Benjamin Netanyahu took his time before celebrating. Having experienced many elections, he knew it would be better to wait until the full picture would emerge. In the previous round in 2021, he already declared "a huge victory" only to see Likud being ousted from power several weeks later. The conciliatory speech that he delivered after it had become clear that he won, was designed to cast his potential coalition partners on the far-Right in a moderate light. Perhaps it was also designed to calm the losing side over the fear that some of the anti-LGBT agenda promoted by various parties would now be implemented. Perhaps he was directing those comments at the international media. He was simply exercising caution, lest he starts measuring the drapes only to discover that come morning, Prime Minister Yair Lapid will have secured enough seats to remain in power as interim prime minister until another election is held.
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This time around, the Likud's well–oiled machine functioned properly. For three years, Netanyahu has tried to get his people out to vote but it was only in this campaign that he managed to figure out how to thread the needle, targeting his voters with great precision. Netanyahu managed to identify what his weak points were in the previous election and focused all the resources on them. Billboards and media interviews were no longer necessary; neither were electoral pledges or statements. The only thing that mattered was to drive turnout.
With two or three events each evening in pinpointed locations, Netanyahu crisscrossed Likud bastions constantly. He got disaffected voters enthused and made sure those that didn't help him remained complacent until the goal had been reached. Netanyahu felt that he had won even before the exit polls. The reports that he got from canvasses, from the Likud headquarters, and from other parties on the Right had left almost no room for doubt: Turnout was high across the board and all over Israel.
Netanyahu also perfected the way he would enter the campaign: uniting the far-Right factions under a single ticket – the Religious Zionist Party – so as not to lose votes was the easy part, but uniting the Haredi factions proved challenging. While the Religious Zionist Party didn't need his help once the union was announced, the Haredi parties rode his coattails until the very last moment.
The final event of the campaign, which had him do a media blitz in Haredi outlets – including by sending pleas on WhatsApp groups and various dedicated forums – was what we all remember. But the fact of the matter is that he and his staffers had to get knee-deep in Haredi affairs all through the campaign to put out fires in the Haredi bloc without much media attention. Netanyahu was ready to pull out all the stops when it came to courting voters. He went to every event, however small, and tackled every challenge with whatever was necessary, be it tender care or aggressive force until he got the outcome that he wanted.
Two weeks before the election, Israel Hayom's front-page headline reported the leaders of the two Haredi factions Shas and United Torah Judaism were not on speaking terms, with UTJ's Moshe Gafni blaming Shas leader Aryeh Deri for briefing media outlets against him to create the impression that UTJ might form a government with the Left if there was no clear winner in the election. Only a handful of people knew that Gafni, while accusing Deri in public, was actually referring to Netanyahu. It turned out that Netanyahu's people were the ones who were spreading the rumors about Gafni supposedly eyeing the Left, forcing him to issue a denial every time.
Every time Gafni said in an interview anything that could be interpreted as a lack of total commitment to Netanyahu's bloc, his office got a phone call – usually from Netanyahu's adviser on Haredi affairs – with a demand to clarify his comments. No matter how many times Gafni tried to maintain room for maneuver, Likud people closed in on him until just days before the election he had to say in his own voice and in an unequivocal way that he and his party were only going to join a Netanyahu-led coalition, and if necessary, will stay with him in the opposition. For Likud, this was "mission accomplished."
Growing together
But it wasn't Gafni who was in Netanyahu's crosshairs; it was State Party leader Benny Gantz. Likud realized that he was effectively running for prime minister and was banking his success on having the Haredim join him in a coalition. Every wobbly statement by Gafni was a boon to Gantz.
The final clarification of Gafni that sitting with Gantz was out of the question hurt the State Party's campaign more than anything else. It left it small and marginal, effectively killing any prospect of having Gantz form a government – the scenario Netanyahu had feared most. As far as Netanyahu was concerned, if he could not form a government, the least bad option was to have Lapid continue as the head of a caretaker government that would call an early election. A new government headed by Gantz would be a whole new ball game whose end no one could predict. It is not every day that you have a government toppled after one year, as the Bennett-Lapid government was toppled.
The way in which all the stars lined up on the Right by pure happenstance was just mesmerizing. Some said it was nothing short of a miracle. It's not just that the Likud managed to galvanize its base – the other three parties also managed to increase turnout while staying in their respective lanes. UTJ, who in recent days had to deal with complacency and low voter enthusiasm, managed to pick up one seat in the Knesset – something it had not done in years.
Shas also had great success in its ground game, with a campaign that touched on the very sensitive spots of Israel's richest echelons and middle class. It was the only party whose campaign dealt with the cost of living and the failed stewardship of the economy during the crisis. The media coverage belittled Shas, which was treated as an afterthought.
Rebranding
This was also the case in the battle over the country's Jewish character. The more the outgoing coalition tried to erase – with some degree of obsession – this feature (including by means of bombastic statements by Transportation Minister Merav Michaeli about public transit on Shabbat), the greater the drive among traditional voters was to strike back, and Shas was the natural address for that.
When Otzma Yehudit leader Itamar Ben Gvir launched his campaign, it was still not clear whether he would ultimately run on the same ticket as Bezalel Smotrich's National Union. At the time, he and his associates were convinced that no one was listening to what he had to say. The media had made him an outcast and were not open to erasing even one bit of the mark of Cain it had put on him. His strategic adviser's first goal was to change his reputation as a radical right-wing candidate.
Ben-Gvir, using his natural skills as a down-to-earth person who shoots straight, slowly but surely managed to make the change and got everyone to listen to what he had to say. This started in social media and WhatsApp groups and continued in mainstream media. Ben-Gvir disavowed the image of being a disciple of a racist rabbi and instead reinvent himself as someone who cared about the IDF and personal security; the guy who would take care of the Arab rioters and terrorists.
