Ask Haviv Anything - 143: How to win the Israeli election

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

To support our work, please consider joining our Patreon community (https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything), Substack (https://havivgur.substack.com), or Buy Me a Coffee (https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur).And be sure to check us out on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/haviv.rettig.gur) and TikTok (https://www.tiktok.com/@haviv.rettig.gur).--Israel's first election since October 7 will be held on October 27 -- and the system it runs through is one of the simplest in the free world, which is exactly why the results look insane from outside.One district: the whole country. One ballot slip. You vote for a party, never a person.In this primer, Haviv walks through how a slip of paper becomes 120 Knesset seats: the 3.25% threshold that erased Bennett and Shaked's party in 2019 by just 1,380 votes, the Bader-Ofer leftover math that quietly rewards big parties and can decide the election, and the surplus-vote agreements filed by October 16 that could hand a bloc the last two seats -- and the country.Plus: why the most chaotic Knesset in memory produced the most stable government since 1973, why religiosity predicts an Israeli's vote better than income or ethnicity, the Haredi demographic numbers nobody can wish away, and the most under-covered story of the cycle -- Arab turnout.By the end you'll know what to watch on election night, and why Israeli broadcasts will be excitedly obsessing about "Bader-Ofer" on election night.--This episode is sponsored by David Allouch and is dedicated “to the next generation, among whom are my amazing nieces, Tali and Elsa; my equally amazing nephew, Ilan; and the children of my dear friend Binyamina, Shmuel, Freidel Esther and Eliyahu. May they all continue to thrive and bring their intellectual creativity to the world, as their ancestors did before them.”--If you like what we do here, please consider joining our Patreon community at https://www.patreon.com/c/AskHavivAnything or our Substack at https://havivgur.substack.com/. You can also Buy Me a Coffee at https://buymeacoffee.com/havivrettiggur. It helps us keep the lights on. Patreon and Substack are also the platforms where you can ask the questions that guide the topics we cover on the podcast, join our great discussions where listeners share news and valuable resources, and take part in our monthly livestreams where Haviv answers your questions live.If you would like to sponsor an episode, please email us at [e-mail]⁠.Musical intro by Adam Ben Amitai.

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Ask Kaviv Anything. Today we're going to cover the Israeli election. We're going to sort of launch our coverage of the Israeli election with a primer on how Israeli elections work, what they mean, what to watch for, everything that's going to go down. You're going to probably hear a lot of coverage, listen to a lot of talk about surplus vote agreements and coalition negotiations. well, after this, you're going to know exactly what everyone's talking about as well or better than the pundits you're listening to. So that's the promise, let's get into it. This is the first Israeli election since October 7, the multi-front war. Before that, the domestic chaos of the judicial overhaul. This is the first time that voters actually get a say on any of that. And the system that this election runs through, the way it actually functions, is the,

maybe simplest electoral system in the developed world, in the free world. There's only one district, the whole country, there's only one ballot slip. You vote for a party, not for a candidate, which is exactly why this election system of Israel and this particular election, which is so momentous, feels so momentous to so many Israelis, it's a referendum on so much, produces results that can look insane from outside. If you're used to the British system, the American system, you know, other ways of doing this. By the end, you will know how a slip of paper becomes 120 seats in the Knesset. You will know why the last two seats can decide who governs the country, and you know what questions to be asking as you watch returns on election night. Before we get into it,

I want to tell you that this episode is sponsored by David Alush and is dedicated to the next generation, among whom are my amazing nieces, Tali and Elsa, my equally amazing nephew, Ilan, and the children of my dear friend, Binyamina, Shmuel, Friedel, Ester, and Eliehau. May they all continue to thrive and bring their intellectual creativity to the world, as their ancestors did before them. Thank you, David, so much for that beautiful dedication. Folks, I want to invite you to join our Patreon community, subscribe to our substack. If you're interested in asking the questions that guide the topics we talk about here, that's where you do that.

You also get to take part in monthly live streams where I answer your questions live. You can join us at www.com slash ask chaviv-anything or chavivgur. Dot substack.com. Those links are in the show notes.

So let's get into it. The anomaly of this election and what this election is about. First of all, this election is a little bit of a statistical freak, okay? Election day is October 27. That's the latest date legally available. The parties couldn't agree on an earlier date, so the clock just ran out on the term

of this Knesset. And that's very unusual. This is the first Israeli election held on schedule since 1988. And the Netanyahu government, this last government, is the first to complete a full term since 1973. The 25th Knesset dissolved on July 17. Outgoing MKs will serve until the new Knesset convenes, and the government will stay on until a new government is formed from that new Knesset. And that's all very interesting, because arguably the most chaotic term in Israeli history, may be one of the most painful, produce the most stable government in decades. Hold on to that point. It's not a joke. It's a clue about how this system works. Why did the chaos produce stability? The judicial overhaul launched within days

of the swearing in of this government in December 2022, just in the first week of January, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets. Then we had October 7 and then we had the multi-front war. In a parliamentary system amid that kind of chaos and amid a government that is seen by many of its own voters as potentially having failed in some disastrous ways on October 7, for example, the more the politicians, struggle in the polls, the more they fear the voter. And the more they fear the voter in the parliamentary system, the more the coalition holds. Nobody wanted to face this electorate a day earlier than they had to. And so they literally lasted to the very last day they could under law.

It's a dynamic that is true of many parliamentary systems, and it's one of the ironies of this sort of system. The less the people want this government, the more. The more. The more, the dynamic that is true of many, likely the government is to survive. Netanyahu is the only figure in the October 7 chain of command who is still in his post, and the only one who is not publicly accepted responsibility. Now, that is not just my commentary. That's a live debate happening in this election. On August 31st, Sarah Netanyahu, Netanyahu's wife, suggested in a television interview that the head of the Democrats Party, the Progressive Left Union of Labor and Merits, Jair Golan, a former, you know, major general and deputy chief of staff of the IDF,

who drove south the morning of October 7 and helped rescue civilians and was widely praised for it. Well, Sari Netanyahu suggested on August 31st that he must have had advanced warning or how could he have just jumped in his car and gone into the battlefield? That's a pretty shocking thing to say that a head of a political party and former deputy chief of the IDF who ran into the fire zone, had advance warning from Hamas? Golan is threatening a defamation suit of about $800,000.

Netanyahu himself has denied there was internal betrayal. But defense minister Israel Katz, also of Netanyahu's Likud party, publicly declined to rule out the idea. And Communications Minister Shlomokari, also Likud, openly backed Sarah's conspirator.

theory. So, you know, Netanyahu denies it, but the Likud campaign is a very tightly run disciplined ship. This stuff wouldn't be out there if Netanyahu wasn't putting it out there. All of that tells us that Netanyahu really does understand or believes that October 7 is still very much on the agenda of this election and has to respond to it. And he's responding in multiple ways across multiple constituencies. One of those is, get anybody you think a conspiracy theory might get. Put it out there. And so Likudas put it out there. But ironically, that might actually hurt Netanyahu and maybe even cost him the election, because the most politically decisive fact of this election is that several Knesset's worth of right-wing voters, habitual,

people who usually vote right-wing, are not automatic Netanyahu votes this time. Likud is heavily represented among reservists, and reservist families are the ones who are most angry at the Haredi exemptions being the ultra-Orthodox military draft exemptions getting extended by this government, by Netanyahu. And some of them are very frustrated at a lot of the populism and what they think is the poor response to October 7 to the judicial overhaul of this government. And so Netanyahu will run multiple campaigns to different constituencies, but they might start canceling out the actual campaign he needs, which is to draw in centrists a little bit

disgusted by the populism, by his refusal to take responsibility for October 7, by all of those issues. On the other side, of course, you have people who are looking to maximize that divide. Gadi Eisenkot is the head of a party called Yashal, which means straight. He's a former IDF chief of staff. He is of Moroccan Jewish extraction. There has never been an Israeli prime minister who has been Mizrahi or Sephardi, non-Ashkenazi. And that's very interesting because in Likud's own base, the Mizrahi and Sephardi constituencies are overrepresented. They tend to vote Likud. They tend to vote right wing. And suddenly they have an actual Moroccan on the other side. The other major party of that opposition side right now are Bennett and Lapid, who have their

own parties. They merged into a party called Bejahad together. on April 26th, and that party is led by Bennett. Now, the merger underperformed, okay? The polls after the joining of Bennett and Lipid together showed a combined list that actually wins fewer seats than the two had separately. And Eisencoat was the main beneficiary. The bottom line is that neither block has the 61-seat majority in the current polling. That's the story of this election.

