Bill Bartley

Last night, the exit polls told one story: Netanyahu had lost, but it wasn’t clear who on the other side had won. This morning, the results are telling another. Netanyahu hasn’t won yet, but the change bloc has clearly lost. I’ve covered politics since the start of the century. I have never seen a camp organize for an election as impeccably, as efficiently and as energetically as the change bloc did. It signed model surplus-vote agreements, so that no leftover votes would go to waste, and ran an unprecedented operation flying Israelis home from abroad to vote. And by the actual count, it ended up with more or less the same number of seats as in the last election. Demography beat energy, and the message also proved flawed and unsuccessful. The public wasn’t convinced that the war had been a total victory, as Netanyahu claimed, but it also refused to buy the opposition’s claim that it was a total failure. It was repelled by Haredi draft-dodging, but didn’t think the solution was a minority government propped up by draft refusers and anti-Zionists. It was disgusted when ultra-Orthodox protesters chanted “We do not believe in the rule of the Zionists,” but it was just as shocked when “Biladi, Biladi,” the Palestinian national anthem, was sung at the Joint List’s headquarters last night. Netanyahu’s position changed completely between the release of the exit polls and the arrival of the real results. Last night it seemed clear that Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana, a Likud loyalist, would be ousted and that, one way or another, Gadi Eisenkot, the former IDF chief of staff, would form a minority government. Now, by the criteria Eisenkot himself set, he has lost the legitimacy to form such a government. He promised he wouldn’t rely on the Arab parties’ votes, yet without a majority he would now need the active support of the Joint List, which looks futile and pointless. In post-October 7 Israel, there is no chance that a coalition including six candidates who lost immediate family to Hamas could last long alongside Joint List lawmakers who claim Hamas is simply a charitable organization. After the 1967 war, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan famously said Israel was waiting for the Arabs to call. In the same spirit, Netanyahu in effect told the change camp before dawn: here’s my phone number, feel free to use it. Yisrael Beiteinu’s Avigdor Lieberman, former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Eisenkot now face a dilemma from hell. They can go to another election, one that Israelis abroad will no longer fly home for. They can try to join Netanyahu’s bloc on tough terms, breaking their campaign pledges never to sit with him. Or they can beg the Islamist Ra’am and the Joint List, now drunk on their success, for support. And one final note: for the entire campaign, we searched for a third bloc, a centrist unity bloc between Netanyahu and his rivals. Candidates included Benny Gantz and former UN Ambassador Gilad Erdan, former general Ofer Winter and economist Yaron Zelekha, former Culture Minister Hili Tropper and who even remembers who else. They all collapsed, evaporated or vanished. And now it turns out the unity bloc may have been the Arab parties all along. Their historic, almost hysterical turnout, at rates that will need careful examination, shattered both sides’ dreams of a 61-seat majority. It reminded Jews on both sides that, after years of division, they may have to learn to sit together after all. newsletter.amitsegal.net/p/i…