Last Thursday, two major centrist Israeli political parties announced they would run as a joint list in the April 9 elections: the secular Yesh Atid party and the newly formed Israel Resilience, which serves as a vehicle for the candidacy of the former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz. Polls show the new bloc, which calls itself Blue and White, garnering roughly the same number of votes as the incumbent Likud. Thus, writes Joshua Krasna, Blue and White poses a more serious challenge to Benjamin Netanyahu than anything seen from the moribund left and divided center in recent elections. But the current prime minister still has many advantages:
[I]t is important to note the decline of the left in Israeli politics. Labor, which as recently as 1992 had 44 seats in the Knesset (and 34 in 1996), had 19 seats in 2006, 13 in 2009, 15 in 2013, and 24 in 2015, after it joined with the remnants of the [now-defunct] Kadima under Tzipi Livni. The most optimistic predictions say it will win ten or eleven seats in the next Knesset. Meretz, the Zionist party to the left of Labor, which had a peak of twelve seats in 1992, has five seats in the current Knesset, and is expected to achieve a similar result in the next elections, if it doesn’t disappear entirely. . . . Why has this happened?
The perceived failure of the Oslo process, and of the unilateral withdrawals from Southern Lebanon (2000) and the Gaza Strip (2005), key policies of left- and center-led governments; the continued stalemate on the Palestinian issue (attributed by the majority of Israelis to a lack of a viable Palestinian partner, especially since the split in 2007 between the Gaza Strip under Hamas and the West Bank under the Palestinian Authority/Fatah); as well as demographics, have moved the midpoint of Israeli politics to the right. Centrist (or even right-of-center) parties like Yesh Atid and Resilience are delegitimized as “leftists”—a term of opprobrium in Israeli political discourse today: the actual left is largely seen as irrelevant. Recent internal developments in Labor seem to indicate that the party is shifting from seeing itself as a potential ruling party to a democratic-socialist “woke” opposition, which may explain the internal pressures to merge with Meretz on its left. . . .
To win, Netanyahu only needs his current coalition to do no worse than before in the aggregate; the election is his to lose. However, Netanyahu’s legal issues and increasingly polarizing political style, combined with possible loss of seats due to an inability of prospective coalition partners to pass the electoral threshold, may have opened a narrow path to victory for a “clean-hands,” rule-of-law candidate of the center-left.
Read more on American Interest: https://www.the-american-interest.com/2019/02/21/can-netanyahu-still-win/