(Very) Quick Thoughts on Israeli Election Results

From abroad in Israel, Armin Rosen offers insight on the recent elections there.

N-Overperformers: mainstream and centrist parties like Likud and Kadima, who were projected to get less than 50 seats in late polling last week. They got 55.

Underperformers: Yisrael Beiteinu and Shas. Beiteinu was projected to win 18-20 seats and ended up with 15. Shas polled at a consistent 12 seats but has historically overachieved on election day. They got 11 seats, bringing the ultra-orthodox/traditionalist bloc down to 15 seats, or around 12 percent of the total seats in the Knesset. Beiteinu’s low total indicates that Likud was successful in siphoning off votes from the far right while Kadima’s election day bounce seems to have come from left-wing voters terrified by the prospect of a Likud-Beiteinu coalition. Meretz, Israel’s most respected mainstream left-wing party, got only three percent of the vote.

The far-right is pretty much dead in Israel. The two religious national/settler parties (parties which oppose any and all land concessions to the Palestinians ) mustered seven seats and around six percent of the vote. That means that 94 percent of Israelis voted for parties that either support eventual Palestinian statehood or don’t care enough about peace issues to make them a major component of their platforms. The irrelevance of the religious-national right—and, more or less, the death of revisionist Zionism as a political force—is a sign that pretty much everyone living within Israel’s 1967 borders believes in (or is pretty much indifferent to) some version of land for peace.

Having said that, the left is also pretty much dead in Israel. Meretz should have been a pretty attractive protest vote in light of Beiteinu’s staggering poll numbers. They got a meager three seats. Hadash, Israel’s communist party, won a majority of the votes in Nazareth and got paltry support elsewhere. They scraped out four seats.

The Arab parties won 11 seats. Even after the Gaza War, Arabs were won over by the possibility of change through democratic participation even if their parties failed to increase their number of Knesset seats.

What to make of this? Netanyahu’s chances of forming a coalition are arguably better than Livni’s. Likud, Beiteinu, Shas, and the far right combine for 61 seats, although this is complicated by the Shas chief rabbi’s claim that Beiteinu voters are going to hell. Livni’s best bet is a Beiteinu-Avoda coalition. Those three parties combine for 58 seats, although it’ll be hard to shake the perception that Livni and Barak were somehow co-opted by the crytpo-racist Avigdor Lieberman.

My prediction: Livni will end up as prime minister after offering Netanyahu a high cabinet position–possibly as foreign minister or finance minister. The freakish Kadima-Likud-Labor unity government that will result will be one of the least stable in Israel’s history.

The author is a List College student majoring in English and Judaic Studies. He the former editor of the Commentariat, the blog of Spectator Opinion.