If the polls are on target, or even slightly off, Tuesday’s election in Israel—the fifth since April of 2019—seems unlikely to settle things down any more than the previous four have. The centrist bloc led by Prime Minister Yair Lapid—who, since June, has been serving in a caretaker role—may deny victory to former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist bloc. The latter has been consistently projected to win between fifty-nine and sixty seats out of a hundred-and-twenty seats in the Knesset—given the margins of error in major polls, a statistical tie. But, as before, turnout can tip the balance. And either bloc could be seriously undermined if one of its smaller, allied parties attracts significant support but falls short of the, in effect, four-seat minimum needed to cross the threshold for entering the Knesset. Winning is not governing, however. Israel’s electoral system is based on proportional representation, so many small parties do cross the threshold and can then become the last piece that builds a coalition to a Knesset majority. Small parties, like factions of bigger ones, may then wield outsized power in negotiating for seats in the cabinet.

Even if Lapid wins a more decisive victory, his electoral strategy entails coöperation with hard-liners who, were it not for their personal animosity for Netanyahu, would have been more comfortable in the rightist bloc. Ultimately, they could confound Lapid’s effort to build a governing coalition that’s more stable or enduring than the so-called “change government”—a coalition of eight ideologically disparate parties that unseated Netanyahu in the summer of 2021—which he has co-led, in alternation, with the rightist former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. If, on the other hand, Netanyahu’s bloc wins a majority, his coalition, led by his own Likud Party, may appear more coherent, at least at first. But it will be hostage to Religious Zionism, a surging proto-fascist settler party that is projected to win a dozen or so seats. A Netanyahu government would thus be a standing provocation for Israel’s élites, Arab Israelis, Palestinians under occupation, regional Arab partners, and even American political allies. On the whole, the Likud rank and file would go along, much as the majority of Republican politicians have fallen in line behind Donald Trump. But a few Likud veterans may bridle. And, unlike in the United States, just one or two defections in a nearly evenly split Knesset could bring the government down.

What is Lapid’s strategy? A recent survey reveals the ambiguous electoral space in which he has been operating: more than sixty per cent of Israel’s Jewish voters identify as “right-wing”—for many, a shorthand for harboring some hostility toward Palestinians and Arab-Israeli citizens, favoring annexation over provisional occupation of the West Bank, and defending Jewish hegemony in the state apparatus. (Netanyahu’s “national camp” has been made up of parties representing ultranationalists, the ultra-Orthodox, and economic populists from poorer communities.) More and more, however, insurgent forces on the right have been promoting an authoritarian version of Orthodox Jewish supremacy: rhapsodizing about Jerusalem’s holiness, advocating for prayer on the Temple Mount, insinuating national-Orthodox precepts into secular schools, neglecting core subjects in favor of Torah study in ultra-Orthodox schools, and subordinating democracy to Orthodox, or “Halachic,” law—separating men and women in classrooms and swimming pools, maintaining a state bureaucracy to enforce Orthodox dietary laws, excoriating gays. Theocrats are growing brazen in their attacks on secular Israeliness.

This trend may have provided Lapid with an opening. According to 2018 data from the Central Bureau of Statistics, forty-four per cent of Jewish Israelis above age twenty define themselves as “secular,” and twenty-one per cent as “traditional,” though not “traditional with religious leanings.” More than seventy per cent of adults, for example, want buses to run on the Sabbath.The center bloc is a hodgepodge that could be home to such voters: it contains parties representing bourgeois professionals, techno-globalists, social democrats, “two-staters,” secular Russian hard-liners, security-establishment veterans, and a scattering of neo-Zionist hawks. (Its prospective Knesset majority could be secured, ironically, by an Islamist Arab party and backstopped by more secular Arab parties.)

Lapid has clearly been betting that a necessary percentage of the right’s sixty per cent will swing to him—that they’ll care enough about an independent judiciary, a free press, science education in Orthodox schools, and so forth. To this end, he has made common cause against Netanyahu with the longtime hawk and nationalist Avigdor Lieberman and with Benny Gantz, the former alternate Prime Minister and chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, who is currently the defense minister. Gantz is also the head of a new center-right party—his third since entering politics in December, 2018. He, in turn, has recruited another former chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot, and the former Likud leader Gideon Sa’ar. Eisenkot endorses two states in principle, but says that, in the current environment, there is“no point wasting time on it” now. Sa’ar was partially responsible for bringing down the change government, in June when he made a major public push to extend Israeli civil law to West Bank settlers while occupied Palestinian towns endured military rule—legislation that Arab-Israeli partners had understandably refused to endorse.

