How did Netanyahu win the elections again?

His duress only made his loyalists join him as he circled his wagons

By AMOTZ ASA-EL
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, thank supporters at a Likud celebratory rally in Tel Aviv on April 10, after it became clear that he had won the election (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, thank supporters at a Likud celebratory rally in Tel Aviv on April 10, after it became clear that he had won the election
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)
Having turned 10 last February, the era to which historians will surely attach Benjamin Netanyahu’s name seemed to have entered its twilight, as Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit said he intends to indict the four-term prime minister on three corruption charges, pending a hearing.
Instead, twilight gave way to a fifth electoral victory, the swiftest Netanyahu has ever struck, a triumph so overwhelming it has left all wondering whether his legal travails, rather than end his era, are merely the bang announcing the dawn of its second decade.
Yes, pre-election polls had indicated Netanyahu’s hardcore constituency was not prepared to abandon him. However, the polls also predicted a tough fight within the conservative bloc, led by departing education minister Naftali Bennett as well as former Likud MK Moshe Feiglin, in addition to the redoubled challenge Netanyahu faced from the center, led by Blue and White’s Benny Gantz.
Netanyahu disproved all these forecasts, big time.
In what was the election’s biggest surprise, Bennett’s New Right failed to cross the 3.25-percent electoral threshold. Reflecting the popularity of Bennet’s colleague, departing justice minister Ayelet Shaked, polls had expected their new party to garner at least five Knesset seats.
A similar disillusionment awaited Feiglin, a right-wing hard-liner who waved a libertarian flag punctuated by legalized cannabis, and was expected to cross the electoral threshold easily, and even emerge as a kingmaker between Netanyahu and Gantz. Instead, Feiglin won hardly 2 percent of the vote.
Similarly, Orly Levy-Abekasis, originally a lawmaker for Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu , also failed to cross the threshold. An accomplished parliamentarian, trained lawyer, mother of four and former model, Levy was lured by polls that initially promised her as many as seven seats. A hawk on foreign affairs, she too posed a threat to Netanyahu, only to meet total defeat.
While leaving these challengers altogether floored, Netanyahu also humbled the right-wing parties that did survive his charge.
Most notably, Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu plunged from 10 Knesset seats to four. Kahlon is now expected to return sheepishly to the Likud where he launched his career and thus retain his powerful position, only this time around as Netanyahu’s pawn.
Similarly, the Union of Right-Wing Parties lost three of the eight Knesset seats that its predecessor, Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home), held before Bennett split it to form the New Right. Lastly, Liberman’s party shrank from six to five seats.
 
