Bibi’s masterplan succeeds — but it still may not be enough - The Jewish Chronicle

Here’s another way of looking at Israel’s election this week. Instead of calling it Israel’s fourth election in two years, it would be more accurate to call it just the latest round of voting in one long election campaign. After all, since the dissolution of the twentieth Knesset in December 2018, there has been only one issue on the electoral agenda, and that is whether Benjamin Netanyahu can win another term as prime minister.

Since then, all the elections have been the same: inconclusive rounds of voting which have failed to decide Mr Netanyahu’s political future. This Tuesday’s round was no exception. Once again, there was no result. The Netanyahu bloc failed to win a majority in the Knesset, while the anti-Netanyahu bloc has no prospect of transforming its majority into a functioning government under a new prime minister.

For the last 27 months, Israelis have been stuck in an interminable reality television show in which they can never vote the contestants off the island.

The only way to enjoy the show is for viewers to detach their emotions and neutralise their feelings, hopes and aspirations for Israel and simply marvel at the political machinations and the superhuman campaigning abilities of Grandmaster Netanyahu who, despite enjoying the support of a minority of Israelis, just keeps hanging on, round after round. And this latest round, number four, was indeed a masterclass of three-dimensional strategy.

Round Four was the longest so far. It took place over a year and three weeks, starting on the day after the 2020 election, when it transpired that despite a surprising comeback for Likud, after it lost first place in the second round to Blue and White, his bloc was still three seats short of a majority. Under the guise of trying form an “emergency national unity government,” Mr Netanyahu set about planning the next round.

This time it was to be total war. There were three stages to his strategy. First, he set about dismantling the opposition that had nearly unseated him. In 2020, the centre-left was relatively compact. It had run in three unified slates, Blue and White, Labour-Gesher-Meretz and the Joint List. Blue and White was split by pressuring an already exhausted Benny Gantz and appealing to his sense of national responsibility as the pandemic began spreading. Once Mr Gantz agreed to enter his government in return for a “rotation” agreement that Mr Netanyahu never intended to fulfil, Blue and White, which had never been a happy family, was finished as major centrist bloc. Yair Lapid and his Yesh Atid MKs remained in opposition and the party was irrevocably split.

Labour-Gesher-Meretz was an even easier target. The single Gesher MK, Orly Levy-Abekasis, defected early on to the Netanyahu bloc and is now a Likud MK. Once Mr Gantz had crossed the line, Mr Netanyahu preyed on the vanity and greediness of leader Amir Peretz and his number-two Itzik Shmuli, enticing them with ministries. Meretz and a lone Labour MK – now the leader, Merav Michaeli – stayed out, but the distrust caused them to run separately this round.

Disjointing the Joint List was the final masterstroke. Mr Netanyahu engaged with Mansour Abbas, the leader of conservative-Islamist party Ra’am, who was always going to be the weakest link in the Joint List’s four parties, and made it clear that there was business to be done. Ra’am split. Mission accomplished. The three centre-left lists became six, four of them hovering around the electoral threshold. If they had failed to cross it, the Netanyahu bloc’s chances of winning an overall majority would have expanded significantly.

After he splintered the opposition, it was time to ensure the same wouldn’t happen on his side by engineering the merger of Bezalel Smotrich’s National Union with the neo-Kahanist Jewish Power and homophobic Noam parties. In this election, not even the tiniest right wing splinter would waste votes.

With the two stages of his groundwork completed, Mr Netanyahu went on the campaign trail.

Here he had just one word — vaccines. With the Covid-19 lockdown still in place, the campaign took place in vaccination centres, with the prime minister acting as vaccinator-in-chief without any overt Likud message. Once public venues were opened under the “green passport” on March 7, Likud rallies began, still focused on Mr Netanyahu’s success in securing early and large shipments of vaccines for Israel. Back in December, he predicted confidently that as the vaccines take effect and Israel re-opens, it would win Likud forty seats.

Every part of Mr Netanyahu’s strategy worked as planned. The opposition split, his own camp stayed together. Millions of Israelis were gladly jabbed – and in recent weeks descended in their multitudes on restaurants and bars. And yet, as the results began coming in on Tuesday night, Mr Netanyahu still didn’t have a coalition.

Incredibly, all six centre-left parties crossed the threshold, and while Religious Zionism did so as well, ensuring that not one vote went to waste, it came at the expense of seats lost by Likud, which went down from thirty-six to just thirty. Where was the post-vaccination boost?

It was a comprehensive, even brilliant masterplan. But Israeli voters have already seen it all. The centre-left managed somehow to distribute its voters to all its parties. And the same voters weren’t swayed by doses of vaccines, either. Mr Netanyahu is too much of a known quantity already. The fact that he was capable of making 30 phone-calls to the CEO of Pfizer and speeding up the vaccine deliveries didn’t impress them. They know what he’s capable of.

The bottom line of this round of voting is that the year of Covid-19, the shambolic handling of the coronavirus in 2020 and the successful vaccination drive of 2021 hasn’t changed the situation on the ground. Mr Netanyahu still doesn’t have a majority and his challengers, whether they are Benny Gantz or Yair Lapid, still haven’t made sufficient inroads in to the right wing base to form an alternative election.

Even a global pandemic can’t break Israel’s political deadlock.