Israel tilts to the center

last updated 8 January 2015

Israeli voters this week delivered a surprise drubbing to the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though he will remain head of government. Netanyahu’s Likud party and its ultranationalist ally Beiteinu are still the largest bloc in the 120-seat Knesset, with 31 seats, but they lost a quarter of their seats. Defying poll predictions, the centrist Yesh Atid party, led by former TV journalist Yair Lapid, followed with 19 seats. The new Knesset is now evenly split, with 60 seats for right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties and 60 for center-left and Arab parties. Netanyahu offered to include Lapid in a broad coalition, but the two would make an uneasy partnership. Lapid is committed to reviving the Palestinian peace process and ending the draft exemption for Orthodox Jews.

Netanyahu brought this humiliation on himself, said Nahum Barnea in Yedioth Ahronoth. It’s not that his policies are so bad, but that “he makes himself loathsome to the public again and again.” Marrying Likud to a far-right party whose leader, Avigdor Lieberman, has now been charged with corruption was one arrogant blunder; his inept handling of the 2011 mass protest for social justice was another. Israeli voters clearly wanted change. Maybe so, said Herb Keinon in The Jerusalem Post, but only in domestic policy. None of the parties that firmly opposed Netanyahu’s positions on diplomacy and security did very well; the winners were those who differed with him on housing and justice issues. “The results bespeak a nation that has accepted the things it cannot change, and is now focusing on what it believes it can.”

No matter who his governing partners are, Netanyahu is now weaker than he was, said Peter Beinart in TheDailyBeast.com. That means that if the White House tries to revive peace talks with the Palestinians, “he’ll be less able to fend Obama off.” Yet the two men are less likely than ever to clash openly, said Aaron David Miller in CNN.com. Since 2013 is a pivotal year to prevent Iran from going nuclear, Obama and Netanyahu will be forced to cooperate, first on diplomatic solutions and then, if unavoidable, on a military option. “They’re never going to love each other.” But it’s legacy time for both men. They can’t afford “a public falling out”—and neither can the Middle East.