The old joke about two Jews, three opinions has rarely seemed more apposite than after yesterday’s Israeli election.
You can, convincingly and accurately, read the result in two entirely contradictory ways, as both blocs are now doing.
On the one hand, it is a repudiation of the Netanyahu coalition which has gone from 68 seats to around 54 seats. On any reading, that’s a kicking.
But equally so, on the other hand, pretty much every poll in the campaign, and most of the exit polls, have been shown to be – yet again – wrong.
Because even on the incomplete results we now have, it’s clear that there was almost no movement from the Netanyahu bloc to the Eisenkot bloc.
As Amit Segal has pointed out, the collapse in the Netanyahu bloc has been caused by a combination of the increase in the Arab vote, the effective end of Meretz and Balad and the “waste” of some 2.5 per cent of the bloc’s previous vote on Ofer Winter, Noam and Leitner and the Ethiopian Immigrants Party.
As for the change bloc: it will have pretty much have stood still on its seats after the last election. It has, despite all the hype and expectation, made no effective progress.
How is it that so many pundits have read the last few years and especially the last few months so wrongly?
Elyon Levy posted today that: “If Israel were the ‘State of Tel Aviv’, the ‘Change Bloc’ would have won a landslide of 101 out of 120 seats.
"The Likud would be the only coalition party to get past the electoral threshold. Ben-Gvir, Smotrich, Haredim – all out. But Israel is not Tel Aviv.”
There is a parallel – inexact but interesting – with how badly wrong the pollsters and pundits got the Brexit vote.
Much as both sides are furiously claiming the overall win, the reality is that the only thing that actually matters now is the number of seats each bloc has in the Knesset and their ability or willingness to do deals with those outside their respective blocs to push them to 61 seats (or even just 60).
Nothing else – momentum, claims of moral victories, falling shares of the vote, any of it – matters.
In this context, we may be in for a repeat of 2022. Netanyahu is a past master of the specifically Israeli art of putting together a coalition, especially when that involves volte faces on pledges and promises.
In contrast, Eisenkot is unlikely to have the political skill and nous to out-manoeuvre Netanyahu – much as happened in 2022 with Benny Gantz.
Last night the odds seemed stacked against Netanyahu. This morning, with actual results replacing exit polls, it may even be that he is now the favourite to put a government together.
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