Relief and Disappointment

An election with mixed results

Well, we don’t have the final final results yet, but the current results are adequately clear to make some observations.

First is that Bibi and his Likud coalition party did surprisingly better than one would expect after governing over the three worst failures in Israel’s history (Oct 7, Meron, and the lack of aviation security). Nevertheless, the bottom line is that the self-styled “Right” (which nowadays largely means Bibi groupies + extremists + anti-Zionists rather than traditional right-wing Zionists) is at the weakest it’s been in nearly two decades.

In part, this is due to their voters becoming disillusioned with their failures and incompetence and corruption, and switching to other parties. But, ironically, it’s also due to Ben-Gvir! His fiery rhetoric against Arabs incentivized many more Arabs to vote than usually happens, resulting in the overall number of Jewish seats being smaller. It’s a classic example of braggadacio coming at the cost of strategic accomplishments, which is (one of) the fundamental problems of Ben-Gvir.

We also see that a clear majority of the Zionist Jewish population wants change:

Unfortunately, the “Change” bloc did not manage to reach a majority of seats, which means that Israel is stuck again. We might get stuck in a yet another cycle of endless elections, or Bibi might work some magic, or there might be some kind of minority government, or there might be a unity government. Nobody knows.

Of course, given that there are 88 Zionist Jewish seats, the majority of which are in broad agreement regarding security issues, there theoretically ought to be no problem forming a stable government. Likud together with Yashar (Eisenkott), B’Yachad (Bennett) and Yisrael Beiteinu (Lieberman) have no real disagreement on security issues and collectively number 66 seats. You could even add the Democrats for social issues, and perhaps Smotrich too. But alas, this is very unlikely to happen, largely because of one person and the way he has conducted himself in politics.

Regarding the charedi front, it’s a relief to finally have their political strength weakened. But a great disappointment was the utter failure of HaTzibur HaCharedi, the promising new party pushing for charedi responsibility, which hardly got any votes. There’s a lot of discussion about the reasons for this. Yet the bottom line is that it least it proves something very clearly: charedi society is not willing to change from within towards taking responsibility for itself and for Israel. Change will instead have to be forced upon it.