April 9, 2019, Israel is going to hold its 21st national elections, seven months before they would have happened anyway. In a parliamentary democracy such as England or Israel, it is the right of a ruling coalition to decide to schedule elections early if they think they cannot continue to function or if they think the timing is good for “producing a new first down,” to borrow an expression from football. If by holding the elections now they think they might win, with favorable results, and waiting seven months for the scheduled time, they might lose, they will sometimes hold the elections early.
Under the present circumstances, Netanyahu decided to hold elections early for any of the following reasons: 1) There is pressure right now from the Supreme Court to pass laws that will make army deferments for chareidi Torah learners a smidgeon harder to attain. Netanyahu wanted to avoid that through elections, this being the main type of protection Netanyahu offers the chareidim in exchange for their voting with the coalition on other issues. 2) Netanyahu has criminal charges hanging in the air, charges he denies, and he wants to try to squeeze in elections before possible indictments make him less popular. 3) In April, Netanyahu will still be under 70 years old, and 69 sounds younger than 70.
These were supposed to be boring elections, similar to the last ones, in 2015. In terms of overall power, there is presently, and has been for some time, a natural, strong, right-wing majority in this country. Of the total of 120 Knesset seats, about 67 are held by right-wing parties, and 53 are left-wing seats, including 13 Arabs. Without the Arabs, the Jewish right-wing/religious/chareidi majority is even more pronounced: 67 to 40. The overwhelming majority of Jews in Israel vote right wing because they are fed up with the bombastic demands of the Palestinian Arabs, as represented by their president, Mahmud Abbas in Ramallah, and have lost any sympathy they once had.
On the Right, there is the perennial leading Likud party, run for many years by the extremely capable Binyamin Netanyahu, a general right-wing party with a lot of Jewish schmaltz and religious sentiment mixed it. It currently holds 30 seats, including five Orthodox-Jewish Knesset members and a lot of others who are very traditional. There is Bayit Yehudi, the only official non-chareidi religious party (8 seats). There are the chareidi parties (13 seats). There are a few right-wing prima donna parties of would-be Likud leaders who felt they didn’t have enough chance to shine within the Likud (16 seats). All these total 67 seats.
There are chronically also about three tiny ideological far-right-wing parties that never seem to pass the voting threshold – a party must get enough votes to earn four seats, or they are not represented in the Knesset at all – and therefore waste right-wing votes even when they run together. In the last election, Eli Yishai-Baruch Marzel of Yachad almost got in but didn’t and wasted votes in this way, although we still ended up with a 67 seat majority.
All that said, the left-wing parties are in a shambles. There is an extreme left-wing party (Meretz), a “regular” left-wing party (Zionist Camp), which just split itself in two, and another prima donna party that tries to talk “centrist,” although everyone knows it isn’t (Lapid’s Yesh Atid). Basically, they’re all the same. If they ever reached a majority, they would all cave in to the policies of the extremist Meretz party, as happened in 1991, the last time they won. The result was the Oslo “peace accords” and the thousands of subsequent civilian deaths during the resultant intifadas.
So what’s the big deal this time? Why are these elections interesting? Won’t everyone run again, and won’t Netanyahu win again?
There is one mildly interesting development on the Left and one very interesting – or alarming – development on the Right. On the Left, a former army general and Chief of Staff, Benny Gantz, has started a new party. Polls give him at least 10 seats in the next Knesset. This is only mildly interesting for two reasons: First, we have seen a number of times in the past that when former generals start new parties, they poll double-digit support until they open their mouths (Avigdor Kahalani and Yitzchak Mordechai are two examples). Israel reveres its generals. Yet the moment they open their mouths, their support plummets to two or three mandates, and then they disappear in the next election. This is what will happen to Gantz. He knows all this so, as of this writing, he has not opened his mouth. Moreover, because he is from the top of the security establishment, it stands to reason that he has left-wing views, i.e., the desire to abandon large parts of Judea and Samaria. So his support is going to come from the same 40 left-wing seats that are there already. He is not going to eat into the 67 seats of the right-wing majority.
What is more interesting is that, on the Right, Naftali Bennett, head of the Bayit Yehudi party, has suddenly abandoned that party, which he himself refashioned out of the National Religious Party six years ago. That’s a bit like a Boeing 747 pilot ejecting himself from his jet and parachuting down without telling his 500 passengers of his plans. Bennett has created a new, not-specifically religious party, which he calls the “New Right.” Apart from its newness, this party will be almost a carbon copy of the already existing Likud, although possibly, just possibly, a smidgeon more right wing on the Land-of-Israel issue. So the question is: Why has Bennett decided to squeeze in a new party at the expense of other right-wing parties, suddenly abandoning the Bayit Yehudi party that he created?
