How Will Netanyahu Try to Reframe His Defeat as a Huge Victory
The bloc that opposes Netanyahu and his collaborators had hoped for a decisive victory. Nonetheless, its achievement is impressive: Netanyahu's coalition, that won 64 Knesset seats in the last election, has been slashed to just 50
The government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began falling on January 3, 2023, the day after it was sworn in, when Justice Minister Yariv Levin announced his judicial overhaul.
The civil "cold war" that it sparked mobilized and solidified Israel's sane bloc, which racked up several resounding victories. It temporarily prevented the dismissal of a decent, statesmanlike defense minister, Yoav Galant, by mobilizing mass overnight demonstrations. It blocked the coalition's plan to introduce legislation letting the Knesset override the Supreme Court. And it prevented legislation aimed at turning democratic Israel into a totalitarian Bibi-stan.
Then came the disaster of October 7, 2023, and the pointless, never-ending war devoid of victory that followed. From then on, the government finished out its term only thanks to an anomaly – a mortal flaw in Israel's democratic system that enables even an unpopular governing coalition to maintain itself with the help of fools, deserters and bribes.
Absurdly, the growing public disgust with the government is what ensured its longevity. Its members understood they had no chance of winning the confidence of a majority of the public a second time, so at some point, they gave up on attempts to talk with it or compromise with it, instead running amok into the abyss.
But it didn't fall deep enough. The bloc that opposes Netanyahu and his collaborators had hoped for a decisive victory. And logically, it was possible to believe that Netanyahu himself had landed the final death blow through two moves that looked devastating.
The first was his loyalty to the ultra-Orthodox parties and his effort to enshrine their draft-dodging in law with one hand, even as he voiced nightmare visions of Israel becoming a "Super-Sparta" and other existential threats with the other hand – the one that embraced his Qatari agents. The second was his absolute refusal to accept any responsibility whatsoever for the failure of October 7, along with the fact that he lay down on the fence to block the minimum required of a democracy – a state commission of inquiry.
These two things, acting in a pincer movement with the huge civic protests that convinced the White House to stop the war in the Gaza Strip and bring the hostages home, breathed a fighting spirit and momentum into the divided, amorphous political entity known as the "bloc of change," which suddenly got up, decided that it was in fact a bloc and started moving.
In reality, its achievement is impressive: The governing coalition that won 64 Knesset seats in the last election has been slashed to just 50.
The sight of the long lines at polling stations throughout the country as soon as the polls opened expressed the angry mood among Jews and Arabs alike. And it was preceded by a week in which Israel was flooded with 100,000 former Israelis who came here in droves by plane from all four corners of the earth to help carry the stretcher and save the country they loved and left.
Kahanist minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and messianic minister Bezalel Smotrich, the real bosses in the Netanyahu government, also gave the opposition bloc enormous help. Only thanks to them was there an unprecedented awakening among Arab voters.
On the other hand, it turns out that among Jewish Israelis, there are still a surprisingly large number of buyers for the goods Netanyahu is selling. Identity politics and demography continue to play a role. Thus at the end of the day, while the bloc Netanyahu led did indeed suffer a dramatic blow compared to the last election, it wasn't a mortal enough blow to destroy it.
Given the hundreds of thousands of soldiers' votes that weren't counted in the television exit polls, the thick fog of battle that will prevail until the real results are released and the guillotine of the electoral threshold, a huge battle will now take place over what is known as framing.
For Netanyahu and his mouthpieces, the task is simple: How do they present an electoral defeat, in which the bloc he heads won only around 50 seats, as a huge victory, using the excuse that his Likud party is "the largest party," and argue that it's necessary to continue to exclude the Arab parties and establish an "emergency government" under his leadership to attack Iran? For both the bloc of change and the media, the challenge, and the test of their character, lies in not cooperating with this.
Over the last week alone, Netanyahu – with his talk of an economy based on cryptocurrency, his fear-mongering about a nuclear attack on Tel Aviv and his efforts to ignite a war – has proven that he is sick, that he has gone off the rails. He needs to be removed from the steering wheel of the ship of state by any means, and it doesn't matter what the composition of the new government is.
Ultimately, the bloc of change has a solid 20-seat lead over his bloc. And in a democracy, the majority decides.