LESSONS FROM THE ISRAELI ELECTION
Despite a heated campaign against Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party ( which included possibly illegal American efforts against him that are being probed by a Senate subcommittee) and exit polls that showed Likud and the Laborite Zionist Union party neck-and-neck on election day, the Likud won 30 seats, up ten from 2013 and six more than the Zionist Union received. Netanyahu is positioned to continue as prime minister. There are some lessons be drawn from the election and its results:
1) Israel is a vibrant democracy. The voter turnout was 72%, the highest since 1999. The new Knesset will include a record number of women (twenty-eight) and 41 first-time members of Knesset. There will be seventeen Arab MKs, up from twelve in 2013. As Abraham H. Miller wryly noted:
The "Apartheid state" saw a 29% increase in the number of Arabs elected to the Knesset (Israel's parliament). Most of this increase came from Arabs elected within Jewish parties and not Arab parties. For the second time in a row, the number of women members of the Knesset increased. Israel has a higher proportion of women in the Knesset than the proportion of women in Congress.
2) Israeli elections are complicated affairs. There were 25 parties competing in this election, ten of which passed the threshold (3.25% of the total vote) to win seats in the Knesset. The Green Leaf Party favoring the legalization of marijuana, the Pirates Party, and the Flower Party were among those who failed to win seats.
The number of parties, among other factors, makes predictions about Israeli elections notoriously difficult. Jonathan Schanzer writes at Politico:
[U.S.elections are] checkers, while Israeli voters and politicians must play chess... Every vote in their multi-party system is a rather grueling gambit. If they vote for the party they truly like and support, they may not get the government they desire. For example, for those who support the peace process, a vote for the leftist Meretz party might mean fewer seats for the center-left Labor party's Isaac Herzog, who is the Israeli politician with arguably the best chance of jump-starting diplomacy... Israeli voters understand this dynamic. They are aware that their votes have consequences well beyond the simple numbers of seats each party gains. But it is impossible for them to foresee how their votes will impact the final tally. They simply cannot know what impact their vote will have on the ultimate composition of the government.
3) President Obama lost this election. Eli Lake calls the election, " a referendum on U.S. President Obama. Netanyahu gave voters a choice between whom to trust more with their nation's security. The result was clear."
Peter Wehner says it was a " disastrous" defeat for the White House and what he calls Obama's "clumsy and malicious mishandling of relations with Israel."
The President's response is predictable. His animus toward Netanyahu is so deep, Obama at first couldn't bring himself to make a courtesy call and congratulate Netanyahu on his victory. (He did make the call this afternoon.) The RJC asked: " What is the White House Waiting For?" Yesterday, a White House aide congratulated the Israeli people, but not Netanyahu. The Hill noted:
The White House did not formally congratulate Netanyahu, but it did release details of an upcoming Obama trip to Panama and Jamaica in April.
The White House also tweeted Obama's picks for the NCAA basketball tournament Wednesday morning.
Republican officials, on the other hand, were quick to congratulate Netanyahu and praise Israel for its democratic process.4) What comes next for U.S.-Israeli relations could get ugly. Netanyahu said right before the election that there would be no Palestinian state created on his watch. His remark was not a denial of the two-state solution, but a recognition that there is currently no partner for peace. He told an interviewer:
"I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to the radical Islam against the state of Israel," he said in a video interview published on NRG, an Israeli news site that leans to the right. "There is a real threat here that a left-wing government will join the international community and follow its orders." ( New York Times; original Hebrew: YNet)
The Obama White House is now obliquely threatening to support Palestinian statehood efforts in the United Nations, a change in American policy, in order to pursue the President's goal of "solving" the Israeli-Palestinian problem before he leaves office.
An unnamed senior administration official said, "We are signaling that if the Israeli government's position is no longer to pursue a Palestinian state, we're going to have to broaden the spectrum of options we pursue going forward," Politico reports.
The Wall Street Journal reports [subscriber-only content]:
The White House upended decades of U.S. policy on Wednesday when it left open the possibility that it might not use its veto in the United Nations Security Council to shield Israel from unfavorable resolutions, such as the creation of a Palestinian state...
The U.S. has several options for taking action at the U.N. Security Council, from refusing to veto resolutions related to the Palestinians to introducing a measure of its own.
"We're not going to get ahead of any decisions about what we would do with regard to potential action at the U.N. Security Council," said a senior administration official, adding: "There are policy ramifications to the positions that he [Netanyahu] took."