October 28, 2022 10:22
Israeli voters are tireless. The elections on November 1 will be the fifth in just three and a half years, yet voter turnout will likely be around 70 percent. This is truly remarkable because all five elections revolved around the same question: Should Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu go to jail or should he become prime minister?
Bibi is on trial for corruption, fraud and breach of trust. The evidence against him is solid and the risk is real. The judiciary is one of the few systems of Israeli public life that has not been politicized: former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced to six years in prison (reduced to 18 months on appeal) for the exact same charges that now hang on Netanyahu .
The former premier benefited from being a populist and ultranationalist on the right at a time when this inclination enjoys evident success in politics (Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Meloni, Modi and so on). But it is nevertheless remarkable that a single man can transform his personal destiny into the central political question of a country of ten million inhabitants.
Change the laws
But why should Netanyahu bother to return to government, given that in Israel the incumbent premieres can still be indicted, tried and even removed if found guilty by the courts? Because the post is a kind of insurance: a convicted prime minister cannot be dismissed until he has exhausted all appeal possibilities, which can take many years.
Furthermore, by exploiting his majority in parliament, he can seek to change or abolish the very laws he has been accused of violating. Netanyahu has not yet succeeded, because all Israeli governments are coalitions and he has failed to persuade his political partners to accept his idea of him. This time around, however, things might be different.
62 percent of Israelis today see themselves as right-wingers
Political attempts to bring down the various coalitions led by his Likud party began even before his formal indictment in late 2019, and Netanyahu has since achieved a very narrow victory in each of the following three elections. After twelve consecutive years in power, he lost his fourth round in 2021, by an equally narrow margin, and is currently in opposition.
But Netanyahu is looking to return to office in November and this time he may be able to form a coalition to put an end to his legal troubles. The Religious Zionist Party (RZP) is relatively new to the political scene, but it is already the third largest political formation in the country.
If a gang of criminals succeeds in gaining political power, they are expected to decriminalize crime. If the RZP enters a winning Likud-led coalition, the project it proposes, renamed “law and justice”, would take power away from the courts to give it to politicians. And above all, it would cancel the current law against fraud and breach of trust.
Breathtaking finish
The leading figures of the RZP, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, have in the past been figures on the fringes of Israeli politics. Ben-Gvir is a well-known admirer of Israeli terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinians in 1994 and wounded 125 others in Hebron. Smotrich argues that “Israel should be governed according to the law of the Torah”: a theocracy like Iran, in other words. But Israeli politics has shifted to the right to include them too: 62 percent of Israelis today consider themselves to the right.
Bibi is not a religious fanatic, but Smotrich’s “legal reforms” would invalidate the indictment of Netanyahu, who therefore would have no problem assigning important ministries to the RZP, if the right-wing parties obtained enough seats in the next elections to to be able to form a government.
Will it go like this? It is impossible to tell. The magic number is 61 (out of 120 knesset seats) and right-wing parties, pro Netanyahu, today only get 59 or sixty seats in the polls. The Jewish parties of the current coalition would get 56, while the four parties representing the Arab citizens of Israel would get four (or possibly none, if they fail to unite).
Like the previous four elections, this one is also destined to close with a breathtaking finale. It might not even be the last, because most Israelis always vote the same way. In the meantime, however, the real world around them is falling apart.
The three million Palestinian Arabs of the occupied West Bank are close to breaking point. The Palestinian Authority (PA) has lost all authority. Its unelected leader, Abu Mazen, 86, is in poor health and has no deputy or designated successor. The cities of Jenin and Nablus in the north of the West Bank are already effectively out of Israeli or PA control. The heavily armed youths of the Lions’ Den militia are in control of the streets, except when the Israeli army decides to open fire, and a third large-scale intifada may be a few weeks away.
But despite everything, Israeli voters, perpetually distracted by the Netanyahu soap opera, seem largely unaware of what lies ahead.
(Translation by Federico Ferrone)
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