Two political parties, the progressive-Zionist Meretz and the Palestinian-nationalist Balad, failed to meet the 3.25% minimum required to enter the Knesset, thus costing the anti-Netanyahu half of Israeli politics around 6% of total votes. Netanyahu’s 64-seat majority is almost entirely a function of this threshold mechanism, which caused well over a quarter of a million votes below the threshold to disappear. And here’s the rub. In Balad’s case, the implosion had been predicted for weeks, due to his decision to run separately and without even a vote-sharing agreement with the other Arab factions. In the case of Meretz, the same question was raised anxiously in September, with calls from campaigners and centre-left leaders for Labor and Meretz to unite to avoid falling below the threshold. The Labor Party refused, even though it was widely understood that the failure of any of the small parties in the anti-Netanyahu bloc to cross the threshold would break the four-year deadlock and hand Netanyahu his victory. Everyone understood, and many predicted, that the anti-Netanyahu camp was headed for failure by the simple fact that so many of his parties were teetering on the brink. Get The Times of Israel Daily Edition by email and never miss our top stories By signing up, you agree to the terms In other words, the left and Balad set themselves on fire, their leadership too committed to party brands, their own position and their narrow ideological nuances to respond to a clear and present electoral threat. They spoke of Netanyahu’s imminent return to power as a huge risk, but then did whatever was necessary to make that outcome more likely. Balad MK party head Sami Abu Shahadeh arrives to vote at a polling station for Israel’s general election November 1, 2022. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)
Lamentations
While party leaders have been doing what failed politicians usually do — squabbling over blame — the broader leftist discourse since Election Day has not shown as much clarity as one might expect about the left’s own role in engineering its loss. . Instead, there was much lamentation and dire predictions. “You want Bibi, but you’ll get Ben Gvir,” Sima Kadmon, the iconic left-wing political columnist at Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper, blasted right-wing voters in her column on Wednesday. “You, by your own hand, will bring about the end of the country as we knew it.” Celebrities threatened to leave the country. Reports claimed that the word “emigration” enjoyed a surge in Google searches and social media in Hebrew, along with phrases such as “how to leave the country” and “the country is lost.” Philosopher Asa Kasher, long believed to be a key figure who helped draft the IDF’s code of conduct, suddenly spoke out in a Facebook post about the “Haredi mutation” and the “nationalist mutation” of Judaism that had taken over the country and he declared that he was no longer a Jew, but merely of “Jewish extraction.” And so went the left-wing landscape of Jewish social media, until even far-left commentators began to express their distaste for such a lamentable wish. Meretz party supporters react as the results of the Israeli election are announced, in Jerusalem, November 1, 2022. (Flash90)
The long-ago collapse of the Israeli left
Certainly, the passion is understandable. This is an age that imposes on its contemporaries a permanent state of moral panic. Some of it is structural: social media algorithms create radical echo chambers, the economics of a shrinking class of journalists drive a news cycle permanently set to the highest volume, and so on. Some of it is substantial: A very real and dramatic change is underway in the politics of the democratic world, including Israeli politics. It’s hard not to connect Ben Gvir’s rise to Marine Le Pen’s stunning 41% vote in the French presidential election, the victory of ex-fascist political elements in Italy in September, or far-right politics in the US. Canada, Brazil, Hungary and elsewhere. Formerly fringe right-wing actors who now claim to have intervened seem to be on the march everywhere. The reasons have been much debated in recent years, from dire warnings of a “democratic retreat” to more empathetic diagnoses that suggest these radical constituencies are responding to hollow national and transnational institutions that have failed to address their needs and concerns. In Israel, as in other countries, the votes for radical political forces come from the fringes, from poorer, marginalized communities. In Ben Gvir’s case, many of his voters come from Mizrahi-majority developing cities, where talk of recent crime waves and rising