Israel in LIMBO After INCONCLUSIVE Election

The Israeli elections have concluded, the votes have been counted, and the results are just as infuriatingly inconclusive as we had feared, Ben. So, we decided to jump on YouTube to walk you through everything that we know, all the latest. We're going to talk about the results, the possible paths forward, there's a number of them, the reasons Netanyahu should be happy or sad, all of it. There's very interesting parts about the Arab parties. By the way, please subscribe to Pod Save the World here on YouTube if you haven't already. It's free, and when you like and you share and you subscribe to these videos, you help us get good information into the YouTube algorithm and get it to people who need to learn. Ben, should we just dive into the results? Let's roll. All right. So, big takeaways. An overwhelming majority of Israelis voted against Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu. The opposition parties got 67 seats, Netanyahu's block of parties got 53 seats. So, that leaves Netanyahu well shy of the 61 seats he needs to have a majority. In the Knesset, Israel's parliament, inform a government. It's also a 15-seat reduction from his current coalition. So, in that sense, it is a big slap in the face to Bibi Netanyahu. But Netanyahu's Likud party is now the largest party in the Knesset with 27 seats, I believe. That number exceeded expectations that were set by polling in the initial exit polls. So, that was a bit of a surprise to political analysts in Israel. And then in terms of the opposition, the opposition coalition, it got about 48 seats total. So, that was fewer than Netanyahu's block. Gadi Eizenkot's Yashar party got 21 seats. So, again, fewer than Likud and not great. But the really interesting factor in this election was the Arab turnout in Arab parties. I believe 80% of Arab voters turned out. So, massive turnout and bigger than the Jewish turnout, which means that the Arab parties have 19 seats. So, if you were to add up Gadi Eizenkot's opposition coalition with the. With the Arab parties, that would be 67 seats and a clear majority, and you could form a government, seems simple, but unfortunately, it is not. We'll explain why and what the options look like going forward. But before we do that, Ben, big picture, general reaction to the results and kind of what you've seen in the days after? I think the big picture is, look, a healthy majority of Israelis appear to be sick of Benjamin Netanyahu for many different reasons, right? I mean, some of it is. He's just been around forever. A lot of it is he's corrupt. He's reckless. You know, it's just past time for this guy to exit stage right. At the same time, though, you don't really have, like, a clear alternative. Like, Eizenkot is yet another one of these politicians who has essentially challenged Netanyahu from the more center-right. He's not, like, exactly running with, like, a sharply different program. And we've seen this before with other politicians like Benny Gantz, like Yair Lapid, like Naftali Bennett. And so there's this kind of sense that you have a situation when Israeli politics overall tilts to the right. Netanyahu won last time by going all the way to the far right and bringing in some parties like Ben-Gavir and Smotrich's that had not previously kind of been a part of Israeli governments. And then you have the Arab parties. And what's happening there is two things. First, you have the Arab parties. First of all, for many years, there's been an effort to try to have better organization and mobilization of Arab voters, often whom feel like they have very little to vote for, in part because they're never really included in majority governments, which we'll get to in a second, and also because they've increasingly been treated like second-class citizens inside of Israel. And yet we've seen this kind of steady increase in Arab participation as a means of trying to change Israeli politics from within. This time around, quite clearly, you saw an overwhelming reaction, I think because of the sense that there's something existential going on in Israel, right? About the future nature of the state, about the future of its policies in the West Bank and Gaza. And so where you saw the most surge in turnout largely was in these Arab parties. And so it just kind of presents this kind of core question. Can you form a government? Will anybody step forward and form a government with the Arab parties? Or are we going to be in some kind of strange horse trading in which you're probably going to have to. Well, you're not probably. You're going to have to peel off parties from within the different blocks. So either Eisenkot is going to have to peel off elements of Netanyahu's coalition or vice versa, or there's just going to be another election. We'll see. Rinse, repeat over and over again, forever in perpetuity. And by the way, Ben, I think you almost undersold it on how out of the mainstream Ben Kavir was before Netanyahu decided to go into coalition with him. And make him his national security minister. I mean, he was seen as someone who wasn't fit to be a part of any conversation in Israeli politics. I believe he might have been barred from coming to the U.S. for a long time. And the guy is like a literal terrorist. Terrorist, yeah. Netanyahu wants a coalition with him. So let's talk about the Arab parties. So they got 19 seats. There's two blocks of Arab parties. The first block is called the joint list. They got 11 seats, I believe. The joint list is made up of three parties. There's Hadash. It's like a communist socialist party. It's like mostly educated, kind of upper middle class. But like genuinely has like Marxist-Leninist roots. Then there's Taal, which is basically a party. It's like a cult of personality built around a Knesset member. Then there's Balad, which is like a hardline Palestinian nationalist party that also has some genuinely problematic former members. So that's one block, the joint list. The second block is called Ram. Ram got eight seats. It has Islamist roots, but it has evolved over time and recently has been a lot more pragmatic. In 2021, they were the first Arab party to go into coalition with the U.S. to go into coalition with Jewish parties and form a government. Its core base is from the Bedouin community. And so since the election, both the joint list and Ram have offered to go into a coalition government to dethrone Netanyahu. But the challenge, I think you mentioned earlier, Ben, is that before the election, Eisencott vowed not to go into coalition with Arab parties, as did several other leaders of the parties in his coalition. There's also, I mean, just to complicate things