Israel-watching is a split-screen activity this week. On Sunday afternoon, more than 18,000 people assembled in Washington for the start of the annual AIPAC policy conference, where they will celebrate Israel's achievements and its resilient partnership with the United States. Meanwhile, an ocean away, despondent Israelis dragged themselves to the polls on Monday in the country's third general election since April.
Never has the juxtaposition of "the thrill of victory" and "the agony of defeat" — to quote the old "Wide World of Sports" opening — better described a national predicament.
While Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu boasts of unprecedented coordination with the Trump administration and other global actors, Israel's domestic politics are a shambles. A transitional government with limited authority to make major decisions has managed affairs of state since the 20th Knesset was dissolved in December 2018. Making matters worse, the frustrating hat trick of elections, at a cumulative cost of almost $3 billion, has come at the very tangible expense of other spending priorities such as the construction of hospitals and classrooms.
The irony couldn't be greater. At the same time that Israel and its advocates are toiling — with no small degree of success — to repel challenges to the legitimacy of the Jewish state, a growing menace to the nation's validity looms from its own citizens. Israelis are distraught over the recklessness of their stewards. Israel's President Reuven Rivlin put it succinctly. "When the nation witnesses its leaders spewing hatred at one another, boycotting entire communities and seeking votes via a strategy of divisiveness," he lamented in January, "what is left for them to believe in?"
Ugliness was the defining characteristic of the just-ended campaign, in which wiretaps played a starring role. Last Friday, Benny Gantz, head of the Blue-White Party and Netanyahu's chief competitor to form Israel's next cabinet, fired his chief strategist after a recording surfaced of the aide confiding that Gantz represented "a danger to the people of Israel." (It soon emerged that Netanyahu himself was involved in the leak.) Across the aisle, longtime Netanyahu consigliere Natan Eshel was caught with his pants down after he was heard disparaging Netanyahu's core "non-Ashkenazi" base of Israelis whose families originated from the Middle East and North Africa. "They hate everything and we've succeeded in whipping up that hatred," Eshel postulated, summarizing smugly that "hatred is what unites our camp."
Other malicious shenanigans also may have influenced Monday's vote directly and unfairly. Netanyahu's Likud Party was accused of releasing internal survey data over the weekend, in open contravention of Israel's election laws. Gantz alleged Sunday that Netanyahu was sowing fear of coronavirus outbreaks in Blue-White strongholds to keep voters away from the ballot box. Fake-news scares came against the backdrop of Netanyahu's dubious smear against the judges presiding over his upcoming corruption trial as "leftists," a seemingly invented charge that he then dared them to deny.
Turnout was key to the results. Having endured two recent elections in close succession, Israelis already knew where their allegiances lie. The main decision that faced members of the electorate was whether to come and vote their conscience or just stay home. Many said half-jokingly that they would take a break this time and return to perform their civic duty in a fourth ballot after the summer. To the extent that exit polls can be taken as reliable — and assuming that the numbers do not fluctuate significantly — the Likud and its satellites apparently proved able to bring out their supporters and prevail as the largest faction in the incoming Knesset. Whether they will control a governing majority remains unclear for now.
And the larger problem confronting Israel is that Monday is always followed by Tuesday — and the rifts within its famously cohesive society will not be healed any time soon. Earlier hopes of crafting a unity government have been buried ostensibly in the wake of the acidic contest and its lingering, bitter taste. But even if Netanyahu and Gantz are somehow able to overcome their differences, join forces and grant Israel a measure of stability, public confidence will be scarred still by the sudden about-face of two men who pledged vehemently not to place Israel's fate in each other's hands.
