After one of the highest voter turnouts in decades, neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition nor the self-styled Zionist opposition alliance secured the 61 seats required for a parliamentary majority in the October 27 polls. Netanyahu’s camp came first, with 53 seats, five more than the main opposition bloc. The Arab parties surged to a record 19 seats but have been relegated to merely observing coalition negotiations.
Viewed from a distance, the results could appear startling. The judicial reforms ushered in at the start of Netanyahu’s government term in 2022 provoked the largest street protests in Israel’s history, while the prime minister himself is still embroiled in a corruption trial dating back to 2019. Alleged failures ahead of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, 2023, that triggered Israel’s genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have still to be reckoned with, despite overwhelming public pressure to do so.
Moreover, the genocide has led to growing international isolation, while also providing the pretext for multiple attacks on countries across the region – the latest of which, undertaken with the United States on Iran in February, continues to roil energy markets around the world. Nevertheless, roughly 2.38 million Israelis on Tuesday made the journey to the polls to back Netanyahu’s coalition, led by his Likud party, while some 2.21 million cast their ballots for the opposition alliance. Between the two, little space was given to examine the multiple war crimes Israel stands accused of having carried out in Gaza, where Israeli attacks have killed more than 74,500 people and left much of it in ruins, or government complicity in the surging violence and pogroms in the occupied West Bank, where a United Nations commission of inquiry said on Monday that Israel had been committing crimes against humanity, including extermination, torture and rape.
Analysts said the fact that neither Gaza nor the West Bank were a deciding factor in how Israelis voted on Tuesday was largely because they already represented an area of broad agreement across both alliances. Instead, the election was fought on largely internal issues: the power of Israel’s courts, whether members of the ultra-Orthodox minority should be exempted from military service, and whether the government’s alleged culpability in missing the warnings of the October 2023 attack should be examined. Leading Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani said the issues were pitched to the Israeli public along broadly similar lines to those used by the politicians enacting the policies.
But knowing something and recognising its moral and political implications are different things,” Shenhav-Shahrabani added, providing one explanation for the absence of empathy displayed by many Israelis in the face of the widely reported suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. For Shenhav-Shahrabani, there has been “a powerful mechanism of denial” at work. For Netanyahu’s supporters, however, this denial could be traced to something more personal.
For much of this electorate, the vote was less a judgement on the government’s conduct than a choice between competing claims to political legitimacy – or as Israeli academic Roi Zur put it, a contest over “the heart and soul of democracy” and the future of Jewish and Israeli identity. What Netanyahu had been particularly successful in doing, he continued, was creating “this campaign of fear and the belief that he is the only one who can deal with this situation, that he is the only strong enough prime minister”. Instead, they had become the prism through which, over decades, Israelis had come to view “security, citizenship, and the very meaning of democracy”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
