Today, Explained - To Bibi or not to Bibi

Episode Date: September 18, 2019

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s decade-long hold on power may be coming to an end. Anyone up for peace? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Alison Kaplan-Summer, you write for Haaretz in Tel Aviv. The Israeli election was yesterday, less than six months after the last Israeli election. Why are y'all having so many elections? Yeah, it kind of feels like deja vu all over again. We just basically retraced our steps from six months ago. And the truth is, the results weren't that different, surprisingly. The last elections were unresolved after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to recreate his ruling coalition. It's a parliamentary system. You have to put together enough political parties to join your government to form a majority. Netanyahu failed at that. And instead of deciding as the law states that he should hand over the mandate to form a government

to the country's president so he can give his opponent a chance to form a government, Netanyahu decided to take a different path. He dissolved the Knesset and he called new elections, which is how we found ourselves voting again in September. And the Knesset is the Israeli parliament for the folks watching at home. So how did things go this time around? Netanyahu pretty much lost his bet. He was hoping that he could get better results this time, in which he could get a definitive majority. And instead, it's looking as if he's got even less of a shot of a majority of 61 than he had the last time around. If you go back in history, we weren't supposed to

have elections until November. He called the April elections because he could see indictments pending against him. He is about to get indicted on corruption charges involving bribery, involving favors in three separate cases. Less than two weeks from now, he is going to be going to a hearing in front of the attorney general. It's kind of his last ditch hearing before these indictments will be handed down. So his entire incentive in April and now again in September was to be able to go to court, being able to say, listen, the people want me to be in charge and, you know, this is a democracy and the court should not override the will of the people.

And he's kind of failed in that endeavor. He hasn't been only fighting for his political life, but he's been fighting to stay out of court and potentially to stay out of prison. Is it a surprise for Israel that he didn't get his majority? Nobody really knows. Listen, when you have an election less than six months after a previous election, the idea that you're going to get radically different results, I think, is unrealistic. So I don't think anyone is completely shocked that he wasn't able to do what he wanted to do. But he has been prime minister for over a decade. He is considered something of a political wizard who has a lot of rabbits to pull out of his hat. So I think people are frankly a little bit

surprised that they are contemplating a future without Netanyahu as prime minister of Israel. Okay. With no clear majority, what happens now? Well, under normal circumstances, someone would try to form a coalition with their ideological partners. So Netanyahu's goal was to take his Likud party, which at the moment is standing with 31 seats in the Knesset, and add to that the parties that he traditionally has in his coalitions, which tend to be right-wing parties and religious or ultra-religious parties. He wanted math that would add up to more than 61. 61 would have given him a majority in the Knesset. But with 90% of the votes counted, he only has 55 seats right now. And on the other side, Benny Gantz, who's the head of the

blue and white party, would be looking at the center and center-left parties to align with, and he would want to form a majority coalition of 61, but he only has right now 56 seats. So neither of them have a clear path to a majority in a government coalition. So who's going to be kingmaker here? The kingmaker is a guy called Avigdor Lieberman. He is the head of the Yisrael Beiteinu party. He has done some kind of a political transformation, I have to say, over the past year. He has traditionally been a right-wing hawk. He's worked closely with Netanyahu in the past, but it was his refusal back in April to ally with Netanyahu to lead to these elections in the first place. And he has

said, you know, on behalf of his Russian immigrant constituents and on behalf of himself, that he is tired of Netanyahu being beholden to the ultra-Orthodox parties, that he wants ultra-Orthodox Israelis to have to serve in the army, that he wants to see them forced into more modern education, that he's tired of so many government funds going towards their yeshivas and their other institutions. And he has said he will not join a Netanyahu government together with these ultra-Orthodox parties. And if Netanyahu can't have the ultra-Orthodox and he can't have Lieberman, then his math just will never work. Only, what, 12% of Israel is ultra-Orthodox. How is this one group so powerful?