Which brings us back to turnout. After secular Israelis, one of the largest groups that could support Lapid’s bloc is Arab Israelis, who make up about twenty-one per cent of the population, and Lapid should be credited with bringing the first independent Arab coalition partner into the change government—Mansour Abbas, the leader of the Islamist Party. But every pitch that Lapid makes to that ambivalent sliver of the right alienates much of the Arab community, most of whom, according to a survey, already believe that Abbas’s joining the government didn’t make it less neglectful of their communities. They may turn out in larger numbers than pollsters expect and give Lapid a working majority. But they may also plausibly conclude that, for Lapid, being “centrist” means being protective of liberal norms inside Israel, while eliding them in the West Bank, and rejecting messianic notions of the Land of Israel, and yet endorsing exclusive Jewish sovereignty over the whole of a united Jerusalem—and hoping that nobody notices the contradictions. Meanwhile, violent clashes have been on the rise in the West Bank, and the army has acted with force. Since the beginning of the year, under a centrist government, more than a hundred Palestinians, some of them young teens, have been killed by security forces in the West Bank, according to the United Nations. It must appear to many Arab-Israelis that, to hold his coalition together, Lapid is unlikely to “waste time” on the Palestinian question.

Indeed, Netanyahu’s bloc is virtually tied with Lapid’s in the projections, in part because survey researchers have warned about a possible low turnout among Arab-Israeli voters. Gantz, accordingly, has been positioning himself to replace Lapid as the leader of the center bloc, suggesting that he can lure ultra-Orthodox parties into a coalition—a scenario in which Arab partners may become unnecessary. (Whether the secular heart of Gantz’s bloc would go along with surrendering to ultra-Orthodox educational and other demands is not clear.)

Netanyahu’s numbers, it should be said, are roughly the same as those he’s had in the run-up to previous elections, which he lost. And his legal jeopardy remains an immediate issue for those on the right who believe in the rule of law: his sensational trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust is ongoing; some of his former close advisers have turned state witnesses, and conviction on at least some charges seems possible. Leaders in the center bloc say that they will not serve under a Prime Minister who is under indictment. But leaders of Netanyahu’s allied parties are seemingly agreeing to let him off the hook. The Netanyahu allies Aryeh Deri, the leader of the Orthodox Shas party, who himself served prison time between 2000 and 2002 for taking bribes, and Bezalel Smotrich, a settler zealot who leads the Religious Zionism party, have both intimated that a Knesset majority should have the legal authority to supersede High Court decisions, possibly including those prohibiting indicted or convicted leaders from assuming ministerial positions.

By far the most disturbing figure in the election is Smotrich’s rival for power in Religious Zionism: Itamar Ben Gvir, a racist and provocateur who has unabashedly promoted expelling “disloyal” citizens from Israel, including sitting Arab members of Parliament. (Ben Gvir also once hung a picture of the American-born extremist Meir Kahane next to one of Baruch Goldstein, a physician who, in 1994, shot and killed twenty-nine Palestinians, as they prayed at a mosque at the Tomb of the Patriarchs, also known as the Ibrahimi Mosque, in Hebron.) Netanyahu has said that both Smotrich and Ben Gvir could serve as cabinet ministers. Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, who is the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee and a longtime supporter of Israel, reportedly told Netanyahu that forming a government with extremists like Ben Gvir could “seriously erode bipartisan support in Washington.” On Wednesday, news broke that the U.A.E.’s foreign minister, Abdullah bin Zayed, cautioned the former prime minister against creating a coalition with Ben Gvir and Smotrich. The Haaretz columnist Amir Tibon fears that, nevertheless, Religious Zionism will be “calling the shots.” Meanwhile, the ultra-Orthodox leader Yitzhak Goldknopf, who has balked at the teaching of math in religious schools, has spoken openly of his ambition to become the finance minister.

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