This, then, is the technical side of Netanyahu’s feat, which added up to a general migration of right-wing voters to Likud from other parts of the conservative alliance over which he presides.
In this regard, his accomplishment is a mirror image of Gantz’s achievement.
BLUE AND White’s 35 seats are effectively a rearrangement of the outgoing Knesset’s anti-Netanyahu camp, which was dominated by the Zionist Union and Yesh Atid’s 24 and 11 seats, respectively.
Yes, Gantz made an impressive political maneuver by managing, even before his first day as a lawmaker, to harness his new party with Lapid’s and with former defense minister Moshe Ya’alon’s. However, the federated party’s votes reflected the collapse of Labor (which succeeded the Zionist Union) from 24 to six seats, and the decline (due to low voter turnout) of the two Arab parties from a combined 13 to 10 seats.
Beyond this bulk, Blue and White snatched hardly two seats from the Right, and was thus left a decisive nine seats short of a Knesset majority, even if one places in Gantz’s basket the two Arab parties, which he said he would not include in his coalition should he become prime minister.
Blue and White’s accomplishment is massive, to be sure, as it now possesses the critical mass that Labor failed to restore since its trouncing by Ariel Sharon in 2001. The opposition’s new engine emerges from its political baptism as a force to contend with, and a realistic alternative to Netanyahu’s leadership.
However, Gantz and his team realize they must for now “serve in the opposition,” as Menachem Begin said after one of his multiple electoral defeats. Blue and White made this concession, twice: First when Lapid said, “We are heading toward the opposition” and vowed to be “a fighting opposition” that will make the government’s life “miserable”; and then when Gantz called Netanyahu to congratulate him.
Beyond the numbers lurked a failure on Blue and White’s part to assess the challenge it faced on several levels. The first was most Israelis’ feeling that they had it good during the Netanyahu decade.
This “era of good feeling” was fueled first and foremost by the economy’s performance. The Netanyahu decade began the morning after the Wall Street meltdown of 2008, which triggered a severe recession throughout the developed world.
Israel avoided those years’ economic setbacks elsewhere, and in fact emerged as the developed world’s fastest growing economy so far this century, a feat underpinned by minimal unemployment, inflation, deficits, and foreign debt as well as surplus foreign currency reserves and a rock solid shekel.
With per-capita product already higher than the European Union’s average, and poised to surpass next decade even France’s and Japan’s, Israeli voters reached the ballots feeling they are prospering. Moreover, many voters recalled Netanyahu’s years as Ariel Sharon’s finance minister, and the market reforms he led in that capacity.
The voters who handed him his latest victory did not necessarily agree with Netanyahu’s Thatcherism. They did, however, feel he is much more economically knowledgeable than the politically inexperienced Gantz, and that Netanyahu will not allow a populist finance minister to overspend and have the economy spin out of control.
After the economy came security.
No, Israel is not at peace with all its neighbors. However, during the Netanyahu decade most Israelis felt their regional situation was improving.
Relations with Egypt first endured an Islamist government’s stint, and then produced a new intimacy with the largest Arab country, and also with other Arab countries. Meanwhile, Israel avoided the mayhem of multiple Middle Eastern civil wars, and at the same time obstructed Iran’s penetration into Syria.
On the Palestinian front, most Israelis were fine with Netanyahu’s policy of containment, in both Gaza and the West Bank. As far as Netanyahu’s voters are concerned, what matters is not how distant peace remains, but how subdued Palestinian violence becomes. Seen this way, the curret decade’s relative security, compared with last decade’s, was another reason for them to reject his challengers.
Finally, the economic prosperity and military security that voters attributed to Netanyahu were animated by a sense of diplomatic pride.
Netanyahu has built close personal relations with the presidents of the US, Russia, China, India, Japan, and Brazil. He comes and goes freely between the Kremlin, the White House, the Élysée Palace and 10 Downing Street. That’s a feat unmatched by any of his predecessors, including David Ben-Gurion.
Having first reached the premiership back in 1996, a time when future world figures like Angela Merkel, Narendra Modi, Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron and even Vladimir Putin were internationally anonymous, Netanyahu is now counted among the world’s most veteran and respected leaders.
Voters were reminded of Netanyahu’s global sway twice, as the election approached: first, when Donald Trump signed an order recognizing Israel’s rule over the Golan Heights, and then when Vladimir Putin helped retrieve from Syria the body of Sgt. Zachariah Baumel, who had been missing in action since a Syrian-Israeli tank battle in Lebanon 27 years ago.
Underscored by Trump’s relocation of the American Embassy to Jerusalem, Netanyahu’s voters evidently appreciated his diplomatic record, and at the same time wondered how Benny Gantz would enter his rival’s shoes with no prior political experience whatsoever.
These, in brief, are the assets with which Netanyahu now approach    es his 70th birthday next fall, the assets that brought him the fifth, and sweetest, victory of his seven prime-ministerial bids. This, of course, is not to say there were no liabilities, much less that they are gone.
One liability Netanyahu once faced was, paradoxically, his rhetorical power.
The gift that worked wonders for him as an ambassador and as leader of the opposition became a liability when he became prime minister last century, as his detractors argued that when it came to doing he wasn’t nearly as effective as he was in talking.
Netanyahu shed that liability the following decade when he became finance minister, and soon showed he could put together a plan of action and get it done. His other liability, a tendency to lose loyalists, confidantes and aides, never went away.
Four of the right-wing political leaders who challenged him this election – Bennett, Shaked, Liberman and Kahlon – were once part of Netanyahu’s operation, as were Blue and White candidates Moshe Ya’alon, Yoaz Hendel, and Zvi Hauser.
 
This is beside Gantz himself, whom Netanyahu had appointed IDF chief of general staff, and three former aides who became state witnesses against Netanyahu in three different cases.
This is how Netanyahu arrived at the election shouldering his heaviest liability, the criminal charges that made many suspect hubris had taken him to the moral self-destruction whose presumed aftermath, political extinction, will be sparked by electoral defeat.
This premonition, which has largely fueled Blue and White’s campaign, proved unfounded.
Netanyahu’s voters were unimpressed by the allegations he faces, whether because they doubted the judiciary’s impartiality or disputed its charges’ severity.
Some Likud voters, faced with news reports concerning Netanyahu’s ostensible felonies, shrugged and said, “So he gulped some champagne,” referring to the unpaid supplies of quality alcohol and cigars he allegedly received from film mogul Arnon Milchan.
Others enthusiastically embraced Netanyahu’s attack on the judiciary, media, and Israel Police, which he accused of colluding in a conspiracy to unseat him.
Whatever their exact rationales, a critical mass of Netanyahu’s followers responded to his situation with emotional dedication, joining him as he circled his wagons, and perceiving his duress as theirs.
This is what Gantz’s operation failed to detect in advance.
Adopting a campaign tactic they now surely regret, Blue and White’s spin doctors reduced its leader’s public appearances to a minimum, and prevented him from saying anything substantive, lest it spark controversy.
That was a grave mistake. Gantz emerged as a candidate who hoped his good looks, humble manner, and impressive military background would substitute for a lack of ideas and fire. They didn’t.
Then again, Netanyahu’s legal liabilities remain intact, and may very well bring his career to its abrupt end, once he emerges from the hearing that is expected to take place in ten months at most.
Even so, events as they have so far unfolded have already confounded much of the punditry that accompanied Netanyahu’s legal entanglement. With its second decade already unfolding, the Netanyahu Era has yet to expire, and its protagonist’s eulogies are clearly premature.