And it's why the rest of this episode is going to be about the mechanics of the election, because the mechanics are very likely to decide the election. So let's get into it. The ballot. On September 9 is the final deadline to file party lists with the Central Elections Committee. On September 9, by nightfall, we will know who is actually running in the election. October 13, the official period of campaign ads on broadcast television begins. That is, Israeli campaign finance is entirely public, Israeli campaign

advertising, at least in traditional media platforms, is very heavily regulated. Every party running has its place. Their equal amounts of ad space. Of course, the larger parties have immense presence on the streets and in social media, which are things that are not restricted. The law hasn't caught up to them. But the basic idea is you need to have a level playing field and there is no super PAC money in an Israeli election. It really is parties talking to voters. On October 16, we have the deadline for surplus vote agreements, 11 days before the vote. In about 20 minutes, you'll know exactly what that is and why it's important. On October 20, the voting opens overseas at Israeli diplomatic missions abroad and things like that. And on October 27, you have Election Day,

which is a national holiday. Public transportation works, but otherwise business is closed to maximize turnout. Turnout, by the way, in Israel is traditionally very high. On November 4, we will have the official results confirmed by the Central Elections Committee, and on November 18 is the deadline for any appeals that any party wants for any particular ballot box and any particular place in the country. That's the schedule. Now, there are four structural facts about the Israeli system you must understand, and that distinguish it from most other systems. Even ones that are fairly similar to it are not identical, it is a little bit of a unique system. One, there is one national constituency. There are no districts, no local representation whatsoever. The whole country is a single district. Two,

there are closed lists, meaning you vote for a party, not a person, and you can't rank the people within the list. So you have other countries that have proportional representation single constituency systems like Israel, don't worry about the terminology, but you vote for a party on election day. But then you flip the party ballot over onto the back, and on the back you rank the party members, the party candidates. And so there's a primary on the back of the ballot on election day. Israel doesn't have that. The list order is set by the party, usually by the party leader. Sometimes parties have primaries. Lykud has primaries, but functionally Netanyahu overwhelmingly controls the party list. We're going to talk about that. There was a very great purge of party

members Netanyahu didn't like going into this election. But most other parties, The coup is among the best. Most other parties don't even pretend to have a primary. Lepid and Lieberman and Shas and UTJ and, you know, do you have a couple of Arab parties with real primaries? You have merits labor over the Democrats. They're pretty real primaries. You have nothing like that in most of the center.

And you have nothing like that in most of the right. And so functionally, the party leader sets the list. And the voter's only choice is yes for that party or no. for that party. And the system is pure proportional representation. In other words, 120 seats are divided in proportion to the national vote. There's no electoral college. There's no first pass the post. None of that. The people who actually take their seats in the Knesset are a very accurate representation of the actual identities and opinions of the citizen population. Now, there's one great exception, which is, of course, the threshold. You have to make a certain percentage to get into

that, Knesset. We'll get into that. So what you actually have is functionally, okay, an Israeli election is a contest between about a dozen party leaders who had either tremendous influence or just outright power to set the party list. And that's why Israelis think of the parties as the party leader. They'll talk about voting Lieberman or Lapid or Netanyahu, and they'll talk about party leaders, and also poll questions will ask who's the most suited to be prime minister among the party leaders, even though the prime minister isn't voted on by the public. It's something that the Knesset votes and negotiates in coalition negotiations. So close party lists in a proportional representation nationwide single constituency system. That is the core structure of the system. And how does

voting actually happen. Election Day, as I said, is a legal national holiday. Most stations open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. in some smaller rural communities in hospitals and prisons, the polling stations are a little bit from about 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. That's not the deadline for voting. That's the deadline for showing up. If you're in line at closing at 10 p.m. or at 8 p.m., you vote. They're not allowed to turn you away. So it always extends a little bit past that hour. There's no absentee voting. The exceptions to absentee voting, Israelis abroad cannot vote. They have to come to Israel and they can vote in Israel, so there are thousands who buy a ticket, fly in vote.

The exceptions are people serving the state abroad. So embassy staff, their families, military personnel stationed overseas, and a few similar categories. Merchant Marine, deployed sailors, things like that. They'll vote early or they'll vote with special absentee ballots that are brought specially in special boxes. Your vote at the station, at the voting station, is tied to your registered address. You have to show your ID when you show up. Voter fraud is a serious issue. It was in the past. And there are very strict measures in place and one really clever measure in place that we'll talk about right now. When you show up with your ID to the one station that you are registered to based on your

municipality, your home address, the committee that is sitting at the table that you approach in order to get your blue envelope that you used to vote, the people sitting at that table were staffed, were put there, were chosen, are representatives of rival political parties running in the election. Every ballot station is run by a committee, by a station committee. And the committee is the political parties. and each member, each representative, again, of rival parties. So you'll have an ultra-Orthodox party and a left-wing party and an Arab party and a right-wing religious Zionist party. And those are the four members of the committee.

And they will each have the same voter role in print in front of them. And they will each cross your name off while watching each other cross your name off at the same time. Then they will hand you the blue envelope and you will take that blue envelope behind the curtain. you will choose from a box of little stacks of ballots. You will take from the stack that is the party you prefer. The stack has had in my lifetime 25 or so parties running, and it's had 45 parties running. The size of the box changes,

but you take the party you want, you slip it into the blue envelope to the Israelis listening to this, and we know there are some. Make sure not to put two by accident. Make sure they don't stick. rub it between your fingers, two ballots, even for the same party in an envelope, invalidates the vote.

Make sure you do this correctly. They are sticklers, these committees, because they're watching each other trying to make sure nobody cheats. You put your ballot in the blue envelope. You come out from behind the curtain, and in front of everybody, with all the members watching, you put the envelope into the big blue box.

The entire system is based on the idea that all the parties are running it together watching each other. So the central elections committee that is the agency actually managing logistically the election is a branch of the Knesset of the parliament. It sits on election day. It takes over entire hallways and halls of the Knesset. And that's where much of the work is done. Some of the counting in the far away areas and the distant areas are done in local, regional, but again, staffed by all the different parties. And the central elections committee is composed of party representatives. The only problem is the Central Elections Committee has to be chaired by somebody who isn't any one party, because that's an unfair advantage.