inter-ethnic tension is a source of daily fear and suffering. It is a vote against both 12 years of neglected Netanyahu governments and 18 months of Bennett-Lapid. These forces will not be defeated by moral rebuke alone. the social realities that drive them must be addressed. However, while this rightward shift in Israel fits perfectly with broader global trends, there is one unique feature in Israel’s case, one that sets Israel apart and helps explain the explosion of apocalyptic discourse on the Israeli left: the Israeli left has collapsed long before the Israeli far-right came to power. Otzma Yehudit party head MK Itamar Ben Gvir speaks to supporters as Israeli election results are announced at the party’s campaign headquarters in Jerusalem, November 1, 2022. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90) If one counts Labor and Meretz as “left” – they are the only parties with which a majority of voters identify that way – then the decline is fairly easy to spot. Labor and Meretz won a combined 44% of the vote in 1992, the year Yitzhak Rabin was elected and began the peace process with the Palestinians. That number dropped to 34% in 1996, ushering in Netanyahu’s first term in office. It then continued to fall, partly because of an experimental change in electoral rules (the direct election of a prime minister) and partly because of growing disillusionment with the peace process that had become the defining political project of the left. It reached 28% in 1999, 20% in 2003 after the wave of suicide bombers of the Second Intifada, 19% in 2006 and 13% in 2009. Two relatively successful Labor leaders — Shelly Yachimovich and Isaac Herzog (now president of Israel) — managed to reverse the trend for a while, with 16% in 2013 and 22.6% in 2015. But it didn’t last. In the five elections of the past 43 months, the left’s fortunes have collapsed, winning 8%, 9%, 6%, 10.7% and 7%. In other words, the Israeli left did not collapse in a sudden, recent right-wing decline of the electorate. It has been deadlocked for three decades. And three decades of failure suggest a simple, inexorable conclusion that hangs over the anxiety over election results and the patina of moral panic that accompanies it: The left that just collapsed, in terms of raw political strategy, doesn’t deserve to exist.
No win in hand
It’s a point few raise now, perhaps out of misplaced sympathy: Even if the Lapido-led camp had won, it would not have actually won. it would have simply denied Netanyahu victory. Prime Minister Yair Lapid visits the grave of his father, Tommy, on election day, November 1, 2022 (Elad Gutman/Yesh Atid) As many have noted, this is because two Arab-majority parties, Hadash and Balad, supported voting with Lapid against a Netanyahu-led coalition, but almost certainly would not vote for a coalition led by Lapidon. The centre-left’s political strategy was, in effect, the hope that a fifth consecutive failure for Netanyahu could see an increasingly disillusioned religious-right alliance replace him. Yet this very hope is a tacit acknowledgment of the basic hopelessness at the heart of leftist politics. If the right had responded to another setback by toppling Netanyahu, it would almost certainly mean an even bigger right-wing coalition than the one that will be sworn in later this month. Right-wing political forces opposed to Netanyahu, such as the Yisrael Beytenu party or former Likudnik MKs in Benny Gantz’s National Unity platform, are now parked on Lapid’s side of the playbook as they hope and plot Netanyahu’s political demise. They may well return to their political home after Netanyahu leaves. The political left has effectively given up all hope of ever returning to power, surrendering itself sometimes, with the help of temporarily disillusioned rightists, to fighting the other side to the draw.
The Shrinking Race
It gets worse. Even that goal will soon slip from his grasp. Tuesday’s election underscored a point long known but flatly ignored by the political establishment and leaders of the left: He is losing the demographic contest, and fast. Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau speaks to religious-Zionist yeshiva students during the “Yeshivas March” against conversion and kashrut reforms, in Jerusalem, January 30, 2022. (Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90) Israeli politics is built on cultural, religious, and ethnic divisions often called migzarim, “sectors” or shvatim, “tribes.” The electoral system itself—a single national constituency with proportional voting for party lists—is designed to reflect and express these racial affinities as coherent parliamentary actors. The specific…
