A confession: I have never paid less attention to an Israeli election campaign than I did to this one. I could blame a kind of ballot-fatigue, with this contest coming just five months after the last. (I imagine Israeli TV news found its very own Brenda from Beersheba to lament, “What, another one?”) I could also cite Brexit, which has become so all-consuming it leaves little bandwidth for anything else.
There’d be some truth to both those explanations, but they’d be missing the larger, gloomier truth. And that requires a bit of back-story.
I used to follow Israeli elections almost as closely as I would electoral battles here, studying the polls with neurotic regularity. I could tell you where I was on every Israeli election night going back to 1984, and for several I was in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv, reporter’s notebook in hand.
The reason was not complicated. I was there because Israeli voters were choosing between two distinct visions of the country’s future and, especially, the conflict with the Palestinians. In 1992, for example, it was a choice between Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir — one at least open to territorial compromise, the other stubbornly opposed.
In 1999, it was Ehud Barak against Binyamin Netanyahu, the former determined to pursue peace with Israel’s neighbours, the latter set on maintaining the status quo.
I mention those two examples because they point to the essential difference between now and then. In the past, there was at least the hope of a decisive electoral victory that might presage a diplomatic breakthrough.
That’s what had me biting my nails on successive election nights. The Rabin victory of 1992 was the model, the landslide win followed a year later by a handshake on the White House lawn and the prospect of an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict — a hope snuffed out, of course, by Rabin’s murder in 1995.
In the intervening decades, that hope has grown dimmer and dimmer. The explanation is not complicated. The second intifada, the years in which Israelis were killed by bombs on buses, in pizza restaurants and vegetable markets left the country traumatised and deeply scarred: it also utterly destroyed the peace camp.
As the Israel-based journalist Matti Friedman wrote a week before polling day, “Simply put, in the decade before Mr Netanyahu came to power in 2009, the fear of death accompanied us in public places. There was a chance your child could be blown up on the bus home from school. In the decade since, that has ceased to be the case. Next to that fact, all other issues pale. Whatever credit the Prime Minister really deserves for the change, for many voters it’s a good enough reason to keep him in power.”
Hence Bibi’s extraordinary longevity at the top of Israeli politics. I watched his first election night 23 years ago and yet there we were again on Tuesday, watching him do battle for the eighth time as Likud leader.
Sure, he had lost two of those previous contests and only managed a draw in April, but he had won four times — and that induces a kind of fatalism. If I didn’t devour every news report I could of this latest campaign, that was partly because of a weary sense of inevitability — the feeling that, one way or another, Bibi would emerge on top once more. What’s more, there was the nagging feeling that even if Netanyahu himself lost, not that much would change — not as far as the fundamental questions related to the occupation were concerned.
No matter how you sliced the pre-election opinion polls, the hawkish-nationalist-religious bloc always came out ahead (especially if you included the likely kingmaker, Avigdor Lieberman, who is certainly no dove).
The left camp — the likes of Labour, Meretz and Barak, who once contended for power — were fighting over the low single digits, forced to join forces to avoid oblivion.
As for Netanyahu’s main opponents, the Blue and White group of former generals that drew level with him on the night, they are not much less hawkish than he is.
When, for example, Bibi announced his aim to annex the Jordan Valley, Blue and White’s response was merely to say he had copied the idea from them.
And yet, once Tuesday came around, of course I had to look. What was at stake this time was not “the peace process” — which no longer exists — or the fate of the occupied territories. Those are unlikely to change any time soon.
On the line was a different question: would Israelis unambiguously repudiate a prime minister with a record of corruption and now-routine racism directed at Arab citizens of Israel, repeated in the final hours of the campaign?
They did not do that. Instead, Bibi’s fate now depends on the parties and their horse-trading. But it still matters. The least we can do is pay attention.
Jonathan Freedland is a columnist for The Guardian
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