The chairman of the Central Elections Committee can make certain decisions about advertising, about whether you go, whether you break the rules of advertising. For example, you're not allowed to show soldiers in your ads. The Army is apolitical and not allowed to be part of political campaigns by law. And so the chairman of the Central Elections Committee gives the order to take down an ad. Now, that's a very significant power. And so that can't be given to any of the parties. And so the committee together votes on policy, together oversees each other, together sets the logistics and oversees the logistical operation.

But the chairman is a Supreme Court justice. In the case of this election, it's Noam Solberg, famously a conservative justice. And his whole job is to be the chair and not to be a partisan. The point isn't that fraud is impossible because of these measures. The point is that the system is designed in a way that assumes bad faith from everybody. There's an election to win. Everybody's going to try and find a path. And it makes them all watch each other.

And there's a paper ballot. So a box can always be recounted if there's suspicions and problems and if there's an appeal. Turnout is important to understand. As I said, about 70%. Historically, it's been very high. It collapsed in the 2000s because of the collapse of the peace process in the second intifada. and it has partly recovered. The machinery, the next most important thing to understand about the machinery is the threshold. The current threshold is three and a quarter percent of valid votes. That's about 3.9 seats worth. So in practice, a party clears the threshold with four seats. It's possible to get three seats, depending on how the remainders fall. It's complicated math. It almost never happens. You need four seats to get into the Knesset. It used to be, the threshold used to be much lower in 19, 1992, it was raised from 1%.

One seat was enough to get in to 1.5%. In 2003, it was raised to 2. And in 2014, it was raised to 3 and a quarter, which first applied in the 2015 election. Now, all the votes below the threshold are discarded and all the 120 seats are reallocated among the surviving parties. So if a right-wing party dies at 3%, it doesn't just lose its own seat. it hands seats to the other side, to the other block. So failure to pass the threshold is very dramatic and finally left over votes. Here's the thing.

If you take all the valid votes, you throw away the ones that fell under the threshold, and then you divide the remainder by 120. You will get the value of each Knesset seat. So, for example, in the last election, the total valid vote was almost a 4.8 million. you divide that by 120 and you get 40,000 votes per seat. What if a party gets 12 seats, a multiple of 12, okay, 480,000 plus 11,000 more, 491,000 is the total votes. What happens to those 11,000? And it's not that you can just pretend they don't exist, whatever, the remainder votes we can just ignore and give out the 120.

You can't give out the 120 if you divide by multiples of 40,000, right? you're going to apportion all the whole seats to parties at each 40,000 increment, and then you're going to be left with two, three, four, you could have five seats, not a portion. You're at 115. If the race turns out like polling is right now, that remainder is quite likely to decide the election, not just a non-zero chance, but a double-digit chance of deciding the election. So what do you do? And the answer will go step by step is called the,

of Phil Badr's system. It's something a lot of people talk about and nobody quite understands and in the next three minutes you will understand. And you'll never have to think about it again. And when people talk about it, you'll be like, I don't even remember the details, but I understand. You count all the valid votes. Okay. So not the envelopes with three slips, but the envelopes that are correct. And you calculate three and a quarter percent of that total and you throw out every list below it. You then take the votes of the surviving lists. We've been through the this before, but just to catch us up and just to just to repeat for learning purposes, you divide by 120, that number, the total surviving votes divided by 120, that number is the price of a seat.

And you then give each list all of its whole seats. And then you have the missing remainder of a bunch of remainders per party that are too small to buy a seat. And then until the seventh Knesset, until 1973, you gave out the final seats by the biggest remainder. So if a party, you know, 40,000 is what you need for a seat, a party has a remainder of 30, and another party has a remainder of 20, the party with a remainder of 30 gets the seat. The biggest remainder gets the next seat. Now, then it no longer has a remainder, then the next biggest remainder gets the next seat until you're at 120.

That was the system until the seventh Knesset. From 1973, we have something called the Badil-Ophil Method, named for two members of Knesset, who legislated this legislation, this change. And it's for the true nerds, it's the Israeli implementation of the De Haunt highest average system. Okay. That's the system used in Spain, Poland, Portugal, Finland. It's a bit different in Israel, but not very different in Israel.

Here's how it happens. Here's how it runs. Folks, believe that it's simple and you'll get it. For every party, okay, you divide its total votes by the number of seats it has plus one seat. And then you get an average number of votes per seat if it got the next seat. So you just go through all the Knesset list,

all the parties, all their votes, and you're calculating if I give you the next seat, which one of you will have the biggest per seat average? the highest average wins the seat. And the idea is that all the seats in the Knesset should be as equally representative as it's possible to get. If adding the seat to party A makes its seat on average represent closer to the 40,000, that's more fair than giving it to party B because it has a bigger remainder, but it'll actually only be 38,000 per seat, average for all of its seats.

And once you've given out the one that you calculate, it's the highest average that would turn out for the party's seats if you gave them the seat, then you recalculate and you repeat for all the parties until 120 you're given out and you're done. Here's the key. This system favors big parties. Why? If you have four seats, okay, and you get a fifth seat, your average now drops by a fifth, right?

Your average of votes per seat drops tremendously because adding a seat to a four-seat party is an immense addition of a seat. That's much, much lower average. If you have 30 seats and you get a 31st, your average barely moves. Something divided by 30 versus dividing it by 31 is a very small change to the average.

compared to moving from dividing by four to dividing by five. So the bigger party has a much higher average, which is what you're calculating. Who gets the higher average? The leftovers, the remainder is a smaller percentage of the total vote. So it drags out of the total vote, a smaller percentage, and that remainder lowers the average less.

Two ways of saying the same thing. the bigger party will have the higher average. And so the bigger party keeps winning the leftover seats. Bad de Roffield doesn't reward getting close to a seat. It rewards already being large. The sort of democratic argument is that it's fairer for the higher average to be the reason. Seats should be equally representative of the population. The reason it got a lot of votes and passed easily and nobody wants to change it or nobody has the votes to change.

is that it favors the larger parties. There's also an argument of favoring the larger parties increases stability. Surplus vote agreements. This is the second and this is really the last piece of the mechanics. You can have two lists, small lists, let's say, that are worried about the Ophil-Badil distribution that want to pick up that extra seat.

Those two lists can sign a deal. They have to file it by October 16. That's the surplus vote agreement deadline. for the sole purpose of the leftover calculation. They're treated in that calculation as one list. So they campaign apart. They sit in the Knesset apart. They negotiate in the coalition negotiations

after the election apart. They're completely different parties. But in the stage, right after the election, when they're calculating those final seats in Badd-Dar-Fer, they're pooled for that arithmetic. And if the joint pool wins the extra seat, Which of the two parties gets it? You run Baddil-Ophil between the two of them to see who has the higher average if they get the seat.

In 2022, the agreements were very reasonable, who you would expect. Lycoud had an agreement with Smotritch's religious Zionism. Shas had an agreement with UTJ, the two ultra-Orthodox parties. Labor had an agreement with merits, the two left-wing parties. Israel Beitaineu, Jewish home, Arab parties did not sign, you know, voter. surplus vote agreements, and Lieberman, for example, Visrael Beiteno, has publicly complained about it afterwards. It was considered a mistake.

