It probably would have made it all the way through, but it is about to fall, thanks to Netanyahu’s long-standing allies, the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, parties.
Those parties were angry with Bibi for failing to deliver what he had promised them: legislation to permanently exempt Haredi yeshiva students from military service.
As a result, Sephardic-Mizrahi ultra-Orthodox party Shas quit the government months ago, withdrawing its ministers. Still, at that time, it did not seek to bring the government down by abandoning the coalition and calling for the dissolution of the Knesset.
But earlier this month, the other major ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism (UTJ), announced it would introduce such a bill.
To take control of the election process, Netanyahu’s own Likud party pre-empted the move with a dissolution bill of its own.
Is This The End of Netanyahu?
The longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history has faced numerous challenges to his political career and has either prevailed or rebounded from defeat. This time, he faces his most daunting trial yet, and the penalties for losing could be grave.
Yet the fraught world of Israeli elections means he has a chance to survive yet another political battle.
Bibi has good reason to pull out every trick he has. Defeat in this election will make it much more difficult to obstruct his criminal trial on charges of corruption.
It will also open the door to a serious investigation of the events of 7 October and the failures that led to that massacre. Netanyahu faces prison and public disgrace.
The difficulty he will face is that polls have shown for months that his Likud Party and his potential coalition partners in a new government are well short of the required 61 Knesset seats to form a government.
Recent polls project his coalition to win between 50 and 53 seats.
Polls can miss the mark, but many have been in that range, and they project Netanyahu and his partners to fail by a wide enough margin to make the outlook grim.
Bibi’s right-wing Likud party is actually the most centrist in the current coalition, which otherwise consists of Haredi parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, and the ultra-nationalist right, Religious Zionism and Jewish Power.
This leaves little room for political deals to persuade opposition parties to switch sides.
While the opposition consists mostly of right-wing and centre-right parties, it is a disparate bunch united around one cause: ousting Benjamin Netanyahu.
Bibi will have a difficult task ahead of him trying to convince any of the opposition parties to switch sides because the sort of offers he would probably have to make to them would alienate the allies he already has.
More than that, the party leaders—Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman, Gadi Eizenkot, and Yair Golan—all either despise Netanyahu or hold significant ideological differences with him.
Whither the Palestinian Citizens of Israel?
Netanyahu’s best chance lies, unsurprisingly, in Israeli bigotry against Arabs, especially against Palestinians. But that advantage is not merely in Netanyahu’s campaign appeals to Israeli racism.
The opposition coalition is much closer to forming a government, according to the polls. They are projected to win between 57 and 60 seats in most polls. But that’s not quite enough to put them over the top.
There are 10 or 11 seats likely to go to the new Joint List, a combination of the three non-Zionist, Palestinian, and communist parties: Hadash-Ta’al, Balad, and Ra’am.
Like Netanyahu’s coalition, the opposition has stated that they will not allow any of the Joint List parties, let alone the List as a whole, to join their coalition.
Since both Jewish groupings exclude the Joint List, that leaves about 10 seats out of play; however, it doesn’t change the fact that forming a government still requires a 61-seat majority.
Since the opposition is much closer to 61, overperforming on election day could put them in the majority. But it is more likely that they will fall just short without the Joint List parties.
In June 2021, Ra’am made history by becoming part of Naftali Bennett’s and Yair Lapid’s joint coalition, a government that lasted some ten months.
But this time around, both Bennett and Lapid (who have joined their parties to form Beyachad (Together), which is currently neck-and-neck with Likud for the lead in the polls) have sworn that they will not include any “Arab” parties.
Both parties pointed to the changed atmosphere in Israel after the 7 October Hamas attack as forbidding Palestinian participation.
It is, of course, possible that, failing to find any other way to form a majority, Bennett and Lapid will reverse themselves. But given the fact that they are correct in saying that anti-Arab hate in Israel has ballooned in the past thirty months, it’s unlikely.
This is a familiar problem in Israel, and one that Netanyahu has capitalised on in the past.
When other leaders have been allowed to form a majority government, they have failed because they refused to include the parties that now make up the Joint List, or other similar Palestinian or non-Zionist parties.
This will present Bibi with an opportunity to survive once again.
Where Will The Haredim Land?
UTJ and Shas have made a dramatic gesture by bringing down this government. But the political landscape for them remains bleak.
Netanyahu will need to woo them back into the fold, and he may promise a renewed effort to pass draft-exemption legislation.
But the political reality is that the exemption for yeshiva students has always been very unpopular in Israel.
In the wake of the last two and a half years of unceasing warfare, it is doubly so.
Even those who might otherwise be sympathetic to the Haredi argument are feeling the strain of the multiple wars Israel has been fighting recently. In Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and Syria, there are long-term occupations and combat operations.
The war with Iran has placed an additional burden on both active military personnel and reservists, a burden magnified by Israel’s scorched-earth escalation in Lebanon and intensifying ethnic cleansing programmes in the West Bank.
Depression, mental and emotional disturbance, and physical harm, including deaths, among soldiers and reservists have made the Israeli public increasingly resentful of the Haredim sitting and studying in their yeshivas and evading the draft.
That resentment is powerful in Netanyahu’s coalition, and it’s virtually absolute in the opposition.
Regardless of Bibi’s intentions, politics dictate that there aren’t enough votes in the Knesset for the exemption legislation to pass, and there isn’t likely to be in the next government either.
The Haredi parties have nowhere to turn if they continue to spurn Netanyahu. The opposition has no place for them.
While Bennett might be personally willing to strike deals with Haredim, he’d never agree to the exemption law. Most major opposition figures, such as Lapid and Lieberman, are fundamentally opposed to the Haredi political agenda.
The Haredi parties control 18 seats in the current Knesset, and polls have them within one seat of that figure, so it’s likely they will retain the same power. It’s unlikely that they will find a prime minister more amenable to their demands than Netanyahu.
If Bibi wins, the Haredim will have agreed to rejoin his coalition. He will almost certainly have committed to the draft-exemption bill again, but he won’t be able to get it through.
The Haredim will be right back where they started, with a prime minister they can threaten, but without enough coalition votes to pass their bill.
The only real difference is that ultra-Orthodox voters probably won’t believe Netanyahu when he makes the promise again.
Before this became such a hot issue, Haredi parties were generally willing to join any coalition that promised them more funding for their schools and other religious programs. They enjoyed their position as kingmakers in the mostly secular Knesset.
But the draft exemption bill robs the Haredim of that kingmaking role simply because they are trying to obtain something that was always unpopular and is much more so now.
The Haredi parties can always threaten to bring the government down again. Still, until they have leverage in an opposition camp, they will have to return to the religious-nationalist coalition that Netanyahu heads.
Even far-right figures such as Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich strongly oppose draft exemptions for the Haredim.
The ultra-Orthodox can bring down this government, but there is no path to the exemption bill they want.
Haredi parties risk losing much of their political relevance unless they are willing to seek a compromise that would allay public resentment.
Photograph courtesy of Joel Schalit. All rights reserved.
