Perspective 79. The Israeli Elections: More of the Same?

On November 1 Israelis will vote for the fifth time in three and a half years. Will this election, like the four previous renditions, simply confirm again the dominance of right-wing and religious parties?

Yes. Voting in Israel is remarkably stable, looking at voters by ideological blocs and not by ever-shifting party alignments. Political parties come and go, split and merge and split again in dizzying kaleidoscopic fashion. But voters generally stay within the bloc that matches their predilections.

In perspective, in the first seven elections after the state was founded, parties on the left consistently won about half of the 120 seats in the Knesset, parties on the center and right won a bit less than one-third, and religious parties came in between 12.5 and 15 percent.

Over time the relative strength of the blocs changed as the demography of the nation changed. New Israelis of Middle Eastern origin (Mizrahim) turned against the Labor Zionist establishment and toward more hawkish voices on the right. This shift lay behind the "upheaval" of 1977, in which the left permanently lost its dominance.

The Mizrahi vote for the right-wing Likud rose from 35 percent in 1969 to 45 percent in 1973, 56 percent in 1977, and 69 percent in 1981. The Mizrahim (today about 40 percent of the population) remain a mainstay of the right. The religious public (25-30 percent) also skews to the right.

The right was further reinforced by immigrants from the former Soviet Union, now about 20 percent of the country, who came with an antipathy to socialism and strong hawkish instincts. The bottom line: in a recent survey only 14 percent of Israeli Jews still identified themselves with the left or center left, 18 percent with the center, and 63 percent with the right or center right.

The result: in every election but one since 2000, the right-wing and religious blocs together have commanded a clear majority (2006 was a fluke because of a strong centrist party). This was the case in the four elections since 2019, with right and religious parties winning 72 of the 120 seats in the last election. Only the strong antipathy of other right-wing leaders to Bibi prevented him from forming a government.

So the political landscape after November 1 will, again, be dominated by right and religious parties. The question is whether Netanyahu, facing trial for fraud, bribery, and breach of trust, will be able to mobilize enough right-wing support despite the fact that he has antagonized important figures in that camp.

There is a good chance that he will be able to do that. The latest poll (two days ago) has Bibi's Likud at 34 seats, his haredi (ultra-orthodox) allies at 15, and his Religious Zionist allies at 9, bringing him, at 58, only three seats short of a majority. (The rise of the Religious Zionists, an extreme far-right party, has been one of the few shifts in the political landscape.)

Furthermore, with now-retired Prime Minister Naftali Bennett's exit from politics, his right-wing party has been transformed into a new party that could conceivably join Bibi. And most leftist and Arab parties are dangerously close to elimination as they are close to the 3.25 percent threshold for representation -- something that would improve the arithmetic for Bibi.

Plus ça change . . . . As demonstration of how little has changed, this post is essentially an update of Perspective 3, from February 2021, written before the fourth election of this zany era in Israeli politics. Only some of the particular details have been changed. For a wild conjecture on how it all might turn out, see Perspective 17.