A Hundred and Twenty

On November 10, 2015, Portugal’s prime minister, Pedro Passos Coelho, accused the left in the Lisbon parliament of assembling a negative majority to bring down a government that had won the election, and he was right about the ballot boxes and wrong about the chamber, because the right-wing coalition he led had come first without ever holding a majority of the two hundred and thirty seats. Paulo Portas, who led the CDS, the junior partner in the alliance, called the alternative government that the Socialist António Costa was negotiating with the Communist Party, the Left Bloc and the Greens a contraption, the word my own language, Portuguese, reserves for a machine of mismatched parts that nobody expects to run, and by late afternoon the motion of rejection had toppled Passos, a hundred and twenty-three votes to a hundred and seven. Costa governed for the next four years with the unprecedented support of those three parties, given from outside, without ministers, and in 2019 voters gave his Socialists twenty-two more seats and gave him the right to say that the Portuguese had liked the contraption.

The numbers that interested me most on Tuesday, October 27, came from Umm al-Fahm, where turnout jumped from 38.3 percent in 2022 to 70.1 by 8 p.m., and from Sakhnin, Kafr Qasim and Rahat, where it hovered around eighty, on a day when the whole country voted as it had not voted since 1999. The analyst Amit Segal observed that, for the first time in history, Arabs appeared to have voted at a higher rate than Jews, and Ra’am and the Joint List won nineteen seats, nearly double the ten they hold in the outgoing Knesset.

Yousef Jabareen leads the Joint List, calls Netanyahu’s government blood-soaked and refuses to join a coalition because of the war in Gaza and the settlements in the West Bank. He takes part all the same, and on Wednesday he announced that his list could support an alternative government from outside, in the name of a genuine partnership between Jews and Arabs, and I would ask the reader to keep both halves of that portrait in mind, because the second weighs more than the first. Ahmad Tibi, a member of the Knesset from the same list, said that it wants no ministries and asks the next government only to fight crime in Arab society and to stop demolishing Bedouin homes, two requests that would fit comfortably in the inaugural speech of a mayor of Beersheba. I suspect we are looking at a change in the profile of relations between Arabs and Jews, and the signs do not come only from Arab ballot boxes, because nearly fifty thousand Israelis have joined the Zazim movement’s campaign for a government backed by the Arab parties.

Benjamin Netanyahu drew a different lesson from the same numbers in the small hours of October 28, when he told party activists in Jerusalem that Likud was the largest party in Israel and that the right had a clear and decisive majority among Jews and Zionists. The first claim is true and decides nothing, because Likud came first without a majority of the house. The second required Netanyahu to count a Knesset of a hundred and one seats, the only one in which the votes of Umm al-Fahm and Sakhnin do not exist, and I confess I have never heard of that Knesset. In the Knesset of a hundred and twenty, the only one that is sworn in, his bloc fell from sixty-four seats to fifty-three, and we gave sixty-seven, Jews and Arabs alike, to the parties that want him gone.

Let us accept Netanyahu’s rule for a moment and count only the Zionists, and the first to lose seats will be Netanyahu himself, because he has to subtract from his bloc the seven seats of United Torah Judaism, a party that does not call itself Zionist, and the change bloc then wins forty-eight to forty-six. United Torah Judaism and Shas demand military exemptions for yeshiva students while our sons fight and die, and on Thursday sources in United Torah Judaism offered Gadi Eisenkot support from outside in exchange for concessions on those exemptions, according to The Times of Israel. So there are two offers of outside support on the table, one asking for exemption from the army in the middle of a war, the other asking for police in Arab towns and a roof over Bedouin heads, and Netanyahu called a government sustained by the second a shame and a disgrace and suggested that Eisenkot would be committing treason if he formed it, which leaves me curious about what he would call the first.

Netanyahu also wrote that Arab parties that support terror had stolen the election, and within two days the police and the Central Elections Committee of the state he governs had contradicted him, while Channel 12 revealed that the Ra’am bribery case he had used to rally his voters began with a phone call from his own chief of staff. The standard of support for terror has an exception, and the exception sits beside Netanyahu, because his fifty-three seats include the seven of Otzma Yehudit, a Kahanist and fascist party, heir to the Kach movement the state outlawed as a terrorist organization in 1994. In March 2021, a Ra’am official told Israel Hayom that the party had decided in principle to support a Netanyahu coalition from outside, and the talks died under the veto of Bezalel Smotrich, who spat the label of terror supporter at Ra’am. The outside support the Joint List now offers Eisenkot is of the same kind, and I would very much like to hear Netanyahu explain the difference.

In June 2021, Naftali Bennett was sworn in with Ra’am inside his coalition, and today Bennett and Avigdor Liberman reject the Arab parties both inside and outside the government and obey the one rule that keeps Netanyahu in office, the veto he imposed even on his opponents. If I were Eisenkot, I would ask Bennett why Ra’am was good enough to sit inside his own coalition in 2021 and is not good enough to support Eisenkot from outside in 2026. Yair Golan is the only leader in the bloc to reject what he called the racist division between Jewish votes and Arab votes, and the vote of a citizen in Tira weighs exactly as much in the Knesset as the vote of a citizen in Givat Shmuel, not a gram more or less, because the Basic Law on the Knesset requires that elections be equal. Opposition voters have already defied the veto, and in a poll by the Accord Center at the Hebrew University, taken on election night, sixty-one percent of those who voted for the four parties of Eisenkot’s bloc said they preferred a government led by him with Ra’am. In the obedience of Liberman and Bennett I see nothing but fear of the name Netanyahu has given the government that would bring him down, like someone calling a machine a contraption before seeing it run.

Israeli democracy counts to a hundred and twenty, and I know how to count that far too. Counted that way, the election of October 27 has one loser, and his name is Benjamin Netanyahu.