Many Israelis felt betrayed when Naftali Bennett allied with an Arab party to form government in 2021. Nevertheless, the anti-Netanyahu bloc may once again rely on anti-Zionist Arab parties to oust Benjamin Netanyahu from office.
I explained how in my Shabbat column for Israel Hayom, an excerpt of which is below.
***
The starting point in the run-up to the next election is the familiar claim: the fragmentation of the anti-Netanyahu bloc plays into the prime minister’s hands, and the only way to break through is to create a clear spearhead — one candidate for prime minister, with several satellite parties around him. But is that really so? The only time in the past 20 years that Netanyahu actually lost was also the only time that there was no clear spearhead at all, but rather a semi-organized mess in 2021.
Still, Yisrael Beiteinu head Avigdor Liberman proposed this week some coordination among the bloc’s members, and a conversation with him makes clear that he is not talking about a single product or a joint list, but about broad shared guidelines. The anti-Netanyahu camp, he says, should offer a “supermarket” of choices: secular right, center-right, center, and left.
To carry the metaphor forward, Liberman suggests packaging them all as different products of the same house brand — spelling out what the next coalition would look like and what its first steps would be. And there is one common goal for every existing list: “Don’t vote for trendy parties,” Liberman warns. “We’ve seen 15 of them so far, from Dash [the Democratic Movement for Change in the 1970s] to the Pensioners [Party] and others. Don’t waste your vote.”
Indeed, new parties are the bloc’s main strategic threat. By definition, they will neither disqualify Netanyahu nor back a “Change Government 2.0,” and thus they effectively wipe out the bloc’s chances of ousting the prime minister. Former Mossad chief Yossi Cohen — or anyone else who shows up — doesn’t need coordination with Netanyahu to meaningfully help him. Simply running alone may well save the prime minister.
But there’s another question: what’s the fallback plan if the anti-Bibi bloc can’t reach 61 seats? On the one hand, if you believe the polls, there would be an overwhelming Knesset majority against Netanyahu. On the other, it’s useless, because the large majority only exists if you include the Arab parties.
Here’s the supposed plan: edge out Netanyahu’s bloc by even a single mandate, swear in a government with the Arab parties abstaining, and immediately call new elections. The idea is simply to kick Netanyahu out of the Prime Minister’s Office. But a coalition that only survives thanks to Arab parties hardly squares with the promise to form a government that will serve the people. In my view, it’s also political madness: Netanyahu would gladly race to new elections fought not over the ultra-Orthodox’s refusal to draft, or October 7, but over the question of “who relies on Arabs.” Indeed, his only victory in the last decade was in an election fought on exactly that ground.
As for Naftali Bennett, who became prime minister thanks to the Arab Ra’am party? His party rejects the maneuver outright, says it is not part of it, never believed in it, and has never even discussed it. Liberman, by contrast, is more enigmatic: “There’s still plenty of time; I’m not ruling anything out at the moment,” he said last week. “What matters is organizing the bloc,” he added, while stressing that, in principle, he does not want to depend on the Arabs.
