One more union
Put it this way and it sounds very close indeed: the election is next month. Its outcome will largely be decided this coming Tuesday, just as it was decided last time when Balad chose to break up the Joint List and when Meretz filed its slate alone.
While all eyes are turned rightward, to Ofer Winter's solo flight, it's worth keeping eye contact with the rival bloc. The tectonic plates there are shifting, even if the ground above them looks stable.
The foundational axiom is that the entire right has had four leaders since the founding of the state, while the center-left has had four leaders in the last term alone: Lapid, Gantz, Bennett and now Eisenkot. Can the chairman of Yashar! be confident there won't be a fifth? Ostensibly yes, but in practice he is stuck in the seat column while Bennett is starting to recover. Anyone who doubts it should open the Haaretz app. The former chief of staff's face runs as an ad before every article on the radical left's website. Whoever is buying space there isn't convinced the campaign has been decided, and wants to take votes off the Democrats.
Bennett has one instrument to help him try to close the gap with Eisenkot: a merger with Hili Tropper's Zionist Home, worth two or three seats in the polls. He is courting him energetically, making offers, and he isn't the only one. Eisenkot, fully alive to Tropper's value, would happily sell a kidney to land him.
But Bennett carries heavy risks of his own, chief among them the polls—so far on Channel 14 and i24—showing a collapse into single digits. And if not the polls, then Bennett's own history suggests that may be his fate again this time.
A grand merger between Eisenkot, Bennett and Lapid is all of them buying down their risks. Eisenkot secures his candidacy for prime minister, his status as the largest party, and the reduction of Lieberman's claim to the crown to absurdity. Bennett hedges himself with a reasonable number of seats, since it costs Eisenkot little to give up slots he has yet to fill.
In the background is the growing recognition among the bloc's parties that the Arab merger, Segalovich joining Ra'am, and the linkups taking shape in the center have sharply reduced the odds of reaching 61. The way to win the election is to reduce the number of holdouts within the bloc to the Eisenkot formula—that is, swearing in a minority government on Arab abstention. The bonus is the assumption that Netanyahu will not be able to stand aside while a rival party runs 10 seats ahead of him, and that in that race, exactly as in 2019, he will bring down the smaller right-wing slates. Is that certain to happen? Not remotely. But it is certainly being weighed with grave seriousness.
What craziness
Every parent knows you should never make the children decide who they love more, Dad or Mom. Surprisingly, that is precisely what Itamar Ben-Gvir has been doing for the past two weeks. For years he took great care not to go into direct battle with Benjamin Netanyahu. Every Otzma Yehudit voter wants Netanyahu as prime minister, so Ben-Gvir cast himself as an essential supplement to a Bibi government, or as the wounded party Bibi won't be photographed with—but he never attacked him head-on.
And suddenly that is exactly what Ben-Gvir is doing. From the Altalena ceremony, through the charge that Netanyahu doesn't want him in the government, to the humiliating refusal to meet and discuss a merger with Smotrich. A well-known rule holds that when two rivals run the same campaign, one of them is wrong. Netanyahu is going for Otzma Yehudit's head himself, on the argument that Ben-Gvir is irresponsible, a narcissist who looks out only for himself.
This is a rare campaign error by the campaign artist from Hebron, and the results are already visible in the latest polls. On the one rare occasion when Netanyahu went for Ben-Gvir's head, in the third election, his party took less than half a percent and came within a whisker of evaporating from politics for good. So why is it happening now? Perhaps because Ben-Gvir believes Netanyahu started it. He believes—wrongly, of course—that the column here two weeks ago on the danger in his continued growth was born of a briefing from Netanyahu's bureau, which is interested in going with Eisenkot.
And perhaps, no less intriguingly, he feels strong and independent enough to begin preparing for the era after Netanyahu. His voter base is stable, in the IDF he is the second-largest party according to the polls, and this is precisely the moment to launch Operation Succession.
And then came Tally Gotliv. Scratch the (very) thin layer of class and right-wing conviction and you discover how completely the loud MK cares about herself and her slot alone. The threatening messages she fired off to the Prime Minister's Office show that the depth of her lack of self-awareness matches the height of her decibels. She was glad to take shelter in a reserved slot with Ben-Gvir; one assumes that Achish king of Gath, before he made room for her, also muttered to himself: do I lack madmen?
