It's less than a week until Israel will vote for its eighteenth parliament in sixty years. Polls following likely voters in Tuesday's election have been all over the map, but it seems plain at this point that former Prime Minister and current Likud leader Binyamin "Bibi" Netanyahu will win a plurality of votes and be appointed to form a government.
This is terrible, needless to say, for the peace process. Netanyahu's tenure as Prime Minister between 1996 and 1999 had him fighting President Clinton the entire time for the least concessions to the Palestinians. His government finally fell because he agreed to re-deploy -- and not to withdraw -- IDF troops in and around Hebron. So why is Bibi being resurrected now by Israeli voters? Here are a few reasons:
(1) The Gaza War. This one seems obvious, but the effects it had on the parties running in the election were interesting. Neither the current Kadima-led government of Acting Prime Minister Tzipi Livni nor the Likud received a substantial boost in its polling numbers from the war. Instead, the parties that won big were one from the left and one from the right: former Prime Minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak's Labor Party and Avigdor Liberman's Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home) party of recent immigrants.
It's little surprise that the defense minister's party would receive a boost from a military operation from a population that, despite obvious excesses by the IDF, viewed said operation as a success. On the right, however, is something more sinister. Liberman, who emigrated to Israel from the USSR in 1978, is probably best known for the so-called Liberman Peace Plan. While this plan has zero support outside his own party, it deserves mention because it bears elements of other extreme right Israeli political parties. Liberman's peace plan would eliminate Israel's Arab population (its citizens, not the Palestinians under military occupation) by redrawing Israel's and the West Bank's borders in such a way that a substantial section of northern Israel, where the Arab population is generally concentrated in its highest numbers, would be transferred to Palestinian control. In exchange, Israel would annex an enormous portion of the West Bank and remove the Arabs from their homes there.
Needless to say it's a recipe for disaster, which is why so few people support it outside Yisrael Beiteinu. So why is this party polling so well after the war? Because Israelis are in saber-rattling mode right now. Sadly, the population that marched on Tel-Aviv in 1982 to demand an investigation into Phalangist massacres at Sabra and Shatilla (carried out in IDF-controlled ares of Beirut) is no longer the population of Israel. Twenty-seven years passing means fewer Holocaust survivors are left, and, as a result, fewer consciences against the deaths of innocents are around to raise their voices.
(2) The Arab Parties. During the "fog" of the Gaza War, the aforementioned Liberman and some of his fellow malcontents successfully lobbied Israel's Central Elections Committee to ban two of three Israeli Arab parties from running in Tuesday's election. While the ban was overturned by the Supreme Court (this move has been tried in the past and succeeded only once -- against Meir Kahane's Kach party), it had the effect of severely hurting both the number of mandates these parties are now likely to receive, as well as likely Arab voter turnout.
This is something that cannot be easily dismissed. Arab voters were absolutely decisively in Barak's 1999 election as Prime Minister. His broken promises to the same voters were a key factor in his losing to Ariel Sharon in 2001 in direct elections for Prime Minister. Furthermore, Livni's Kadima party can only form a majority government of 61 seats (out of 120) with the Arab parties in a coalition. While this is not as far out as it sounds (even Menachem Begin's first government contained a party, Dash, with Arab members), the Gaza War may have permanently dissuaded the Arab parties from joining any coalition led by Livni.
(3) Single-issue Parties. The surprise winners in the last Knesset election in 2006 were Liberman's party, which won 11 mandates (up 8 full mandates from the previous parliament) and Gil, a party of pensioners who ran for the first time and won 7 seats. Gil and Israel's Green Party were polling 1 or 2 seats apiece in early polls, and Livni would likely have been able to count on those mandates to form a majority government. Now they are polling below the threshold that Israeli law requires a party to receive to get a seat in the parliament. All their votes went to either Labor or Yisrael Beiteinu -- thus their gains.
So what are the scenarios that are likely? The only contenders for Prime Minister are Livni and Netanyahu. A poll published today by Ma'ariv, Israel's largest evening newspaper, shows Livni's Kadima receiving 23 mandates to Netanyahu's 27. That's inside the margin of error, but let's go with what we have on the table.
Livni can count on Labor and its 17 mandates as a junior partner, giving her 40 seats. She can also count on Meretz, the social democrats, to throw their 6 mandates behind her. But 46 is the grand total of mandates for which she won't have to wheel and deal. Shas, the Sephardi/Mizrachi religious party, has 10 mandates in today's poll, but Livni failed to come to terms with Shas in forming a government in the fall -- thus Tuesday's election. Rancor between Kadima and Shas is at an all-time high.
It's possible that Livni could court and win the Ashkenazi religious faction United Torah Judaism, but they have only 5 more mandates, for a total of 51. She's still 10 seats short, and the Arabs -- even if they were willing to join a coalition -- only have 8 seats to give.
Netanyahu has his own 27 mandates and can count on the so-called national-religious parties to join him. These include Yisrael Beiteinu (17 mandates), Jewish Home (formerly the National Religious Party -- 3 mandates), and the National Union (4 mandates), a coalition of the extreme right wing. That gives him 51 mandates. All he has to do is get Shas into the mix and that gives him his majority. He can even get United Torah Judaism on board to give him some breathing room.
So it looks like Bibi will be "King of Israel" again. How much damage can he do? Well, given that he will require Shas in his government to get a majority and Shas's demands are always unreasonable and their likelihood of bolting any coalition is around 100 percent, his government won't last long. But consider how much damage he did in a mere three years in the nineties.
Israel is heading for at least a year more of serious -- perhaps deadly -- conflict with the Palestinians and a complete absence of peace talks, as even Fatah cannot negotiate with the Likud, who hav said quite plainly that they oppose Palestinian statehood in any form. People are going to die and, as per usual, many more of them will be Palestinians.
The only hope is that Arab voters turn out and vote and that they persuade their parties to stop Bibi by joining a Livni-led coalition. But with the Gaza War and the toll it took on the Palestinians, that ship may very well have sailed.