Naftali Bennett is a younger Netanyahu with a kippa. Perhaps he is not as physically handsome, but he’s a military hero, a business tycoon, enormously energetic, and enormously eloquent in defending Israel on international stages. He took a leadership role in the security cabinet that led the Israeli government to take more seriously the Gaza border tunnels and then the Lebanese border tunnels, and ultimately to work to destroy them and remove those threats.
He also speaks a native American English, gets along great with the chareidim after a few temporary missteps six years ago, and also gets along great with the irreligious. Plus, he has a proven track record of being squeaky-clean and an exemplary family man.
Bennett feels that he deserves to become prime minister, and he feels that first he must become defense minister as a steppingstone towards that. He discovered several months ago, when Liberman’s party left the coalition, that he could never become defense minister as head of a religious Zionist party. So he is trying “Plan B” – starting his own secular party.
We might ask: How can he abandon Bayit Yehudi? Doesn’t he have a long-term goal of building up a religious Zionist party until it becomes a ruling party? The truth is that he may have had that goal, but I don’t think he does now. Add to this the fact that he has recently gone on record as saying that his ideal Israel is not Jews scrupulously keeping halacha and learning Torah while participating in the army, the workplace, and in building the state – the traditional religious Zionist goal expressed by Rav Kook. Rather, his goal is a country in which everyone is “traditional” – not overly scrupulous about Jewish law, not “going overboard” with it, but keeping traditions and holidays. Such a man does not need a religious party.
Now, it could be that Bennett’s ultimate goal, all the same, is to advance the Redemption by taking steps to become Israel’s first prime minister who puts on tefillin. Certainly, if the prime minister of Israel wears tefillin, that would go a long way towards normalizing tefillin. Is his liberal talk about tradition just a ploy to reach out and make people feel comfortable, with his ultimate goal being the same as that of other religious Zionists? I can’t tell. Are his views tarnished, like those of Bar Kochba, or is he a secret saint? Only G-d can judge such a thing.
Even giving Bennett the benefit of the doubt, we must still ask: what are the immediate repercussions going to be of what he is trying to accomplish?
First, there is a chance that no one will leave the other parties to vote for him. Secessionists do not have a good record of success in Israel. When Ben Gurion left the Labor party and founded Rafi, to his surprise, it only won three seats. Big stars who leave large parties to start their own new one often don’t do well.
If other right-wing voters do vote for him, where will those votes come from? If they come from the Likud, Likud will view him as an enemy, and he may find himself excommunicated in the next election. Likud may even prefer the prima donna quasi-centrist party of Yair Lapid in the coalition as an alternative to Bennett. If Bennett’s votes come from the liberal-wing of religious Zionism living in the big cities, it may hurt what is left of Bayit Yehudi. It may even endanger its existence.
So, I am worried. There are rumors that Bayit Yehudi will now be run by Betzalel Smotrich, an excellent, eloquent 38-year-old from that party. That is good news. Will he succeed in building up a strong religious Zionist party, unifying the religious parties, and stopping small ideological splinter parties from running and wasting votes? I hope so!
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Postscript: Articles of this sort are hard to write because the news in Israel changes daily. After I completed this article, I came across a Jerusalem Post headline stating that Attorney General Avichai Mandelblitt is warning that he may announce his decision about a bribery indictment for Netanyahu “before February 22,” and not wait until after the elections.
If that is the case, then several things may occur. Likud may suffer, as voters are less interested in supporting the party of a man indicted on serious charges. Religious Zionist Likud voters, who if they all voted together might produce 25 mandates or more, might then feel that they still want to support the Right but not necessarily through Netanyahu. Hence, they may strengthen Bennett, or they may strengthen Bayit Yehudi under Betzalel Smotrich. Furthermore, a chastened, weakened Likud may not feel that it can punish Bennett for creating a new party, hence he may end up defense minister after all. Non-observant Likudniks whose second choice was previously “centrist” Yair Lapid may choose Bennett instead. Bennett may therefore even be credited with political acumen for predicting Mandelblitt's move and saving the day, like Yosef down in Egypt. Once again, we shall see!