They couldn't agree. They didn't like each other. They had all these tensions. So they ended up not signing it, and they didn't get Ophil Baddil seats that maybe could have been available to them. I never ran the full math if they had, so I don't know for sure, but they certainly would have been in the running in a way that they weren't otherwise. The logic of surplus vote agreements is simple, and, and,

and very democratic. If my leftover votes, I have leftover votes, okay? Those are people who voted for me, but they're not giving me seats. They're not going to be represented in the final Knesset. Well, if they're going to go to someone else through Ophil Badr, then they should go to someone else who agrees with 95% of the things that I'm running on, not to someone on the other block entirely,

because I didn't make it with the average calculation to get the seat, myself. And so, you know, if your chasse in your remainder through your surplus vote agreement pushes UTJ one up, 95% of your agenda is still on the boat, is still, is still represented. That's the concept. In other words, political parties have two stages of consolidation. First, they merge to survive the threshold, right? Multiple parties are running as joint lists right now. And then the joint lists, the merge list, signed surplus deals with each other to fish for that one extra seat on Baderoville round after round until there's 120. Two different moves to solve two different problems.

And the net result is that as few votes are lost as possible. Most, the votes are given as closely as possible to people who represent them as closely as possible. That's the machinery. Once we have 120 mKs and they are seated, then begins the coalition process. the president who is elected to seven-year terms by the Knesset and is independent, apolitical, supposed to be, independent of the Knesset. The president consults with the head of every political faction because the heads of the factions are the important thing, not the party list. They're just people mostly appointed by the head of the faction. The president consults every faction leader.

And then the president assigns the task to form a government, to be the prime minister to one of the members of Knesset, he believes, can find that 61-seat majority. It doesn't have to be the head of the largest party. It usually is, but it doesn't have to be, and it hasn't always been. But it has to be

someone who has that coalition, who the president thinks could cobble together that coalition, and it must be a member of Knesset. Not every member of government has to be an elected member

of the parliament. You can have a minister brought in for the outside to run some particular agency of government, but the prime minister has to be a member of the elected parliament.

That member of Knesset gets 28 days. It's extendable by up to 14 days by the president. If he fails to form a government in that period, the president can hand the task to another member of Knesset for another 28 days. If that fails, 61MKs together can ask the president to name a candidate who gets another 14 days. And if that fails, the Knesset dissolves and you go to another election, which happened, you know, between 2018 and 2022, where we had these five,

run on elections that never managed to be decisive. Historically, forming a government has taken anywhere from 20 days to 100 days. So, you know, we've seen the whole range, and you have to assume it's, you know, it could take quite a while after election day. A minority government, a government that doesn't have 61 seats, literally signed on to the coalition, is legally possible. The basic law doesn't require an absolute majority for the vote, the Knesset's investiture vote, the Knesset's vote of confidence in the government that establishes it.

But you don't really survive it in practice. If people are defending you from outside, but not actually part and they don't have coalition discipline, they don't have a coalition agreement, so they don't get that much out of your continued rule. It has never been, it happened a few times. It has never been stable. It didn't happen in an election. The Knesset didn't elect a minority government, but you've had governments form normally and then lose a faction that left for some.

some reason, some big dispute, some big problem. And then the government would be very unstable. It'd be a lame duck and eventually, or usually quite quickly, fall. By the way, even with a narrow majority, if Nizenegov wins with 61 seats, or Eisenkoot wins with 61 seats, two backbenchers can topple everything or extort as if they themselves are the prime minister. I mean, extort everything, because they hold the key to the government. So the goal isn't to form us 60. seat majority. The goal is to form a 66 seat majority or 71 seat majority where no single faction, no single MK with some crazy idea can extort everybody else. And that has happened, including two Netanyahu, including in the last few years. The structural point here is

really significant. And this is maybe the chief takeaway. Now that you've walked through the whole setup and the whole system and all the mechanics, the structural point is, is the executive is not separately elected. The cabinet is made up of party leaders who personally appointed the MKs who sustain them in the parliamentary majority. The parliamentary majority, okay, and the executive, and the people who pick the legislators

who are the parliamentary majority, are the same tiny group of people. There's almost no internal separation of powers and more than other parliamentary democracies. You go to places like Australia and Britain, there is a local direct election of the MP. You go to places, Scandinavian examples where you have a primary

on election day on the back of the proportional representation ballot. The non-regional and also non-personal I think is unique to Israel. Every system has one or the other. other. And if you understand that, that almost total lack of any separation of powers between executive and legislative, then you suddenly begin to understand the judicial reform and the arguments, why it set society on fire, why hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets.

A right winger who says the court is too strong is not saying something crazy. Courts are, by definition, the least democratic institution in a democratic system. They're supposed to be. That's their job. Right, to defend principles that nobody wants to defend at that moment, to defend a minority person everybody hates, but whose rights nevertheless have to be protected in order for there to be rights. A court is not supposed to be democratic in the sense of answerable directly to the people quickly. And for various historical and cultural reasons, Israel's high court is stronger in standing and justiciability and all kinds of different things and its actual effect on the on the country. then maybe any court of its kind in the free world. And a right-wing conversation about that is completely reasonable and legitimate,

and it's a real debate. It's an honest debate. It's an authentic debate. It's a years-long debate. The problem with the judicial overhaul proposed by this government, a problem, by the way, that drove, you know, there was, in 2022, general, fairly widespread agreement among the population, the judicial reform was a good idea.

and that collapsed into massive opposition, only a minority, and not a very big one, actually supported the actual proposals of the government. And that collapse was because nothing else was offered to replace this powerful court that is really the only significant check on the system. No second chamber of parliament, no constituency element, meaning empowering personal MKs as a check on party leaders by having them be directly elected in some way. No back of the ballot primary,

so you could at least have different camps within a party as a check on party leaders who are also the executive branch. No supermajority requirements. No, almost not. I mean, there was just nothing proposed by the government to build checks into maybe the least checked and balanced system in the free world. And so if you're weakening the only check, you're left with pure majority rule or the only significant check, obviously except for elections, which is the baseline. But beyond elections, elections isn't enough, okay? Pure majority rule has been recognized since Aristotle. And throughout the federalist papers, the American system was built to prevent pure majority rule. And Aristotle warned that that's the failure mode of democracies. That is, you think the dictator is bad. Wait till you meet the mob.

protecting the unpopular person in the system, which it's eventually going to be you on some issue in some way, is what a democracy needs to do. And the Israeli system doesn't have those checks and balances. It's worked extraordinarily well so far. But it's reasonable for a left-winger to say, if you weaken the court, you destroy democracy. And it's reasonable for a right-winger to say this court is so powerful that it's actually a drag on Israeli democracy. And the conversation was never serious and honest and actually about checks and balances. It was about partisan rage. And you understand that when you really get a sense of how the system really functions.

It's worth saying a word about history here. Nobody designed this system, but it doesn't mean it came out of vapor or foolishness or accident. The Knesset, the proportional representation, direct election, single constituency system was inherited by Israel from the Assembly of Representative of the Yeshua, of the Jewish community under the British, in mandatory Palestine, which was nationwide, proportional, and had no districts. Now, why were there no districts? Because the Jewish community wasn't territorially contiguous, right? And so it's institutions, it's communal institutions.

They were not a state. They were communal institutions. were not able to set districts when you didn't have the right positioning. This was a period where the British wanted the Jews to be building out these institutions and the Arabs to be building out their own Arab agency, Arab institutions, etc. For a future of separation, the Peel Commission, we've done and we will do many episodes on that history and on the many contentious claims about it and the many debates about it. But there was this representative body of the Jewish community that was not, not districted and proportional.

