Washington Just Gave the Opposition an Opening

Three things happened here in nine days. First, Israel produced a Knesset with no majority in it. Then, on the morning of the American midterms, Donald Trump told Fox News that the United States would stop giving Israel the roughly four billion dollars a year it provides in military aid. He said Netanyahu had raised the idea some time ago, that Israel did not need the money, and that arms sales would continue. The aid, he said, had become a bad talking point that candidates were using against Republicans. Lastly, the Democrats took both chambers of Congress, and every Israeli I have spoken to since has called that third one the bad news.

The first two are a warning. The third is an opening, and the Israeli opposition is not treating it as one.

The numbers in the Knesset have not moved since October 27: Netanyahu’s bloc has 53 seats, the Zionist opposition has 48, and the Arab parties have 19, the most they have ever held. Nobody reaches 61 without them. Still, the opposition has spent nine days looking for a majority that does not require the Arab parties, and there is no such majority to find.

A fifth of this country’s citizens have been represented in a government once, and it was fleeting. They get counted as a bloc, courted in the last week of a campaign, and otherwise left outside every coalition since 1948, except as support from outside that nobody would name out loud. In 2021 Ra’am joined the Bennett government, the first independent Arab party ever to do so, and that coalition put nine and a half billion dollars into Arab communities, went after violent crime, and recognized Bedouin villages that had gone unrecognized for decades. Then it fell.

They should be in a government because they are citizens. But that reason has not been enough. So here is another one, for anyone who needs one.

Of everything the opposition could do before the mandate runs out, forming a government that includes Arab citizens would do more for Israel’s position in Washington than anything else available to it.

For three years the people who still wanted to defend this country have had very little in their hands to defend it with, and have been asked to argue from shared values while the evidence behind them ran the other way. There is a limit to how long anyone keeps doing that. The day after the election, Vance posted the four things a pollster had found would bring back the voters who abandoned the Republicans: end the war, deal with the cost of living, put America first, and change our relationship to Israel.

A cabinet with Arab ministers won’t reverse the shift in American opinion, and nothing available to Israel will. The shift was three years of footage, a government that gave Americans no reason to defend it, and a generation with no memory of 1967. Anyone promising to undo it with better communication is selling something. But it gives the people who still want to make the case something to make it with.

This does not resolve Gaza or the West Bank, but it has a chance of changing the status quo in Israel, and nothing else on offer has any chance at all.

In 2018, Americans under thirty sided with Israelis over Palestinians by 59 to 21. This April, 46 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 told the Harvard Youth Poll that the relationship with Israel is mostly a burden to the United States, against 16 percent who called it a benefit, the lowest figure for any country on the list. Pew has 70 percent of Americans under fifty at an unfavourable view, including 57 percent of young Republicans, which should finally end the theory that this is a campus problem with a left-wing accent.

Those people are not in Congress yet — they are staffers, organizers, state legislators — but in ten years they will be.

A government formed this month lands in front of people who can still do something about it. A government formed in 2030 lands in front of the Harvard Youth Poll.

In the Book of Numbers the Israelites are camped at the edge of the land they were promised, and Moses sends twelve men, one from each tribe, to see what is there. They are gone forty days and come back carrying figs, pomegranates, and a single cluster of grapes so heavy that two men have to carry it on a pole. Ten of them say the people who live there are too strong to fight. Two, Joshua and Caleb, say otherwise, but the nation believes the other ten. A whole nation gave up everything it had walked out of Egypt for, because ten men came back afraid. They had the fruit in their hands and chose the fear.

The opposition is about to reach the same conclusion. A majority exists and it is refusing to pick it up. If it goes on refusing, the mandate fails. Then the second mandate fails. Then there is another election, and Netanyahu stays in the prime minister’s office through all of it, because a caretaker prime minister is still the prime minister. Israelis know what that costs better than I do: five rounds between 2019 and 2022, years of caretaker government, budgets passed late or not at all. A sixth would take most of 2027, and the American clock does not stop while this country votes again. That Congress would spend its two best years watching a caretaker government conduct no foreign policy, and then hand its committees to the people in those Harvard Youth polls.

So the opposition would have won an election, held the only available majority in its hands, declined to use it, and returned Netanyahu to power — and it would have done all of that in the one window when Washington was still in a position to help.

The opposition is afraid of the voters who are afraid, so it keeps looking for a majority without the only people who would give it one. In the Torah that fear cost forty years. Here it costs another election, the American Congress that still might listen, and a generation of Americans who will not. Netanyahu does not go anywhere, and neither does the country.

That night the people wept. The sages say it was the ninth of Av, and that God answered them: you wept for nothing, so I will give you something to weep for through all the generations.