was founded as a nation in 1948, it has only happened once that a single party had a majority of seats in the Knesset…and the slimness of that majority—one single seat—led to elections within a year.) And so, other than for those few months in 1969, Israel has always been ruled by some sort of coalition—either a so-called “grand coalition” featuring only the two largest parties or, far more commonly, a coalition cobbled together by the leader of the party that won the most votes that inevitably includes people who would be marginal figures in most other settings. (Readers unfamiliar with this strange process that regularly invests parties just large enough to have a handful of seats—or a single seat—in the Knesset with power far out of sync with the size of their supporter-base can click here to see the very thoughtful and thorough essay on just that topic by Evelyn Gordon published in the on-line magazine Mosaic just last week, which I read carefully and from which I myself learned a lot.)

And now we have the results. Sort of. Or rather we do, but without knowing with anything like real certainty where they will lead. This is also a huge difference from our American system where, yes, the results of the popular vote in a presidential election have to be either confirmed or not confirmed by the Electoral College, but where the outcome of that vote can be predicted more or less certainly once the popular vote is counted. (Yes, there is the issue of the so-called “faithless elector” in our country to reckon with, but it’s not much of one: out of the 23,548 electors who have participated in our nation’s 58 presidential elections since 1789, only 157 have voted for candidates other than the one they were supposed to support…and of them 71 had to support an alternate candidate because the one they were theoretically supposed to support had died between Election Day and the vote of the Electoral College.) But in Israel, voters vote for parties, not candidates, and the normal practice is for the President of the country to invite the leader of the party that won the most seats to form a government. As of when I am writing this, that has yet to happen.

To most outsiders, it feels like a kind of a tie: 35 seats for the Likud, Netanyahu’s party, and precisely the same amount for the Blue and White party led by Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid. Yes, the Likud got more votes, but only about 14,000 more—which margin turned out not to be meaningful in terms of Knesset seats awarded. So, a tie. But also not a tie because the nature of coalition politics in Israel puts the Likud firmly in the driver’s seat with a coalition of ultra-Orthodox and right-wing parties bringing their combined thirty seats to the ball, thus giving Bibi the ability easy to form a government with a 65-seat majority. Not such a big majority, it’s true. But the parties who promised to join Gantz and Lapid in a new government only won twenty seats. And so the 35-35 tie turns more meaningfully into a 65 to 55 victory for the Likud.  Or does it? There are apparently still tens of thousands of ballots left to be counted and if those new votes grant even a single extra seat to the Blue and White party, then that could conceivably be enough to force the President’s hand and oblige him to ask Benny Gantz to see if he can form a government. And with that the rules of the game would change yet again. He might not be able to do it, but he also might—the nature of coalition politics in Israel is that no one dances with the one who brung him (or her), that the system resembles more than anything a vastly consequential game of musical chairs in which there are more bottoms than chairs to accommodate them and whoever scrambles fast enough when the music stops stays in the game, and in which it isn’t ever really over until it’s really over.

So, at least as I write this on Thursday morning, it feels like there will be a fifth Netanyahu government. That is either good or not good for Israel, but for Americans like myself who support Israel wholeheartedly and without reservation it means coming face to face with an unpalatable reality, or at least with one widely perceived as unpalatable. I am not a huge fan of the Prime Minister’s, and not solely because he betrayed my colleagues in Israel by reneging on the Kotel deal after it was widely considered to be a done deal. Indeed, there are lots of reasons to feel uncertain about his leadership and surely not least of all because he is facing indictment on multiple charges involving bribery and corruption. And yet, despite it all, I continue to be a firm supporter of the democratic ideal. The people spoke. The man won, sort of. We have no choice but to move forward and, as we do, to support vocally and unequivocally not the man or the party, but the inalienable right of the people to choose their own leaders and, in so doing, to chart their own destiny forward into the future. What American could argue with that?