Benjamin Netanyahu has won reelection as prime minister of Israel, putting him on course to be the country’s longest-serving chief executive in the Jewish state’s history. The Netanyahu right-wing coalition gives the incumbent leader a majority in Israel’s multi-party parliament, the Knesset, which is necessary to form a government. Under a parliamentary system, the “government” is essentially equivalent to our executive branch, with key member of parliament simultaneously serving in the leader’s cabinet. Although it won the same number of seats as Netanyahu’s Likud Party, the opposition “centrist” Blue and White coalition has formally conceded. Israel is the only functioning, multi-ethnic democracy in the Middle East.
Netanyahu is a fierce campaigner and a strong leader especially on security matters and in the war on terror, but can be disingenuous in certain instances. At crunch time, though, he usually wins. He has now won his fifth term as premier, the fourth consecutively. This comes even as Israel’s Deep State has accused him of corruption, allegations that he has called a witch hunt.
Moreover, although ordinary Israelis are trending right, Israel has a Netanyahu-hating left-wing media, which a significant part of the public seems to have disregarded. Sound familiar?
The globalist cohort — which likes to meddle in Israel’s elections — is no fan of Netanyahu or his country, which puts him in very good company. During a campaign stop this week, for example, the fake Hispanic who is running for U.S. president ironically smeared Netanyahu as a racist.
According to Israeli journalist and scholar Caroline Glick, who deems the allegations against Netanyahu absurd, Israel’s unelected Deep State consists of an activist supreme court and the attorney general’s office. “Over the past two decades, the two arms of Israel’s legal fraternity have seized massive powers to the point where together, the justices and the attorney general exert significant control over all government policies and legislative initiatives.”
This mean that the prime minister is not out of the woods in terms of a potential indictment. ” Sometime in the next month or two, Netanyahu and his lawyers are slated to meet with [Attorney General] Mandelblit and try to persuade the attorney general not to proceed with the indictment. The process of deciding whether or not to indict Netanyahu could carry into 2020,” Legal Insurrection observed.
Israel’s Voting System
In Israel, voters case their ballot for a party candidate list or a joint list, and the number Knesset seats each party enters the Knesset based on proportional representation. SaraCarter.com detailed.
“National representation is ideological, not geographic and the vote is proportional, meaning the 120 Knesset seats are divvied up in proportion to each party’s percentage of the total vote.
Only those parties that win at least four seats can join the Knesset, so votes which fall short of the threshold are, in effect, not counted. This rule must be considered by each voter. Despite the myriad of parties, strategic choices must be made.
“With so many options, it has never happened that one party has alone reached the magic number of 61, which is required for control of the Knesset. Thus, the ability to knit together a coalition joining several like-minded-ish parties is the key for a successful party to attain control. The party most likely able to form the ruling coalition is rewarded by its leader becoming prime minister,,, Every Israeli citizen over 18 years of age can vote. That includes Arabs, Muslims, Christians and Jews.
A list operation also means that in the event of a parliamentary vacancy, the next person down takes over. This stability provides a sharp contrast to what happens in Congress. If a vacancy occurs in the U.S. House or Senate, there is a temporary appointment and/or a special election that could flip the seat to the opposing political party, which could far-reaching implications.
Adds Mosaic:
“Only a single branch of national government—the parliament, or Knesset—is up for election. When the results are in, its 120 seats will be distributed among the competing parties in almost exact proportion to the support each has won among the voters on election day—minus those parties that have failed to clear the 3.25-percent minimum threshold of total votes needed to enter parliament. There is a purity and simplicity to this system: the parliament that results from each Israeli election directly reflects the expressed will of the public. Gerrymandering is not possible. Nor are enormous double-digit minorities left effectively voiceless in the national legislature as smaller regional constituencies throw their weight to one side or another.”
Bibi by the Numbers
In a a typical Israeli election, right-of-center voters have a tricky decision to make: Do they vote for one of the smaller parties that is closer to their ideological leanings or do they vote for Likud to make sure Netanyahu stays as prime minister?
A final tally is expected Thursday night. Moreover, a recount may result in the New Right party launched by Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked achieving the electoral threshold if they haven’t narrowly made it.
Check back for updates.
As it stands now, Likud and Blue and White appear to have won the same number of seats (35), and will become an opposition force in parliament, but “Bibi” Netanyahu is in a commanding position, the Spectator explained.