Why proportional representation instead of, you know, regional first past the post? Why actually representing everybody? Because you had ideological factions in the Jewish community that were 5% everywhere, right? And a majority nowhere. And they still had to be at the table. This was a very fractured group, the Yeshua, the socialists, the deeper socialists of Mapam, the, or communists, actually, the religious, the revisionist, the ultra-Orthodox, the Ashkenazi Jews, the Sephardi-Jews as they come in before the major Sephardi immigration, the Ashkenazi Jews were not Ashkenazi Jews. They were deeply divided by origin. So the German Jews didn't like the Polish Jews. And these were real tensions. are real tensions between the German Jews who were heavily represented in the judiciary of the early state and Ben-Gurian because he was Polish.

I mean, that was something that bothered some of the German-Jewish leadership. That kind of erases itself when more different people come in in the vast emptying of the Arab world of its Jews into Israel. So you had these minorities that are scattered everywhere, and you want them represented at the table because you really need buy-in and solidarity of the end. entire community if you're going to build something. And that's what the system was meant to reflect. The state is declared, May 1948, in the middle of a war, under an arms embargo by Britain and the U.S., and with no fixed borders. You can't draw districts after 1948 when the Egyptian

army is still on the land until 49. So they used what they had. January 1949, 1949, there was an election to a constituent assembly that was supposed to write a constitution. And it used the Assembly of Representatives system, and it still needed for all the reasons that that system looked the way it looked. It looked the way it looks. Within days of convening the Constituent Assembly, it just called itself the first parliament. And so the temporary became permanent, and no reform idea or offer since then has ever commanded major, dramatic. There have been minor reforms around the edges, but no big reform of how the system works has ever commanded enough agreement, enough consensus to replace it. Every argument you will ever hear about the Israeli electoral system, and we're going to get into this again with an expert in a future episode that I very much am looking forward to, but every argument about the Israeli electoral system is an argument with a decision made in a war by people who assumed that somebody else would fix it later. And later never came, because no one could agree on how to change it. It's hard now to get a political class elected in the current

system elected by a system that can elect them that they know how to be elected in to vote in a different system that maybe they can't get elected it. And so it's very hard to change a system once it's in place. By the way, and this again is going to be a whole episode deep dive, that doesn't mean it's a bad system. And this is maybe the last significant piece worth knowing. It reflects real fault lines among Israelis. On the Jewish side, also on the Arab side, but less so. On the Jewish side, it's really definitional, so it's important to understand. The single most important factor characteristic that correlates to how you vote is religiosity. There's an Israel Democracy Institute analysis published in June of this year

that draws on 20 surveys conducted in 2022 to 2023, where among Jewish Israelis, their self-defined religiosity predicts their vote better than income, better than class, better than ethnicity, better than geography, better than any other factor. So 80% of the voters for the coalition parties that Netanyahu's current government were either Haredi, national religious, or traditional. Traditional is a category often heard from Mizrahi voters. Seventy-seventy-four percent of opposition voters were secular. Secular voters went overwhelmingly to the opposition, and religiously inclined voters of different kinds and different communities overwhelmingly are the coalition. And as you walk down that religious ladder of more or less religious identification, the percentage that vote

for this particular direction, that changes accordingly. So 97% of Charedim, of Charedi voters voted for the coalition. That drops to 80% of national religious voters. And that drops to 66% of traditional voters. Over on the secular side, 74% went to opposition.

So it really is a religious. This coalition, incidentally, that's part of the energy of the opposition to the judicial overhaul, which is that it was a sense of a deep culture war on their way of life. It wasn't just that this right-wing majority has very few checks. It's that they also want to change my life, and there's a lot of religious law in this country inherited from the Ottoman Empire,

like every Middle Eastern country. So it's not as though there isn't a state rabbin, it's state rules about religious life, marriage, identity, there was nobody was dumb in that fight except maybe the politicians who handled it as badly as they handled it there's also sectoral loyalty that's really important to understand i have read i couldn't find for this episode so i can't give you the exact place but i will look for it um the argument by an Israeli scholar that Israeli young people are more likely to vote the way their parents voted than any other democracy. And that's in keeping with this sense of a kind of tribal

identification with political parties or political camps that you get, by the way, in the Middle East, in the place where Mizrahi Jews come from, Arabs come from, more than half of the Israeli population, two-thirds maybe of the Israeli population has some origin in the Middle East and sense of identity that's very Middle Eastern. And the political system reflects that. It looks in some ways like the Lebanese political system, where your tribe is a significant piece of your identity that affects how you behave at the ballot box.

86% of Haredi voters voted for the two Haredi list. Some Haredi voters voted for a far-right party, is maybe a little bit Likud. 86% voted for the Haredi list. that's the highest block loyalty in the country. The number one party among the religious Zionist voter is religious Zionism, Otsma, that shared list of Ben-Vir and Smotritch. It was at 45%.

Smotritch represents a very right-wing side of religious Zionism. The other side didn't really have a representation and voted generally other more center-right parties. Among traditional Jews, Likud is the top. Muslim Ushachai Jews, in other words, the Qud is the top at 47% of them. And among secular, Yeshateed is the number one, the biggest. It has a plurality of them at 40%.

And so there's very heavy concentrations of based on these religious identities. Another important point. One of the key issues of this election is Qaridi demography, the Qaridi draft, the Qaeda education system, the Qaeda welfare system, which is a welfare system on top of the regular welfare system, through all sorts of coalition funds to municipalities and all kinds of different mechanisms. And all of these issues make Haredi demography, not just a culture war question, but a real structural question about the future of the country. The Haredi population today is about 1.4 million people. That's about 14% of the population. It's double in real

numbers from 750,000 just in 2009. It's a population that grows at 4.2% per year, maybe the fastest in the developed world, and 57% of them are under the age of 20. It's a very young population. Among Israelis generally, Israel has generally a very young population, but the rest of the country is about 31% under 20. Among Khadim is 57%. The Central Bureau of Statistics projects that that will rise to 16%, from 14 to 16% to 16% of the population just by 2030, 20% by 2040, and 24%

by 2050 or 24.4%. There are some models that are a little lower than that, but that's the official Central Bureau statistics model. But it ranges from 22 to 25. Employment is a huge piece of the problem. Kharedi male employment is 53%. And there's low unemployment in Israel. It's not that there aren't jobs.

Half of Kharedi men are not in the workforce as a cultural choice. Haridim are now, at this moment, 23% of every cohort designated for military service. The kids turning 18. 23% of them are Haredi and by the vast majority will not serve in principle. That's going to be 25% in 2030 and it's going to be 33% in 2040. Education.

In Haredi education, 16% graduate the high school level with eligibility to matriculate, meaning passing their matriculation exams and being eligible, for example, for university. 16%. The nationwide number is 71%. Is that sustainable for an economy that's dependent on high education industries? And when they talk about their own priorities, the number one priority, 41% of voters say this is their top priority is religion and state, not fixing any of those

other issues. religion and state is something other groups don't care about as much. It's 17% for everyone else. So when you argue about math and English in Haredi schools, or when you argue about extending the draft to a Haredi young man who isn't learning in a seminary, what is his excuse for not serving? What is excuse for not finding a non-combat, non-uniformed medical part of the service so that he can take the burden off of everybody else? these are not just about anger, about the psychology of it, about political gamesmanship, or bigotry, or different groups looking at othering each other. You're talking about whether in the very near future a third of the army and a fifth of the population will be able to work in the economy that pays for it all.

It's a significant national question and its core to this election. Religious Zionism October 7 was a very dramatic moment. They're a disproportionate share of combat deaths and of reserve days. Culturally, they're deep right. But they feel the Haredi exemption problem most personally. The most visceral divide over the Haredi draft is within the coalition between the ultra-Orthodox parties

and the religious Zionist parties. And they're split. if only 45% will vote Smotrich Benvier in 2022. And Smotrich has never, even those parties called religious Zionism, he's never won more than about half of his own natural constituency. That, by the way, that seemed, that divide is where Ophil Vinto's new party, a religious Zionist, former brigadier general in the army, his new party is trying to open up and conquer that part of the constituency, of the public.

