A veteran figure in Israel’s election industry recently said he has never seen sums of money like those now being invested in the concentrated effort to defeat Netanyahu in the upcoming elections—not in 2015 with the V-15 NGO, not in the endless rounds of the early 2010s—nothing comparable.
Here are rich people’s problems: what do you do with all the money? Campaigns usually focus either on mobilization or persuasion. In the current era, moving voters from one side to the other is almost impossible. One can focus on getting center-left voters to the polls—what is called “maximizing turnout”—and perhaps, in parallel, run a targeted campaign in the urban wings of Religious Zionism.
It is doubtful one even needs to spend a dollar to mobilize opposition voters. They have voted at very high rates for years. In 2022, there was indeed a small, marginal drop of 2–3% in turnout in places like Ramat HaSharon, Hod HaSharon and the like, the result of disappointment with the “change government.” But the assumption is that this time they will flood the polling stations en masse. Avigdor Lieberman, for example, is convinced that if turnout rises by five percent, that will be enough to defeat Netanyahu—the question is whether that is even possible.
In normal times, most of the money would go toward boosting turnout in the Arab sector. But the leaders of the change bloc have not yet decided whether they want Arabs to turn out in massive numbers or stay home. If they believe some of the polls, only two or three seats separate them from a Zionist majority, and higher Arab turnout would shatter that dream. If they believe other polls, raising turnout is essential to prevent Netanyahu from securing a majority.
There is another issue that is discussed less. According to polls projecting 52 seats for Netanyahu’s bloc, about 8–9 mandates moved directly to Bennett and another 3 to Lieberman—some due to the judicial reform, most due to October 7. The question is: where are they? In the 1996 election, Netanyahu presented a gallery of disappointed Shimon Peres voters. In 1999, Ehud Barak boasted of well-known figures in and outside politics who had voted for Netanyahu and defected. Where are they now?
How is it that every Saturday night there are demonstrations, but all those religious Zionists or Likudniks who speak of themselves as “the right” have not voted for Netanyahu’s bloc for at least a decade? Those who defected to Lieberman are unlikely to appear, since most are immigrants from the former Soviet Union—but what about the rest?
One explanation is that this is not a direct shift, but rather Likud voters who will stay home. When that happened in 2006 and 2021, Netanyahu lost power. When they came out in droves, as in 2022, he won easily.
And here lies his opponents’ main dilemma: if there is one lesson from past elections, it is that Israel is too small a country to mobilize half of it to vote while putting the other half to sleep. You cannot blast horns in your camp without the other camp hearing and waking up—assuming, still unproven, that Likud voters are asleep at all.
This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Israel Hayom.