What we're talking about here is political power at the moment. And the two ultra-Orthodox political parties, as of this most recent election, one has nine seats in the Knesset and one has eight seats in the Knesset. And so that's 17 seats. These ultra-Orthodox parties, they have traditionally been the kingmakers in past decades. They often made the difference between a left-wing or a right-wing government in Israel. But in the Netanyahu era, they have become kind of irrevocably tied to the right. Lieberman, as being the anti-ultra-Orthodox guy, has replaced them as the kingmaker, and he's going to be the decider as to who gets to be prime minister. So the ultra-Orthodox community was a huge factor in this election, it sounds like.

Yes, absolutely. And even more so this decision of this one politician who in the last election had five seats and in this election appears to be getting nine seats. His decision to be a pushback force against the ultra-Orthodox. So Lieberman's pushback is resonating with the Israeli public. What is the general feeling about the ultra-Orthodox in Israel? Well, very much divided. Obviously, it's a Jewish state, but the religion of Judaism has become politicized in Israel because you have these ultra-Orthodox parties and some less extreme but still very Orthodox parties aligned with them who say the nature of a Jewish state means that you shouldn't have public transportation on the Jewish Sabbath. You shouldn't have shopping malls open on the Jewish Sabbath.

That there are public events that cater to the ultra-Orthodox, that they want to be separated by gender. There's a huge national controversy over whether ultra-Orthodox men should be exempt from military service so that they can continue studying in yeshiva. So there's a controversy and discussions and arguments over exactly how Jewish should a Jewish state be. And it's turned into a little bit of a civil rights battle for non-Orthodox Israelis. They say, if I want to take a bus to the beach on Saturday, why shouldn't I be allowed to? If Saturday is my only day off from work, why can't I go shopping? And they are, you know, pushing against those who say that in order to maintain its Jewish nature,

the Israeli Jewish state should maintain Jewish law in a lot of its public life. I guess on the opposite side of the religious spectrum here, not all of Israel is Jewish, right? Right. I mean, nearly a good quarter of the country is not Jewish. And Netanyahu has had something of a rocky relationship with Arabs who live in Israel, right? How did they factor into this election? Well, that's kind of putting it mildly. In his past few elections, I know this is going to sound very strange to somebody in the United States, but Netanyahu has found that it energizes his base to incite racial resentments and to kind of build on that. So his traditional sort of modus operandi

as the elections have drawn closer have been warning that the Arabs are going to come out in huge numbers and vote and that if you don't reelect him, there's going to be a leftist government dominated by Arabs. Arab polling places to try to identify Arab voters, you know, who might have their community frown on the fact that they're participating in the elections. And his incitement sort of reached a peak during this past campaign. And it acted, in fact, as kind of a boomerang, because he was so public and so outspoken for so long about the Arab citizens of Israel as a threat that they pushed back and they actually did vote in greater numbers than in the past, just to kind of demonstrate their unhappiness with that level of voting. And I think it really helped to turn the tide of votes against Netanyahu. And is there like a bloc now that will represent Arab Israelis that wasn't present before?

There's a party called the Joint List, which is actually four very disparate Arab parties who joined together in a block for this election. And they are the third largest party if the current results bear out. The Joint List, the Arab party, could become the opposition party. Do his tactics against Arab Israelis offend Jewish Israelis at all? Absolutely. I think part of voting against Netanyahu in general, not only from the Arab communities, is people, you know, want more of a message of unity and they don't like his incitement, which, again, might sound familiar politically. While it's supposed to excite Netanyahu's base, it turns off a majority of people in the country. If Netanyahu's future as the leader of Israel is looking sort of in doubt, I wonder, what does that mean for the peace process? Well, the peace process is pretty non-existent at the moment. After having fizzled out in the Obama years, Israelis have been sitting tight waiting for this much ballyhooed

deal of the century to come out of the Trump White House. It's been postponed multiple times now, mostly because of the Israeli elections, or so they say in the past year that President Trump didn't present it first because elections were being called in April and now because elections were called in September. So one has to wonder if the United States is no longer doing business with Netanyahu, what does that do for this deal of the century, which frankly, nobody was putting a lot of stock in anyway. People were a little bit cynical as to whether Jared Kushner was indeed coming up with the magic formula that could bring peace to the Middle East. Why? Just kidding.

