Netanyahu's New Election Ploy Smells of Desperation and Elon Musk -
This week, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – still stuck in the polls without a majority at just under 11 weeks until election day – made a move which encapsulates his campaign's utter hypocrisy, seasoned with a generous pinch of hummus, desperation and Elon Muskophilia.
Netanyahu doesn't trust voters to guarantee the results he wants, so he's undermining the electoral system. At this stage, his focus is on his own Likud party, while fears are rising of serious interference in the October 27 national elections.
Instead of accepting the results of Likud's own internal popularity contest to create a list of candidates, the prime minister strongarmed his party into giving him eight "reserved" seats – so he can parachute people he chooses into realistic slots. Unsurprisingly, he's choosing the most reliably fawning candidates who don't have the gravitas or capacity to pose a potential leadership threat to him.
Chickpea impresario who called Trump a 'piece of shit'
The prime minister's first pick is an Israeli chickpea impresario who has lived in Silicon Valley for decades. Oren Dobronsky founded a Californian hummus eatery mini-empire, was a judge in Israel's version of "Shark Tank" and has become a high-tech angel investor. And he is phenomenally devoted to Netanyahu.
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Naturally, there's been more noise in the media about Dobronsky's recent indelicate attack on U.S. President Donald Trump, whom he called a "morally corrupt piece of shit" after the U.S.-Iran cease-fire agreement in June.
But Dobronsky was only obediently following the herd: The agreement, reached by sidelining Israel, was widely considered to be a humiliating fiasco for Jerusalem, triggered Netanyahu loyalists to publicly call various senior White House officials "Jewboys" and "scumbags," and to rename the president "Donald Hussein Trump." As for Dobronsky's call for Gaza to be completely destroyed until "not even a cat [is] left alive" there – depressingly enough, that hardly distinguishes him from the rest of Netanyahu's ruling coalition.
In the same bloodthirsty nationalist vein, he is entirely opposed to the idea of a Palestinian state; thinks Israel should keep bombing Iran's infrastructure even if the U.S. holds fire; and approvingly reposts U.K. far-right thug and anti-immigrant agitator Tommy Robinson.
It also won't shock you to hear that he also thinks any Jew who still subscribes to the New York Times after the furor over Nicholas Kristof's controversial column about Israeli sexual violence against Palestinians is a "spineless collaborator" and calls Haaretz "slanderous" and "anti-Israel." More unusual is his suggestion that the late Lindsay Graham was poisoned and his assassination, if proven, would be a casus belli (against whom? Dobronsky leaves us hanging).
Brown-nosing Netanyahu
But back to the core issue: His sycophantism for Netanyahu is wholehearted. He waxes lyrical about "Bibi's greatness" and what a "phenomenal man" he is, a "once-in-a-generation" wonder.
Waving aside the charge that Netanyahu should be held accountable for the unprecedented disaster of October 7, Dobronsky considers him a strategic giant among Lilliputian opponents, claiming that "In moments of crisis, in critical moments when the only right decision has to be made out of a hundred difficult options, I trust his judgment more than all the others combined." His brown-nosing is only surpassed by a Likud primaries contender (whom Dobronsky reposted) who makes the impressively counterfactual claim that "To choose life is to choose Likud, it is to choose Netanyahu."
In an X post by Netanyahu welcoming him to the "winning team," Dobronsky talks about how he has been "called to the flag"; in a Facebook video with Netanyahu, he says he regarded the prime minister's invitation to join Likud as an IDF-style "conscription order."
Musk, the far right and bromance with Netanyahu
Dobronsky says he wants to support Israel's technology sector; it's reported that Netanyahu would want to appoint him to be Israel's first minister in charge of AI. That's where the Muskophilia comes in. Netanyahu has a years-long bromance with the entrepreneur who has a penchant for Sieg Heiling, Holocaust denial and the German far right. In 2023, he said he'd had an "insightful" conversation on AI with Musk, a man, Netanyahu wrote, "whose genius & impact on humanity are formidable."
Netanyahu's grandiose vision is for Israel to become an AI superpower, and to use AI for greater governmental efficiencies. Perhaps Netanyahu wants to add Musk's rickety DOGE chainsaw to his armory of bombs and bullets. With Israel's defense budget ballooning to extraordinary proportions, every other budget is already being slashed and burned – apart from those hurriedly assigned to electoral constituencies, such as the ultra-Orthodox, whom Netanyahu has to keep sweet for the next couple of months. Or maybe Netanyahu thinks that an international AI brotherhood can overwrite Israel's growing international isolation.
Dobronsky himself is certainly on board with Musk – but more for the X/Tesla/SpaceX tycoon's far-right conspiracy theories than a specific policy. "Read what Elon Musk writes," Dobronsky urges, "He claims that the left's infiltration of the judiciary in the West is the left's greatest long-term piece of trickery." That theory, conveniently, correlates with Netanyahu's intensifying campaign against Israel's so-called "deep state" and his assault on the independence of the judiciary, in which the premier has a burning personal interest as a defendant in an active criminal trial.
Netanyahu is already surrounded by sycophants. Why risk party unrest by coercing Dobronsky into the top flight of the Likud list? Partly, it allows Netanyahu to puppeteer him into saying the red meat conspiracies and criticisms of Trump that he himself can't risk doing.
But there's another reason: As part of his desperate attempt to scrape every single potential vote, Netanyahu seems to think Dobronsky can appeal to expatriate Israelis who might be motivated enough to fly back and vote.
The threat of flying voters
Apart from very few exceptions, Israelis have to physically turn up to the polling station to vote. There are an estimated half a million eligible voters abroad; in the last elections in 2022, parties needed roughly 155,000 valid votes to cross the 3.25 percent threshold and gain a seat in the Knesset.
Academic studies, especially in Europe, indicate that expat voters are often more hard-line than the home electorate. Expats can be radicalized by dissatisfaction with their economic status and with democratic governance, "particularly when they feel marginalized in the host country," one study suggested. It's possible that rising antisemitism and hostility towards Israel and Israelis since October 7 and the Gaza war could have that effect on some potential voters, even among those once disillusioned by Netanyahu, and these are the votes in Dobronsky's sights.
But it seems more likely that more of the record number of Israelis who emigrated over the last few years left because of Netanyahu, and they seem to have more motivation and means to fly back and vote against the coalition. There are several groups busy organizing flights for Israelis to vote on election day, from the AID Coalition's Fly&Vote campaign to Australia's progressive Zionist Hatikvah. None of the groups have openly partisan political platforms, nor do they pay for the flights themselves – both would be an illegal form of campaign finance.
But their activity is sufficiently worrying for the government that it's trying its best to scupper their efforts, whether by floating the idea of drastically limiting charter flights to Israel ahead of the elections, or by sympathetic journalists slamming expat voters as "insolent" and the campaign to fly them back an "immoral venture."
Pointing out the rank hypocrisy of denouncing a legal form of civil activism while engineering a comfy Knesset seat for a longtime expat is for patsies. Netanyahu is playing a far colder, ruthless game: He is playing for his political life and personal freedom, while entrenching, perhaps irrevocably, his anomic, autocratic vision for Israel.