There are three cities of Jerusalem. There is the Palestinian city whose residents did not participate in last Tuesday’s election. There is the city of the ultra-Orthodox Jews who voted (or refrained from doing so) on the orders of the rabbis. And there is the city of the Likud party and other rightwing groups. Within this last are a few tiny enclaves of mainly secular middle-class Israelis who support the parties of the left. Altogether last Tuesday they amounted to only 15% of the vote.
On Wednesday morning, in a cafe in one of these enclaves, they sat huddled over their cappuccinos, asking themselves how it happened. “I just can’t understand why someone in his right mind votes for Bibi again,” exclaimed a yoga instructor. “I look at the numbers and it just doesn’t make any sense,” answered her friend, a film editor. “So many people falling for his same old tricks.”
Outside, a small car covered in Netanyahu posters drove slowly down the street. The driver, delirious with joy at the latest results, called from a loudspeaker (“Thank you for all voting in the right way”), oblivious to the baleful stares of those within.
Yet again they had allowed themselves to believe that Israel was “coming to its senses”, only to have their hopes cruelly dashed by the exit polls, which showed Binyamin Netanyahu making a comeback and closing the gap on Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog. And then, a few hours later, came the second blow when it transpired that in the actual results Netanyahu was ahead by a comfortable margin. Where had all his supporters come from?
And just a few days earlier, in this very enclave, all had seemed possible.
A group of men in their early 30s were drinking at a nearby pub, discussing politics. They were all from families who had invariably voted Likud since emigrating to Israel in the 1950s. This time would be different. “You can’t have someone in power for so long,” one of them said of Netanyahu. “It all goes rotten and corrupt.” “Bibi lost sight of ordinary people’s problems and, instead, just wants to frighten us with stories about Iran and the Palestinians,” said another.
They were planning to vote for Kulanu, a new centrist party, headed by a former Likud minister who had fallen out with Netanyahu, had run on a social and economic reform platform, and was widely expected on the eve of elections to join a Herzog-led coalition. They said many of their friends and family members were planning to do the same – part of a demographic that the pollsters had detected leaving Likud and endangering Netanyahu’s re-election. His defeat suddenly seemed possible, if not probable.
The next morning, 48 hours before the polls opened, on a train from Jerusalem, making the winding journey downhill to Tel Aviv, the passengers, mainly soldiers and police officers returning to their bases after a weekend’s leave, were talking about the election. “I didn’t want to vote Bibi, he’s been around too long, but now there’s a danger of the left coming to power, so we have to vote Bibi,” was a sentence I heard repeated up and down the train.
The fatigue that most Israelis felt for Netanyahu was very real. In poll after poll large majorities answered that they would prefer change and more votes were cast for parties who were critical of his policies and whose leaders, if they could find a way of sitting together in one government, would have gladly replaced him.
So how did Netanyahu manage in the last six days of the campaign to convince more than 250,000 voters to change their minds and vote Likud? Why did his rivals fail so miserably at mobilising the anti-Netanyahu sentiment into a coherent and cohesive political force?
Netanyahu won the election because he succeeded in stoking a deep and irrational fear of the left. A left which – or so runs the line – is too complacent, too cosmopolitan, too secular and too lacking in an ideological backbone to stand up for Israel’s interests.
Netanyahu’s cynical ploy on election day, when he warned in a personal message on his Facebook page of “droves of Arabs” descending on the polls, was appealing less to the racism of his potential voters than to their fear that the left was incapable of keeping a hold on power and would be easily manipulated by outside forces. He was warning them that should they vote for someone else, Jews would be losing control of their destiny in their land.
An interview last Sunday with a small weekly newspaper, read mainly by religious settlers, in which Netanyahu seemed to be ruling out the possibility of his ever agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state, made headlines around the world. It is now the reason for yet another crisis in his relationship with the international community.
In Israel it barely caused a stir. Save for a relatively small number of settlers still traumatised by past evacuations of settlements in the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip and the retreat from parts of the West Bank at the start of the Oslo accord, it is barely an issue.
A majority of Israelis in opinion polls still support in principle the two-state solution, but it seems so distant. Their concerns are more immediate. Can they buy their own flat? Will their monthly income be sufficient or will they have to yet again enlarge their overdraft? What prospect of prosperity can their children look forward to?
Netanyahu sought to make the election about his determination to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. That flawed strategy nearly cost him his fourth term. His opponents, many of whom do support a two-state solution, barely mentioned that either, focusing instead on the rising cost of living, and six days before Israelis went to the polls, that narrative seemed to be winning.
Netanyahu, in his own tiny bubble of privilege and sycophancy, was on the verge of losing the election. But he emerged in time to stoke the primal fears of his electorate of their fate. It was a destructive tactic that took advantage of racism and ignorance and jeopardised Israel’s diplomatic position within the international community. It won the election but has divided Israel like never before.
Anshel Pfeffer writes for Haaretz