Fata Morgana
If someone had told us a year ago that a magnificent crowd would gather at the center of the map—legendary officers in the reserves, reservists from every sector, bereaved families, Israeli icons, media stars, hasbara artists. If someone had said that above them a cluster of senior politicians would assemble—defense ministers, Likud heavyweights, ambassadors to the UN. If all of that had been said, how many seats would we have projected for the center? 10? 15? Perhaps even a party of government?
And yet the latest polls teach us that the public isn't interested in the merchandise. According to them, all of the following names—Shira Shapira, Elyasaf Peretz, Yoseph Haddad, Netaly Shmatov, Oren Smadja and Hezi Nechama, Dedi Simchi and of course the top tier: Winter, Erdan, Edelstein, Gantz, Tropper—all of these names fail to clear the electoral threshold, not separately, and not together either.
The frustration mounts for that crowd as the polls reveal themselves to be a fata morgana: the closer you get, the further the threshold recedes. The reservists cleared the threshold and then collapsed. The same polls showed that if they merged with Tropper they would clear it—only for them to dive back under. The same thing happened to Erdan, and before him to Gantz, and after him to Winter. You put up a building only to find it was built on a whale that has since sailed off; you merge only to find that anything times zero is zero.
Right now, too, the illusion persists. Below the threshold, according to the polls, sits roughly 10 percent—an astonishing number of voters. Is that really the situation? Or do all those fractions of a percent scattered across the parties represent nothing more than a passing mood?
Anyone who holds, as before October 7, that everything will again drain into the question of Netanyahu yes or no has an easy job of it. He will simply explain that there was never a chance to begin with. But what about those who believed there really was demand for the goods of unity and the third way? Could this be, as the economists say, a supply-side problem? Or was it an illusion from the outset? The speed with which parties are shot into existence and are then forced to fall in with the right-wing or left-wing camp, to declare loyalty or commit to a formula, and then to evaporate, suggests this may not yet be the round in which conclusions are drawn. That, as in the 1973 election, another round will be needed before the shockwaves of the surprise and the failure break against the old fortifications of the political system and bring them down.
To want, to need
When Donald Trump does compliment Netanyahu these days, it is done sparingly and in the past tense: he was an outstanding prime minister in wartime, he did a great deal for Israel. That is a radical shift in both frequency and rhetoric.
On the other hand, it has also become somewhat less urgent for Netanyahu that Trump back him ahead of the coming election. The American president's standing in public opinion here collapsed completely when he signed the memorandum of understanding with Iran, which was perceived here as a betrayal. At roughly the same time it also became clear that a US president's support guarantees nothing, since after a vigorous campaign on Viktor Orbán's behalf, the right was defeated in Hungary's election. The effort Bennett invested in keeping the White House neutral petered out as the numbers of both the former prime minister and the sitting president fell here in parallel.
But the election is next month, and a turn may yet be taking shape. Netanyahu himself is currently weighing whether it is worth the effort to secure the president's support after all. Surprisingly, it emerges that he considers the matter entirely within his control. If he wants it, he gets it; if he doesn't, he won't. After all, the memorandum of understanding is dead, the siege on Iran is tightening, and Trump is currently doing exactly what Israelis want—strangling the ayatollahs' regime without Ben-Gurion Airport being shut down and everyone here heading down into the shelters. It is entirely possible that next month his standing will have recovered enough for him to deliver Netanyahu a last-minute October surprise.
Not that there is any shortage of people around him who oppose it. The president's confidants, Witkoff and Kushner in particular, would probably be glad to see a different prime minister. In 2020, the president's circle made a point of bringing the challenger of the day, Benny Gantz, to the White House over the Deal of the Century, and in doing so hollowed out Netanyahu's comparative advantage. This time too there will be those who advise Trump not to bet on a lame horse trailing in most of the polls. They will pop the champagne if Eisenkot is elected. But in the Prime Minister's Office they remain convinced that it depends on them alone, and that if they need it, they will get the full support package from the man who was, until very recently, the most popular politician in Israel—despite living on the other side of the pond.
