Don’t underestimate Netanyahu

Coalition may cool Iran rhetoric, but Likud leader is a political survivor

Pollsters and politicians were well wide of the mark in predicting the winners and losers of last Tuesday’s Israeli elections. Israel “experts” and foreign observers got the result badly wrong, too.

About all everyone got right was that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would still be on top of the heap, although his place there is more precarious because he got there with one-quarter fewer seats than last time. The first consequence of Netanyahu’s reduced status is that he has already initiated talks with Yair Lapid, who leads the new centrist party, There is a Future, about being part of what would be a centre-right coalition.

Reflecting how much Israel’s political landscape has suddenly changed, Netanyahu has reportedly not yet picked up the phone to call right winger Naftali Bennett, who leads Jewish Home. Yet Bennett would likely make a more agreeable partner for Netanyahu because his political ideas are far closer to his than Lapid’s.

While everyone — Netanyahu included — was transfixed by the idea that LikudBeitenu and the religious right were poised to win a sweeping new mandate, the truth that eluded almost everyone was that Israel’s actual political drift was to the centre. Final results Thursday confirmed this, although Jewish Home got one more seat at the expense of an Arab party, bring the right and centre-left split to 61-59.

Almost everyone in Israel and from elsewhere missed what was happening on the right and the concomitant rise in support for the centreleft. This happened because observers were seduced — even if some of them were at the same time repelled — by the idea that Israel’s shift to the right was unstoppable and the seeming invincibility of the hard-right settler movement which had mostly got its way since former prime minister Ariel Sharon’s dramatic about-face and withdrawal of the Gaza or Gush Katif settlements back in the summer of 2005.

Curiously, for all the attention that the existential threat posed to Israel by Iran’s nuclear program has received in the West, including during the recent U.S. presidential election, barely a word was spoken about it during the election campaign here. Against previous expectations, it is now widely thought that Tuesday’s result will cool off Netanyahu’s hot rhetoric about the need to attack in the next few months.

“With a coalition that will squint towards the centre, it seems the chances of an Israeli attack, one that is not coordinated with the Americans, are shrinking significantly,” defence specialist Amos Harel wrote in a Thursday newspaper. “In the Iranian context, even though you won’t catch anyone among the top brass in the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) admitting it out loud, you can bet that at the general staff there were many sighs of relief as the election results came in.”

Left unsaid was that the Pentagon and U.S. President Barack Obama were undoubtedly equally pleased. Senior U.S. generals and the president had wanted to keep their powder dry until they had much better evidence that Iran was close to manufacturing nukes or that stiff sanctions imposed by the international community were finally forcing Iran to give up its dream of having nukes.

That change is coming to Israel was made plain Thursday by the conditions that Yair Lapid was said, by the popular Ynet News website, to have handed Netanyahu if he was to join his coalition.

The first demand that every Israeli citizen including ultra-Orthodox Jews and socalled Arab Israelis must be obliged to report for compulsory military service at the age of 18 have already been embraced by Netanyahu. The second stipulation was that Netanyahu must resume peace talks with the Palestinians.

The dilemma for Netanyahu is that if he accepts Lapid’s conditions and invites the upstarts from There is a Future into his tent, several of the implacable right wingers who served in his last coalition will still be in his cabinet. How peace talks between these two factions would turn out is anybody’s guess. The early money is on another general election within two years.

But Netanyahu should never be underestimated. He is a wily, often bombastic survivor of far more military and political battles than any of the principals who are after his job. Although never much-loved, he is widely, if sometimes grudgingly, respected.

After being elected as prime minister in 1996 he lost out to Ehud Barak in 1999. Having licked his wounds as a private citizen, as Ariel Sharon’s foreign minister and finance minister in 2002, he later served three years as leader of the opposition and then became prime minister again in 2009. Only 63 years old, it is a certainty that Netanyahu has lots of fight left in him.