To remain prime minister, Netanyahu might have to work with Israeli Arabs - Washington Post

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Israel’s fourth election in two years looks to have ended like the others: The country is about evenly divided between those who support Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and those who don’t. If he does survive, it will likely be because of an unlikely demographic: Israeli Arabs.

Netanyahu faces a clear math problem. With about 90 percent of the vote counted, his Likud party is on track to win 30 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. Three religious parties allied with him — Shas, United Torah Judaism and Religious Zionism — look to be winning another 22 seats. That gives him 52 seats, nine short of the majority he needs. Even if the right-wing Yamina party, which is currently winning seven seats, were to join his coalition, he would still be short. About 450,000 votes remain to be counted, but that will likely only marginally change the final numbers. Only one other party with Knesset representation is open to backing his reelection: the conservative Islamist United Arab List.

The UAL, known as Ra’am in Israel, broke away from its previous alliance with three other Arab parties to run on its own in this election. Its leader, Mansour Abbas, has argued that Israeli Arabs need to be able to leverage their votes to gain tangible benefits for their communities, such as greater protection against soaring crime. He pledged that his party was neither for nor against Netanyahu and that it would support any coalition that supports its aspirations. The party did well enough in its base among Bedouins to surmount the 3.25 percent threshold and gain at least four seats.

Netanyahu has said he won’t deal with Ra’am, but that stance could easily soften in light of the election results. There’s also another reason he might make the unlikely arrangement: Likud’s own campaign to gain Arab votes. Likud has traditionally performed extremely poorly among Arabs, but the party launched a strong effort to increase its share of the vote on the basis of the Abraham Accords. Netanyahu campaigned in some Arab communities, placed an Arab on the Likud party list and even said there could be direct flights from Tel Aviv to Mecca if he were reelected.

The unprecedented effort paid off. Likud received significantly more votes in Arab towns such as Umm al-Fahm and Nazareth than it did last year, getting as much as 6 percent of the vote in the predominantly Bedouin town of Rahat. Coupled with a large decline in Arab voting overall, this means Likud’s share of the Arab vote, while still small, went up a lot. In Israel’s proportional representation system, that small rise is likely to be enough to have given Netanyahu’s party one or two extra, crucial seats. Turning its back on Ra’am might show these new Arab Likud voters that the party’s apparent change was just a mirage.

Alternatives to a Netanyahu-Arab alliance are fraught with difficulty. The anti-Netanyahu bloc runs the gamut from the Arab Joint List, which includes the communist Balad party and the pro-Palestine Ahmed Tibi, to Ysrael Beytenu, whose leader Avigdor Liberman has previously called for Arab towns in Israel to be given back to any Palestinian state. The bloc would also need the hard-right Yamina party, which wants Israel to immediately annex West Bank settlements, to get a majority. That’s a hard coalition to put together.

The wily prime minister could try to get Knesset members to defect from opposition parties and back him. That’s what he did last year, breaking up the main opposition party, Blue and White, while also persuading three members of the Meretz-Labor-Gesher slate to join him. Hard-line Likudniks want Bibi to try this route again, and they might only need one or two defectors if Yamina joins the pro-Netanyahu coalition. Netanyahu could then have his cake and eat it too by making a private deal with Ra’am to support its priorities in exchange for it not propping him up.

Likud’s first targets would likely be the former party members who defected this year to join the New Hope party, led by former Likudnik Gideon Sa’ar. That party started strong, polling as high as 22 seats when it was launched to great fanfare in December. Despite hiring chief strategists from the Lincoln Project to run his campaign, Sa’ar’s break-away effort fizzled. The party won a paltry six seats Tuesday, and it’s easy to imagine Netanyahu telling former Likud members that all will be forgiven if they return — and that their political careers will be over if they don’t.

Netanyahu didn’t become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister by being a political naif. It would be highly ironic, though, if his legendary political skills resulted, directly or indirectly, in the first real rapprochement between Israel’s Jews and Arabs. Politics makes strange bedfellows, indeed.

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