“A Likud-led coalition with the religious and hard-right parties, softened a little by the center-right Kulanu, will give Netanyahu a solid 65 seats in the 120-seat Knesset. A Blue and White-led coalition with left-wing parties including the rump of once-mighty Labor, reduced to a mere 6 seats, and Arab parties would only gather 55 seats. In a possible further boost to Netanyahu’s control of the next Knesset, with the last votes to be counted, the New Right were still 0.1 percent short of the threshold for Knesset representation….Israel’s combination of proportional representation and coalition government means that anyone who voted for a right-wing party that isn’t the Likud knew that they were, in effect, voting for Netanyahu and a Likud-led coalition. Despite Netanyahu’s personal failings, a sizable majority of Israeli voters trust him with the two issues that top polls of voter concerns, the economy and security.”
Netanyahu’s Legacy of Security and Prosperity
At Forward.com, Israel expert David Hazony explained the secret to Netanyahu’s success:
“The truth is, most Israelis don’t care about political rhetoric. They’re like American consumers, so infused with advertising that they know how to tune it out and cut through the nonsense. Israelis do care, however, about their neighbors, children, and friends not dying. Israelis know death is always lurking just on the other side of bad political choices. They have lost people because of politics…The bottom line for many Israelis is that they associate periods of Netanyahu’s premiership with relative security and prosperity. And that’s a very big deal. Because at the end of the day, governing a country is hard under any circumstances, and it’s even harder when you’re trying to keep your citizens safe and prosperous in a part of the world notorious for brutal authoritarianism, and when you’re trying to transition your country from a failed statism to a prosperous market economy…And in the midst of all this have been Israel’s achievements over the last decade, and it would be foolish to pretend they had nothing to do with Netanyahu. Booming infrastructure. Tel Aviv’s unrecognizable skyline. Israel’s founding existential natural-resource crises— water and energy— are basically solved. On geopolitics, Israel isn’t just no longer a pariah; it’s actively courted from Brazil to Beijing…Is Netanyahu corrupt? Some will insist he is, while others defend him…A more important question is, is Bibi absolutely necessary for the well-being and prosperity of Israelis today? Rightly or not, an awful lot of voters seem to think so.”
According to This Week, the left in Israel is effectively done for, which is good news for everyone except for the anti-Israel globalists and the Deep State:
“[T]he most far-reaching consequence of the 2019 Israeli election may well be that it verified, beyond any reasonable doubt, that there is functionally no left left in Israel. It has become a country with a center, a right, and a far right, but no electorally viable left to speak of. Center-left social democratic parties have been in sharp decline in recent years across the Western world. But nowhere has the collapse been more stunning than in Israel, whose founders and ruling class for the first 30 years of the country’s existence were very deeply linked with the labor movement. Labor has been in retreat ever since the collapse of peace negotiations with the Palestinians in 2000.”
PJ Media has more about what this means:
“It means that the right-wing/religious sector of the Israeli Jewish population remains predominant and invincible. It means that the socialism of Israel’s early decades has been relegated to two none-too-relevant fringe parties. It means that with Gaza—fourteen years after Israel withdrew from it—remaining a serious security challenge of rocket fire, border riots, and incendiary balloons and kites, sane Israelis are not even contemplating withdrawals from the vastly larger West Bank that abuts Israel’s airport, capital city of Jerusalem, and heavily populated coastal plain.
“And it means that a solid majority of Israelis appreciate Netanyahu’s strong and dynamic leadership and want to keep him at the helm—and that’s despite the unresolved corruption charges and an often viciously adversary media that is one of the last bastions of the old left. No doubt he faces significant challenges. A growing budget deficit needs to be tackled. Hamas and Hizballah remain security threats on Israel’s borders. Most serious of all are their patron Iran’s ongoing efforts to entrench itself in Syria and continued development of ballistic-missile and nuclear-weapons capabilities. But given his nonpareil energy, resolve, and skill, most Israelis know that Netanyahu is the right leader to contend with the challenges and overcome them.
“Meanwhile, he faces a hearing on the corruption charges in the summer. The charges look dubious, and Israel has a long history of such allegations being quashed as the result of a hearing.”
In a famous Oval Office encounter, Netanyahu educated Obama about the realities, rather than the platitudes, of the Middle East (starting at about the seven-minute mark):