And let's get into Arab politics. This is probably the most undercover story of the election, and it really shouldn't be. It could easily decide the election, and not just whether they join or don't join a coalition, but turnout. So the Mosheb Dayan Center at, I believe Tel Aviv University, has a survey from May in which they project the Arab turnout. They asked who plans to turn out at 53%. That would be identical to the last election in November 2020, 52. 53% turnout.

Remember, the nationwide turnout is 70%. 71%. If their turnout is 53, they will be dramatically underrepresented. And it didn't have to be that way. If all four Arab parties ran as one list in that poll, in that Moschadean center poll, then the turnout would jump, according to the Arab respondents, to 67%, which is the highest a survey has ever recorded, and also the list would win 16 seats, and Arabs would be almost exactly represented to their population. population in the final result. Rising for 53 to 67, if the four Arab parties unite is such a fascinating story. And it's something that I have talked about repeatedly in the past. In 2020, all four Arab parties ran together and got, I believe, 67% of the vote, a huge jump. They then split apart. They have a lot of ideological divides. There's a party that's socialist, progressive urban elites, Khadash. There's a party that's,

Islamist conservative, mainly among the Bedouin of the South. Brahm, Balad is a Palestinian nationalist party, and that's their agenda. And these are really deep divides, not just of sort of abstraction, ideology, but they're really deep divides of culture, of agenda. And every time they unite, turnout jumps spectacularly. When they divided after 2020, winning about 67%, they dropped to 466 in the next election, total Arab turnout. And then it rose to 50s. Low 50s. The Arab community, the Arab street, there's a divide here between the street and the elites, wants a unified

Arab party, a unified Arab identity that faces the Jewish majority and is big enough to pull budgets, to get state attention and bandwidth, and to represent the community as a cohesive minority to the state, which also means that the Arab street wants to be part of the coalition making game. 77% of Arab respondents say that an Arab party should join the next government. 43 points of that 77 is that they should join any government. 34 points say they should join a center-left one if the opposition wins. I think if the right would invite them in, in exchange for everything, for example, that ultra-Orthodox parties get for joining a call. I suspect a lot of that, 34% that wants

a center-left government. That would be their preference. I suspect they'd be okay with any government, or some of them, obviously, not all, some. 64% specifically asked on Jewish-Arab political partnership. 64% said, they support it, bluntly. So, and by the way, 71% name violence, in crime as a single most important issue, you know, 20, 30 points ahead of the second biggest issue. That is the core issue. And 76% support voluntary, non-security national service for Arab high school graduates. They don't want their kids going to the Israeli army. They do want their kids going to Israeli national service. For example, that many religious young women who,

for religious reasons can't serve in the military, but they serve as adjunct teachers in, you know, schools that don't have the budgets in poor towns and poor areas that don't have the budgets to have enough teachers. So there'll be an extra teacher who's a volunteer with the national service. But volunteer once and then you're stuck in there for two years and you do your service. Often in your community, bringing national service to the Arab community is something 76% of the Arab Israelis would like. It's a about time that that desire of the actual voters be expressed in politics. So what actually happened in the run-up to this election?

It's not what the poll modeled, okay? On August 19, three of the four parties, not all four, signed a three-way joint list. Khadash, Taal, and Balad. They're headed by Khadash's Yusif Jabarin, then Ahmadibi, then Balad Sami Abushad. Balad is rescued from falling below the threshold, which happened to it last time, by that joint list. That will increase Arab representation. Rahm stayed out of the list deliberately, and for a fascinating reason, because Abbas,

Mansul Abbas, the head of Rahm, doesn't want the other Arab factions to hold him back from joining the next coalition. He wants back into a coalition government. So it remains to be seen whether or not voters actually vote at that 60% figure from that union when the brahm on its own, which, by the way, has been talking for years, six now, seven maybe years, about joining coalitions recognizing Israel's a Jewish state, something Mansour Abbas has said publicly for many years in Arabic. since it started talking that way about deeper integration into Israel and Israeli politics, it became the largest party in the Israeli Arab community. Rahm wants, won't join because it wants to be more integrated. And that's fascinating.

And it remains to be seen whether the three-party list plus Ra'am serving the overwhelming majority desire and agenda that we poll in the Arab community will still be able to drive that 67% figure, even though they're not literally. a four-seat single block. How much does Rahm want to integrate? On August 31st, Yoav Sigalovic, a former member of parliament, member of Knesset from Yashatid,

announced that he's running at number two on Rahm's list. Jewish, Zionist, hawkish, Mansur Abbas agreed that he will be the second person on the Ra'an list and he resigned from Yashatid and he resigned from the Knesset to run. This man is one of the most senior and accomplished police officers in the Israel Police,

former police officers, obviously. He founded the anti-corruption unit Laveh 433. He commanded the police's Investigations and Intelligence Division. He was the top investigator of the National Police Force. He served as Deputy Public Security Minister, the Deputy Minister of the Ministry that oversees the police, and he specifically ran the task force on Arab Secretary. crime. And Ra'am is now running a campaign that is entirely answering the Arab community's

overwhelming desire to integrate, to sit in the next coalition, to draw budgets through coalition agreements, and is zeroing in laser focus and bringing in a former deputy police minister and deputy head of police intelligence and investigations to be the man who will spearhead the party's work on crime in the Arab community, which is the number one by far priority of the Arab community. It's important to understand what all of this means. Some of the gap in funding to Arab towns compared to Jewish majority areas is discrimination. But a lot of it isn't. A lot of it is arithmetic. A lot of it is politics. The structural politics. It's coalition membership. Joining a coalition is how you get ministries. Ministries are how budgets get steered. And that's how

the Kharidim built a welfare system on top of the welfare system. The Arab parties have always refused to play, nearly always. There are small exceptions occasionally over the course of Israeli history, but nearly always refused to play. So their vote wasn't for sale. So nobody was buying it with coalition agreements and benefits and ministries and budgets. That's changing. There is an internal, driven at the initiative of the Arab street, percolating up into the Arab elites who are forced begrudgingly. I once wrote a piece saying the more you unite, the more the voters come out. So our party's proper strategy should be to unite. And an Arab member of Knesset sort of angrily yelled at me that I'm a patronizing Israeli Jew because I don't understand that there's a huge

cultural gap between the Islamist Bedouin and the progressive socialist professor in Haifa. I do understand, but I'm not, but that's the Arab street. That's what they're saying in every poll, and that's how they're behaving in every election. And once you have seven elections where they behave in the same exact way, maybe it's time to, maybe it's time to listen. Maybe the elite concern with those differences just doesn't matter to the people on the ground, and that gap is going to hurt you at the ballot box. That's basically what's happened. There's no conversation like that today anymore. The political parties have figured it out. And yes, they still negotiate and they hold out and they have a lot of, you know, wrangling for position. But everyone,

in the Arab political system understands what actual Israeli Arabs want. And so at the initiative of the Arab side, there's a push for integration of the likes of which we've never seen before. And it's happening at the same moment post-October 7 with the political forces that are most anti-integration in this government, like Ben-Vir. It's happening at the same moment as the worst Jewish-Arab political rhetoric we've ever seen. From the Jewish side is famously, because people listen to that, but also from the Arab side, also from some of those politicians who are begrudgingly dragging after this integration agenda of the Arab community. And of course, at the time of the greatest Israeli-Palestinian violence, there's ever been.