Among young voters and soldiers, Ben-Gvir had become as popular as Netanyahu. The rise was rapid and soon the polls would show that the National Religious Party was projected seats in the double digits. Despite the fact that Smotrich was the head of the list, Ben-Gvir was the one who would become the demonic symbol of the Right, according to the Left's and Arab narrative, putting him front and center in their campaign against the Netanyahu bloc.
Ben-Gvir had thus become the star of the pro-Netanyahu campaign and the anti-Netanyahu campaign. His name was mentioned everywhere, and as a result his party's numbers in the polls just went up and up. The last polls had it at 15 seats, which was very close to what ultimately transpired. The goal – to become the third-largest in parliament – was therefore achieved, and Gantz was put in fourth place, making his campaign for prime minister a laughing stock.
But even now that the elections are history, Ben-Gvir knows that the campaign is not over. A new campaign was launched right after the exit polls were announced: The campaign to make Otzma Yehudit a legitimate coalition partner. The delegitimization, the talk in world capitals on the uneasiness with its participation and the pressures from the US not to establish a "radical" government, and even the calls for a unity government look and feel like a campaign. Thus, in recent days, Ben-Gvir and his people will try to legitimize his way into the government and counter any negative buzz around it
Netanyahu's coalition partners have demand, but it would be wrong to describe this as having him wrapped around their little finger. Netanyahu won't be in power without them, but they too have nowhere to go than to his coalition. The gap between Netanyahu and his partners is small, and the government – however difficult the coalition talks – will likely stay intact for a long period and may even serve out the Knesset's term. The past several years have had the effect of bringing the parties on the Right close ranks. With their rivals lurking on the sidelines, no one on the Right will hasten to bring down the government or threaten to do so. The opportunity presented by the election could be a rarity that appears only once every several election cycles.
A chain reaction of mistakes
The glue that was supposed to bind the outgoing coalition was never there to begin with; the uncommon denominator was so apparent that it was simply intolerable in its final throes. The master stroke that made the assembly of the coalition possible was the work of Yair Lapid, who was the big beneficiary: He managed to unseat Netanyahu after many had tried and failed. Lapid did this by letting go of his personal interests for the sake of the greater good of the anti-Netanyahu camp. Lapid was described as a real egoless leader who had an appreciation of the enormity of the task at hand and was willing to pursue it without power plays and personal infighting.
Lapid's generous posture was clear even before he formed a government in 2021 with Naftali Bennett. During the campaign, Lapid didn't say he was aiming to win the most seats or even become prime minister. As soon as he got the presidential nod to form a government, he gave it to Bennett. He knew that the Knesset could dissolve without the rotating premiership moving to him but he set his sights on removing Netanyahu from power and that was his sole objective.
The first mistake the Lapid-Bennett government did – which created a chain reaction of miserable choices and lapses – was that no one brought Gantz truly into the fold; he had been left to his own devices, harboring a grudge and a sense of a missed opportunity in not being part of the rotating premiership. Every other coalition partner got an upgrade – Bennett was prime minister, Lapid was alternate prime minister (and then vice versa); and even the leaders of Meretz and Labor managed to climb up the political ladder, while he was left only with the title of defense minister – after he had served as alternate prime minister in the short-lived Netanyahu government in 2020-2021, with effective veto power on all of his decisions.
Under the Bennett-Lapid constellation, he was nothing more than a decorative ornament; a spare that wielded no power. Lapid underestimated this sense of grievance Gantz had owing to his failed partnership with Netanyahu in 2020, which ended the Blue and White anti-Netanyahu alliance Lapid and Gantz had run on for three consecutive elections. For Lapid, taking all this out on Gantz by ignoring him trumped his desire to bring Gantz into the fold.
This mistake came back to haunt him after the government collapsed and an early election was called: The Left stood firmly behind him – with the exception of Gantz. Another member of the coalition joined Gantz – New Hope leader Gideon Sa'ar, who refused to accept Lapid's leadership. Gantz also landed former IDF chief of Staff Gadi Eizenkot, who was courted by Lapid, and peppered the country with huge billboards promising that he was able to form a government that would be bigger than the one Lapid could form. When Lapid saw that it was impossible to stop Gantz's momentum, he resolved to be the biggest party in the election, as this was – in his thinking – the only way to make sure no one on the Center-Left would emerge victorious apart from him.
In his assessment, the way to ensure that he would remain prime minister was to have Gantz flunk the election. Lapid knew that even the most optimistic scenario would have him just remain as the head of a transition government until another election, and thus the prerequisite to remain in power was to be the largest party in the bloc. Yes, the other Center-Left parties were his allies but they could just as well be Gantz's coalition partners after the election, and that had to be countered.
Having adopted this posture, Lapid embarked on a path of errors, false assessments, and lapses. Lapid failed to convince Labor and Meretz to run on the same candidate list to ensure neither one missed the minimum electoral threshold; he realized too late that the Arab parties had not signed a surplus agreement. And even as he sat idly by, over at the other side – Netanyahu was working overtime to make sure the Right was solidly behind him in one united front.
The only person on the Left who acted wisely was Meretz leader Zehava Gal-On, who used every opportunity to warn that her party would not win enough of the votes to qualify for a Knesset seat. It turned out that despite being the best behaved among the Left, she had to pay the price for her coalition partners' failures. In the blame game following the election, everyone is right: Gantz is correct because Lapid was the head of the bloc, and Lapid is correct because Gantz refused to toe the line he had set. Now they will both have a lot of time to continue their infighting in the opposition.
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