Before the election, Netanyahu promised that if he won, he would annex the Jordan Valley, which is the opposite of a peace process, obviously. It's like something like a third of the West Bank. Is that even possible for him to do? Is that within reach? Well, first of all, anything's possible. Second of all, you know, this was very much of a campaign move. You know, look at the facts. He's been prime minister for a decade. If this was something he had really wanted to do, why didn't he do it before? It was a campaign promise made in order to win more right wing voters into his camp. People on the far right who do advocate not only annexing this part of the West Bank,

but they'd like to annex all of the West Bank. When you look in the research and the numbers, when you ask Israelis about annexation, you could find a high percent of Israelis who might support annexing those parts of the West Bank, which essentially are only populated by Jews, when you start asking them about annexing the entire West Bank, or you start asking them about annexing to Israel parts of the West Bank, which are, you know, overwhelming majority, if not completely populated by Palestinians, there's much less enthusiasm for that. So that was a very carefully crafted campaign promise of wanting to annex a part of the West Bank that is essentially populated by Jewish communities. And without the kind of majority, solid majority that Netanyahu could get in order to push through something like that, it's highly doubtful, if not completely inconceivable, that this is actually going to happen. When he floated the idea, did Kushner or Trump himself weigh in on it? Do they factor into this election at all? Well, they certainly factored into the election in that one of Netanyahu's selling points

that he was trying to sell himself on was, listen, you're not going to be able to replace me with anybody who has the ear of the most powerful person in the world the way I do. And, you know, he was showing off his relationship with President Trump and our buildings were plastered with billboards of Netanyahu shaking hands with Trump. So that was a major selling point on his part. What was interesting before the April elections, there was kind of a series of gestures on Trump's part. He invited Netanyahu to the White House. He recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. People were expecting something similar in September, and they were waiting for it, but there was utter silence. Why did Trump sit this one out, you think? You know, you can speculate that, you know, Trump likes winners. He likes guys that win big. And the fact that Netanyahu was not able to pull off a victory in April, that he was stuck and he was forced to redo the elections, maybe turned Trump off to him a little bit and maybe made him think, wow, maybe this guy isn't so much of a winner anymore and made him want to distance

himself from Netanyahu a bit. So Netanyahu's standing on shaky ground despite ramping up all the bellicose rhetoric on the West Bank. Is this some sort of sweeping irony? Did driving the country far from peace end up bringing the country back to it? Well, we'll see. I wouldn't push that theory too hard. When you look at who Netanyahu's rivals are, who the alternative person is to be prime minister, you look at this blue and white party. It's Benny Gantz, who's a former chief of staff of the IDF, the Israel Defense Forces. His party is sort of a team of four. Some people joke about a military coup. It's completely a joke. But three of them have been head of the Israel Defense Forces. These are military men. We are not talking about, you know, squishy left wing types of people. So I would be

hesitant to say like, yes, this is the team that's going to lead us right back into the peace process. So Netanyahu's time as leader might be coming to an end, but that doesn't necessarily mean jack for peace. It does not necessarily mean that we're heading in that direction, for sure. And if you look at overall polling of the Israeli electorate and you look at their voting patterns, the parties that really openly advocate for active pursuance of a two-state solution and real peace parties have shrunken, really, I wouldn't say into non-existence, but they're very, very weak and very, very small at the moment. Alison Kaplan-Summer is a journalist based in Tel Aviv. She's also a panelist on The Promised Podcast. This is the Today Explained Podcast. guest.