There's nothing ever been like either October 7 or the Gaza War between Israelis and Palestinians. This was for 140 years one of the least bleeding conflicts in the region, in the Middle East. and that's completely changed. And this is also the moment of the greatest push for integration from the Arab community at a level unimaginable 10 years ago that there's ever been. If you're confused, it's because a lot of things are happening all at once, and it's fascinating and also maybe a little bit confusing. Let's finish up with strategy.

There's a lot of consolidation. because of everything we learned about how the system works. Religious Zionism of Smotritsch is joining with Zheut, led by a guy named Faglin. They signed an agreement on September 1st. Netanyahu publicly blessed this union, drove it, negotiated it, pressured to have it done, to make sure that no right-wing votes are wasted. He first asked Smotrich and Ben-Gvir to unify into a joint list again, as they were last time. Ben-Vir adamantly refused.

He faced tremendous pressure from Netanyahu. The Fagland deal then happened. Was it Smotritch's fallback, or was the public fight with Benkvier to take Smotrich away to lower Faglin's chart, you know, price that he set for the union between Faglin and Smaltrich to help push Smotrch over the threshold? It's politics. Maybe it was all the things all at once. The Smotritch-led party is still trying to get Ophil Vinter. Netanyahu is still very angrily and publicly trying to get Ophil Vinter to join

to create a larger religious Zionist block. I don't believe that that door is really open. I don't think Netanyahu really wants Vintel to merge with Smotridge. Unless he genuinely believes Vintel can't pass the threshold, because Vintel's votes would

disappear in a shared list with Smotich. They are votes against the people in power. Right-wingers, religious Zionist, against the people in power in the last four years. Don't like this government. And so that that joining would lose those votes.

On the other hand, it would draw some of the votes, and those all would be lost if Vinter's under the threshold. So Nizeniao might be figuring that he'll try to get Vintel on board, and he will try to prop him up if he ends up when, you know, the lists are closed on September 9, and he's still running alone. Then Nizte Nizan will probably try to prop him up and make sure he passes that threshold.

On the other side, labor and merits are now joined together in a list called the Democrats. Bennett and Lapid are together, the Arab three-way list. Everyone's running the same play. Unite to avoid the threshold. I should say, Nisinau is doing it better, and he's doing more. For example, Netanyahu has now deployed the conspiracy theory strategy. He's pushing a narrative through his wife, Sarah Nizeniau, and through the communications minister, Shlomo Kari.

that other, that left-wing figures like Ja'Ir Golan, the head of the Democrats, former deputy chief of staff of the IDF, knew about the October 7 attack beforehand, that there's some kind of conspiracy there, that they couldn't have pulled it off without, that the left was somehow literally complicit in October 7. This is something that Sa Netanyahu said in Channel 14, the right-wing pro-Netaniou television channel, explicitly, openly. And Shlomokari defended her.

explicitly and openly in the last few days. Netanyahu himself has said publicly that the generals didn't wake him that morning because they were afraid he'd order, he'd understand what was happening, in order a full mobilization to stop the attack. And that that mobilization would lead to a war the generals were afraid of. They were so timid that they'd never woke him. He's the tough security hawk, and they're the squeamish, scaredy cats. It's a hard claim to swallow for a few reasons.

one, the Army sent the warnings through the channels to his office, both directly to his military secretariat and to the National Security Council, this sits directly under him in the hierarchy. Both warnings stopped cold in both places. It's his own direct staff that didn't wake him. And that's because nobody quite understood what was happening until pretty late. And also, because that's not the issue. It's that one of the specific of the many failures of that day isn't really his culprud. His culpability is that he was Prime Minister almost unbroken for a decade and a half beforehand. He restructured many of the systems and appointed many of these officials, from the National Security Council to the heads of the army, to many other Mossad and the Shabakh are under him. And he led the doctrine of containment and funding for Hamas to stabilize Gaza. That was his decision. A lot of people agreed with it. But he's the guy who made the decision. If a lot of people agree with the prime minister's policy that later turns out to be

catastrophically mistaken, a lot of people aren't wrong. The prime minister don't bear accountability and responsibility. The prime minister bears accountability and responsibility. If the system was so broken that it couldn't handle itself on that day, maybe the guy in charge of the system for 15 years, right? Israel cuts, the current defense minister, spent many years, over a decade as transportation minister, built many highways, expanded the rail system tremendously. If all of his expansions turn out to break down and trains crash, he's not at all responsible? Because why? He's not

an engineer. He's the guy in charge. The buck stops with him. So the refusal to wake him up isn't just about him saying everyone is at fault except me on October 7. He's the only person who's refused to accept responsibility. It's also about trying to change the window. from 15 years of containment policy that turned out to not have been a good idea, to what happened at 629 or 4 a.m. exactly on that one moment. I want to talk about that one moment so that nobody's talking about anything else. It's not an insane conspiracy. It's a claim, a rational claim, about culture and bureaucratic breakdown.

The idea that the Israeli political left, especially people who ran into the fire to save people like Eirgol, knew about it ahead of time and were complicit is already a kind of betrayal of the dead and of the sacrifices. And Netanyahu's wife and close ally as a cabinet minister, Shmuro Mukali, will advance that argument

because somebody might be convinced enough for Netanyahu to hold that half a percentage enough. You deploy everything you have in every direction. It's a completely predatory politics. The point isn't that he believes any of these claims and conspiracies. Not the disgusting one and not the reasonable but not exactly exonerating one that he himself allows himself to say. The point isn't that he believes it.

The point is that it's part of that larger strategy of sailing past the rage, of getting over that hump of the sense of betrayal of so many right-wing voters at the behavior of the government and at the handling of October 7. Netanyahu has purged the Likud list. The primary was on August 17. It was slated for August 4. There was a lot of disagreement and dissension. It was delayed to August 17, mainly caused by Nizaniao, including a threat to cancel the primary altogether if Niztinyahu didn't get eight appointments to the list.

The primary was then held on August 17. The central committee of the party gave Niztinau eight reserved slots. That was on July 27. And then three more for certain coalition problems and internally could party problems. Sa'a al-Israeli Kats and Chaim Katz. Don't worry about the details. So Netanyahu can now appoint 11 people, basically to the top 20. And that takeover of the party list is meant to dilute the swing voter repelling figures,

the populists who say crazy things, including vicious conspiracy theories about how the left might have been coordinated with Hamas on October 7. left-wing former generals who ran into the fire to save people. People like Shlomo Kari, Maigolan, Tali Gottlieb. They're people who are popular with certain parts of the base, but absolute kryptonite to the swing voters, or just to the traditional Likud voters who find them repellent and are more center-right than deep-right.

And Netanyahu has purged the slate to a significant extent. He still hasn't named all of his picks. he picked a number of eight to push them down, not because he had eight people. He desperately wanted to run on the list because he wants them in the next Knesset. Gottlieb, Tali Gottlieb, survived the purge barely at 20,

and has been attacking Netanyahu publicly and on right-wing news media on Channel 14 ever since. Kali survived at 21. There are now rumors spreading through Likud, that Gottlieb is actually going to defect to Ben-Gvier's list. She's publicly backed Ben-Gvir against Netanyahu's pressure

that he merged with Smotrich, and she's railed at him about her placement. She hasn't yet defected, but she has publicly threatened Netanyahu that she will continue to be loud, which is to say damaging to the campaign. If she doesn't get a direct appointment to one of the seats he can appoint her to, she specifically talked about being appointed to number 12. Netanyahu doesn't mind her rage because the purge is a message. Center right voters are meant to see it. And Gottlie, and he said that.

