Israel Votes Again But The Arithmetic Hasn't Changed

Israelis have been here before. Yitzhak Rabin and Ariel Sharon made the passage from uniform to power, but the road is also littered with generals who led in September and vanished by winter.

Benny Gantz, who three times came within reach of the prime minister's office, now leads a party fighting to survive. The Israeli center keeps looking for a man on horseback to rescue it from politics, and keeps discovering that governing coalitions are assembled by politicians.

Eisenkot says he wants to lift the opposition to 63 to 64 seats and end what he calls the country's isolation. On Sunday, he challenged Netanyahu to a televised debate, pressing him on the refusal to appoint a state commission of inquiry into October 7.

It is a strong card. It is also telling that the frontrunner is the one asking for the debate.

Netanyahu, who turns 77 a week before the vote, is running the only campaign he knows. The choice, his message goes, is between the right and a Palestinian state. In late September, he stood at an air force base and warned that Israel's enemies might strike to disrupt the election.

The next day a Tel Aviv-bound Flydubai jet carrying more than 100 Israelis was diverted to Saudi Arabia after one pilot attacked the other. The prime minister's allies presented it as vindication.

Lapid replied that the security briefing he had received the night before mentioned nothing of the kind. Israeli officials are reportedly still divided over whether it was terrorism or a suicide attempt, and the opposition is demanding the transport minister's head.

The episode shows both Netanyahu's method and its limits. Fear has always been his best campaign manager. But a leader who claims credit for foreseeing every threat invites an obvious question about the one he did not foresee.

Security remains the central issue of Israeli politics, and it is no longer Netanyahu's private property.

Here is the opposition's real problem, and it is not Netanyahu. The parties pledged to replace him cannot reach 61 without the Arab lists, and most of them have promised not to try.

One survey cited by the Arab Center in Washington, DC, found 70% of Jewish Israelis opposed to an Arab party in government. The coalition understands this well. On September 23, the Central Elections Committee, a body of party representatives, voted to bar both the Joint List and Mansour Abbas's Ra'am from the ballot.

The Supreme Court unanimously reversed the ban on October 2, as it has done in nearly every similar ban. The right will not mind losing in court. The point was to remind Jewish voters that a ballot for Eisenkot might be a ballot for Abbas.

So the Arab citizens of Israel, a fifth of the population, hold the balance of power in a system that treats their votes as untouchable. In 2021, Ra'am joined a government, and that government lasted a year.

The opposition leaders have pledged to stop attacking one another until election day. They have not said what they will do on the morning after, when the only majority on offer includes partners they have disowned.

In Washington and the European capitals, many are quietly hoping that an Eisenkot victory will produce a different Israel: more pliable on the Palestinians, easier to defend in public, a partner one can be seen with again. They are likely to be disappointed.

Eisenkot has criticized Netanyahu's talk of Israel as a“super-Sparta” and argues that the prime minister has brought relations with American society to a low point. That is a difference of tone and of competence, and both matter. But it is not a difference of strategy.

No candidate with a chance of governing is running on Palestinian statehood. The partners Eisenkot would need include Bennett and Avigdor Liberman, neither of whom is a dove. The Israeli consensus on security moved to the right after October 7, and the election is being fought inside it.