While roughly 90 percent of the votes from Tuesday’s election have been counted, the results are likely to remain uncertain until Friday, if not until Monday. It does seem, however, that—unlike in the three previous elections—the Likud party has a clear plurality, with a prospective 30 Knesset seats as compared to the seventeen of the runner-up Yesh Atid. At present neither Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu nor Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid has an easy or obvious path to forming a majority coalition. Even if a coalition does form, it will be highly unstable. Jonathan Tobin comments:
This fourth consecutive election stalemate in two years is a discouraging outcome for the Jewish state. It’s not just an annoying waste of time. More than that, it has been estimated that the cost of holding these four votes amounted to $4.24 billion—a staggering sum for a small country that, like the rest of the world, is dealing with the economic catastrophe caused by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. . . . Then there is the plain fact that the lack of a national budget for 2020—let alone 2021—is also a blow to stability and the country’s economic well-being.
And yet, the one person who hasn’t been hurt by it is Netanyahu. The failure to form a stable government has served him fairly well since it enables him to govern without actually winning an election. . . . But the election results speak volumes about both his strengths and his weaknesses.
While the incumbent prime minister finds himself in the same position he has been in for at least two years, the state of the Arab vote has changed dramatically, after Mansour Abbas split his Islamist Ra’am party from the other three that form the Joint Arab List. Ra’am is currently expected to have five seats in the Knesset. Tobin observes:
As he promised during the campaign . . . Abbas says that he is open to supporting either side of the Israeli political divide in order to advance the interests of Israeli Arabs. That opens up the possibility that one of the non-Jewish parties would become part of a government, even if it meant supporting it from outside the coalition.
If Ra’am enables Netanyahu and the Likud to govern in this fashion, . . . it would give the lie to the canard that Israel is an “apartheid state.” It would also illustrate just how far the Abraham Accords and the other normalization deals between Israel and Arab and Muslim states, have helped erode support for the century-long war on Zionism. Friendly relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain are a signal to Arab voters that it’s in their interests to stop acting like auxiliaries of Palestinian terror groups.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/israel-still-cant-make-up-its-mind-about-netanyahu/