Israel's election deadlocks as Arab parties win 19 Knesset seats

Israel’s general election has ended in a deadlock, with Benjamin Netanyahu and his rival Gadi Eisenkot each unable to assemble a governing coalition without the support of the Arab parties, which secured a historic 19 seats in the Knesset.

As Sunday World reported on 1 November, the result leaves Netanyahu politically alive despite polls that had suggested Israeli voters were tiring of him and his far-right coalition partners. The Arab parties’ showing is the pivot on which the next government turns.

The numbers, as set out in that account, are these. Netanyahu’s bloc has fallen from 68 seats to 53. Not all votes had been counted at the time of writing, but the count remaining was not expected to change the balance. Record numbers of Israelis turned out, and the country’s politics came out split down the middle.

That split is not the ordinary kind. Two halves usually mean two sets of policies. Here, according to the columnist, it does not. Every contesting party other than the Arab ones campaigned on a Zionist coalition, meaning one that excludes the Arab parties. So the arithmetic and the politics point in opposite directions.

The columnist, Dr Oscar van Heerden, a senior research fellow at the Centre for African Diplomacy and Leadership at the University of Johannesburg, reads the gap between the polls and the result as an example of the Bradley effect, the social desirability bias named after Tom Bradley, the California mayor who ran for governor and lost after leading in the surveys. Voters, on this reading, tell pollsters what sounds acceptable rather than what they intend to do.

He applies it bluntly. The polls, he writes, had suggested Israeli society was fed up with Netanyahu, and the result said otherwise. He describes the outcome as evidence of deep racism in Israeli society, of cognitive dissonance and of moral panic, and argues that no party other than the Arab ones proposed an end to the war in Gaza.

Those are the columnist’s judgements, offered in an opinion column, and they are his to make. What is not in dispute is the arithmetic he sets out.

If no deal is struck between the two main candidates and the Arab parties, Netanyahu continues as prime minister and a fresh election is declared within six months. He could try a minority government, but the columnist judges that a non-starter because the opposition holds most of the seats.

Eisenkot’s alternative is the one the piece calls unthinkable: a coalition with the Arab parties that removes Netanyahu and negotiates the terms on which Arab politicians would hold executive office. The Arab parties would push hard, and their demands would include an end to hostilities in Gaza and the West Bank. The columnist expects that to be a stretch too far for Eisenkot.

Netanyahu, on losing his majority, moved to cast doubt on the Arab parties’ result, spreading claims that foreign governments had assisted them. The columnist names that for what it is, Islamophobia from Likud, and rejects the foreign interference claim.

He also records that Netanyahu wanted to strike Iran days before the vote and that his generals refused, reading the request as an attempt to move voters on the eve of the election.

Underneath all of it sits the question the columnist says the election does not answer. If every Zionist party has made clear it will never support an independent Palestinian state, then the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank gain nothing from a change of coalition partner in Jerusalem.

For South African readers, the practical consequence is straightforward. Until a coalition is built, Israel’s government is unchanged, its prime minister is unchanged, and the war that has dominated its politics continues to set the terms of its foreign relations, including with Pretoria. The six-month clock to another election is the only deadline on the table.