Cassie Smedile Docksey

30 years after Israelis went to sleep with Shimon Peres and were surprised to wake up beside Benjamin Netanyahu, they went to sleep with Gadi Eisenkot and are likely to find Bibi cuddled up beside them once again. Despite early predictions of an opposition plurality, Netanyahu’s bloc stands at 52 seats to the change bloc’s 49: a lead, but nine seats short of a majority. It appears that seven years after the question was first asked in earnest, Israelis have not changed their answer to “Bibi or no Bibi?” Half instantly answer yes, the other half an emphatic no. Despite October 7, two still-inconclusive wars with Iran and Haredi riots, the man who has stood astride Israeli politics since 2009 has not lost his footing. Israel has made its voice heard, and it’s singing a hit from 2019: two blocs, no majority. We may soon be humming the chorus again: new elections. But this time, the ball is in Bibi’s court. With only 49 seats, Eisenkot can’t form a minority government unless the pacifist Islamist Ra’am actively votes for it and the anti-Zionist Joint List abstains. Bibi, meanwhile, can head back to the polls with the upper hand. If the results resemble the polls, his base will be energized, while his opponents will face a haunting thought: their best effort, a final push that took all their hope and energy, fell short. Arab turnout, too, tends to burn out faster than Jewish turnout. Bibi and the opposition have every reason to think that more rounds will only strengthen the prime minister. This lead belongs entirely to the man himself. Netanyahu sucked the oxygen out of his own coalition. Shas became an unwilling organ donor to Likud, but it was ripe for the harvest. Trying to straddle traditional voters whose sons serve in the army and an ultra-Orthodox base that rejects the draft, it fell flat on its face. The more interesting pickup was from would-be Otzma Yehudit voters. Itamar Ben Gvir, the party’s leader, tested the limits of his independence by accusing Likud of a nefarious plot to stab him in the back and form a centrist government. But he broke the first rule of parenting: never ask a child who they love more, Mom or Dad. Forced to choose, his voters chose Bibi. One suspects that by the next election, Bibi’s portrait will fill the empty space on Ben Gvir’s wall where Baruch Goldstein’s once hung. Most mayflies enjoy longer life spans than statements made on election night. One that seems to have rotted especially fast is Eisenkot’s grandiose declaration to the security chiefs that “Bibi is a prime minister without legitimacy.” Not only did Netanyahu steal Eisenkot’s dream of finishing as the largest party, and by an embarrassingly large margin, but his bloc now leads. Will that be enough to crack the opposition’s resolve? And if Bibi strikes a magnanimous tone, can he break the boycott that has kept Together leader Naftali Bennett and Yisrael Beiteinu leader Avigdor Lieberman out of his government since 2021? What now seems certain is that, regardless of the opposition’s response, Bibi isn’t going anywhere. open.substack.com/pub/amitse…

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