It's a new list, a new, almost everyone on the list is people who were on the last list. But what he meant by, it's a new list after the election is the people you really don't like, they're gone. Gottlieb's rage is proof of delivery. So he wants the fight to be visible without losing the right wing flank. And since all she can do is go to Benvier and Ben-Vir will definitely recommend Netanyahu and the coalition part of the election, that's a loss he can take if it brings in a few more from the center. Ofer Wintel is functioning as his useful rebel. Netanyahu and Vinterer had loggerheads.

They're putting out press releases against each other. But Vintel is not going to cross over to the opposition, probably. He's a former brigadier general who was passed over for promotion twice and left the army in 2024. The man who passed him over was Gaddi Eisencoat when he was chief of staff. And the reason he passed him over, according to Vintel's supporters, is that he's religious Zionist. And he was part of a couple of sort of,

of public dust-ups about religious soldiers in the army and talking about religious wars and and just a kind of culture war discourse that sometimes slightly sort of pulls in the army into the conversation. He's a very accomplished general, commander of the 98th division, one of the most important ground force fighting divisions of the IDF. And he has refused to put on his list. His slate is made up of Burrish families, of reservists, of civil society figures. Number two is Yosef Haddad, a Christian Arab Israeli and wounded IDF veteran who wants to be the public diplomacy minister of Israel. So it's a list made up of new people, of the kind of idealized Israeli society that the religious Zionist community thinks it is and thinks it belongs to, and that isn't the far right of Smotrich or the populists within Likud. and he explicitly said that his people will not be people who were in power on October 7.

But he's also publicly said he's going to recommend Nizeniao for Prime Minister in the coalition stage. He entered the race at polling at about 2%. Amid Gampol on September 1st put him at four seats. Sometimes he's below the line in polls. Netanyahu seems to really be scrambling to save both Smoltech and him and kind of wants that unity. But if he doesn't unify, he helps Netanyahu more, as long as he makes it in because he picks up those moderate religious Zionists who won't vote Smotich, the center-rightly couldninks disgusted by the populism who would otherwise drift to Bennett or Eisencoat,

and then votes for Netanyahu-led coalition with those anti-Netaniou votes. Netanyahu has run enemies before. It's a very clever way of doing things that voters approve of, because they'll vote for these people after these people say I'm going to vote for Netanyahu. So that's another significant strategic act by Netanyahu. And I want to say all that just to tell you, just to explain, at this moment, while Netanyahu is micromanaging very carefully, the threshold math and the shadow list and, you know,

the opposition is doing almost none of this. They're struggling to consolidate smaller factions, parties that are polling below the list and don't like Netanyahu. or maximizing their surplus voting strategy in different ways. For example, the Bennett-Lopied merger destroyed value, you know, two parties combined, and there are fewer seats than they had separately. The difference mostly flowed to Eisencote, but not entirely. They're Lepid voters who don't like Bennett and vice versa.

And so if mergers rarely add, they sort of average out and lose the total, the sum total, then the parties need to be able to run apart while having completely unified planning and strategy. They have to have a sense of solidarity and shared fate. Religious Zionism and Zahut and Uttemayudit and Likud and Shas have that. They run apart, maximize their effectiveness in their constituency, and then coordinate perfectly. And in the opposition, they don't have that.

You don't see that. They're not doing the work. And that, again, in a close election, any of these things can decide the election. The Undecides. The pool of Undecides, according to pollsters, peaked at 26% of the electorate in December 2024. It has shrunk every month. It was 16% in May. And a Channel 12 poll has it at 10% in late July. We're going into the election with probably 10% of the electorate undecided. And it's, it hasn't been growing. So every new party launching right now is launching into a small existing pie that is undecided, but not necessarily undecided and will go to a small party that doesn't have a chance

to make it in. The priorities of the undecided are interesting. Cost of living is first, then war and personal security, then the draft equality, state commission of inquiry for October 7, you know, accountability for October 7, all of those issues. to me says that the undecides will break to the opposition. We're more likely to break to the opposition. By the way, 52% of undecides. What makes them undecided is that they want a broad national coalition, not a narrow ideological one like the Netanyahu government or a left-wing government. It's almost the mirror image of the committed voters on either side who want their side by a huge majority. The undecideds are 51% national unity government. 18% narrow ideological government. Late undecides, undecided is late in the game. More often than not break away from the incumbent, especially if their number one issue is something the incumbent

can reasonably be seen as being responsible for like cost of living. So these are seats that are available to be picked up by good quite possibly by good strategy of the opposition. We haven't yet found that strategic cleverness and campaigns that we see on the right with that old, grizzled old veteran of politics, Benjamin Netanyahu. Let's close. Friends, there are three separate contests in an Israeli election, and you have to win all three. You have to win votes. You have to convert those votes into seats, meaning clear the threshold, create a mini coalition that makes sure the

arithmetic gives you a seat for your leftovers. And then the third stage, you have to convert the seats into a coalition that survives its own backbenchers. That doesn't fall when Bennett's most right-wing edge of the Benedict government, a tiny handful of MKs abandoned them for the right because almost of social pressure. And everything falls apart. There are basically six camps in this election, Netanyahu's religious right coalition, whose voters really are a religious right coalition.

The two anti-Natineau major vehicles, Yashalin together, Bennett-Lapid and Eisenkot, the explicit left, Meritz-Labor forming a joint list in the Democrats, the Haredi parties were up to four, the far right, Ben-Gvier Smotrich, and the Arab parties. And there are different and fascinating dynamics happening in each of them. And the bottom line is Netanyahu is losing in every poll. And so is Eisenkot. He's losing in every poll. and Netanyahu is the only one who's very visibly,

there's a decent Eisencoat campaign with some good campaign videos on social media, mocking Netanyahu for his claim that he was asleep on the morning of October 7. They're not totally incompetent on the other side, but you don't see the kind of camp building, the kind of sort of blunt force pushing through the camp building that you see with Netanyahu. he's doing that unglamorous arithmetic that decides elections that are close like this one.

So I am not going to tell you who wins, but I am going to tell you what to watch for now that you've walked through the whole system. Who merges before September 9? Can decide a lot. It'll decide who goes below the threshold. If Winter runs and fails, that could cost the right the election.

If Smoktrich unites with Fegnan and still runs and still fails, that could cost the election as Winter rises to five. all of these things can decide everything. Who merges, who signs surplus deals by October 16? Again, two seats exchanged in a surplus deal could decide the election. It would be a coalition you don't want to be part of because it could fall on one or two people leaving it, but it would be a victory.

And what happens to the Arab turnout? If the Arab turnout moves off of 53 percent and because the Arab political parties more than ever before are in sync with what their voters say they actually want and we suddenly see 67 percent, it's a whole nother Knesset. The math tilts very decisively. Maybe most of those Arab factions, Rahm wants to sit in a coalition. Bala doesn't and can't. It's a Palestinian nationalist party that that is its idea. So it's not clear if those Arabs could make a coalition or if Ram would be enough or if

some of the parties, the hawkish parties on the center left, would sit with Rahm again. of this is clear, it's chaos, but watch the Arab turn out because it could be decisive as well. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope that even if you don't remember all the details, you know what's happening, you know what we're looking for, you know how it works. And now the election.