further, there are some Arab parties that have pretty profound disagreements on policy with the parties they'd be in coalition with. So the politics of a merger get complicated. Like they're not going to agree on Gaza, for example. They're not going to agree on West Bank settlements, for example. Also, right after the election, Netanyahu immediately tried to delegitimize the Arab parties by saying he had asked the Shin Bet, which is Israel's version of the FBI and the cops and the electoral committee to investigate whether Qatar, which is Israel's version of the FBI, had interfered in Israel's election by providing money to Ram for like turnout operations or something. Apparently three Ram supporters were arrested on or around election day with envelopes full of cash. This all seems like a pre-planned pretext to delegitimize these Arab parties and part of a PR campaign to make it harder for Eisencott to build a coalition. But we'll see, I guess. Ben, any other thoughts on this sort of surge of Arab participation and what it says? I mean, it, it speaks to the fact that there is this kind of silent minority, silent in terms of the absence of political power among Arab-Israeli citizens. I mean, we, when you look at it from the outside, I think most people think in terms of Jewish-Israelis, but that's, there's a very large population of people that have increasingly seen themselves treated more and more as second-class citizens. And they're making their voices heard and not because of Qatar. I mean, I've seen nothing that suggests that Netanyahu's claims are, are legitimized. And frankly, his language is outwardly racist. He's trying to scare people. He's, you know, not unlike Donald Trump, his buddy here in the United States, his closing argument against Muslims. But I think that the, the challenge is, you know, what are the objectives of the Arab parties? And I think what, what is clear and I think smart by them is objective number one is just to get rid of Netanyahu. You know, that he is, he is a uniquely cancerous figure in Israeli politics in terms of his policies and his, his lines at the far right. So there's some pragmatism that they've indicated, not just by turning out to vote, but by kind of really prioritizing, we just got to get rid of this guy and move on to what comes next. And then it really does put the spotlight on this other constellation of political parties in Israel because, you know, the question is that they use pretty hyperbolic language that I agree with about the fact that, you know, it's not about Netanyahu, but then they have an opportunity like sitting like right in front of them to remove Netanyahu. And it would require them simply to form a coalition agreement with not all, but some of the Arab parties or particularly Rahm. And thus far, you know, with the exception of some of the kind of center left figures who have smaller political parties in the Aysen coalition, you don't see them really stepping forward to do that. We'll see what happens. - Yeah. My understanding of sort of the big issues that we're driving these Arab parties in the turnout was one was crime. There's a lot of concern about violent crime within Arab communities. They want more policing. They want more resources to deal with it. They were also motivated by, yes, disliking Netanyahu, but also Smotrich and his like virulently bigoted language. I think they really want to get rid of him. You know, we've talked about this before on the show, Ben, but none of this, none of what Netanyahu is doing to delegitimize the Arab parties is new. The racism isn't new. Like in 2015, he talked about how Arab parties are voting. being in droves, I think it was a 2019, the like, who'd put cameras in Arab polling stations. So, you know, there have been efforts to intimidate silence and then use as a propaganda tool these Arab parties all along. And by the way, if Netanyahu was worried about Qatar, he should probably talk to the two top aides who were working for him who were accused of getting paid by Qatar when they were on Netanyahu's payroll. He's shockingly quiet about that. And can I say one more thing about it? Because on the crime piece, this is tied to Netanyahu in a way because Ben-Gavir was the national security minister, is the national security minister. So he's in charge of the police. And so part of what Ben-Gavir is doing is he's turning the police into kind of this tool of his own political, you know, agenda, his extremist political agenda, you know, deploying them to kind of persecute Arabs or, you know, and to back his policies. Smotrich is the finance minister, and he's like diverted more resources to support the settlement, the settlement movement. So part of the bet here is if you get rid of Netanyahu from the Arab perspective, you may not get anywhere near all that you want. But if you don't have Smotrich and Ben-Gavir in those roles and in the coalition, you could see improvements in terms of the allocation of resources and public security. So a lot of this is just about getting rid of not just Netanyahu, but also the coalition that includes the kind of two most extremist figures in Israeli politics. Today, which are Smotrich and Ben-Gavir. Not the two most, but the two most powerful ones. Ben, I just want to take a minute to invoke Brett Stevens, the New York Times columnist, and scold you for even knowing the name Ben-Gavir, because he says it drives him crazy. And in a recent event suggested it was anti-Semitic to even know who those two individuals are and not know who the interior minister of Japan is. Because I guess in his whataboutism, somehow those things are connected. It was triggering. On every level, but it's also useful as like it should be like put in the time capsule for the discourse of this day and age. Because first of all, like I promise, Brett Stevens, I will learn a lot about the interior minister of Japan when Japan starts serially committing war crimes with billions of dollars in American tax revenue. Until that day, I will rest easy not knowing the name of the Japanese interior minister. And I'm happy to admit here today, I don't. Like the point is, you know, Brett Stevens has probably written far more. I mean, exponentially more columns about Israel than someone like me ever has or anybody like. And then he gets mad when other people talk about Israel. Dude, you work at a newspaper. Your job is to inform people. And then you're going to like scold them for knowing something about a country. We're obsessed with this. Well, yeah, it's a little disturbing to see a guy who is the national screen minister of a country that has received tens of billions of dollars in American tax revenue. I mean, he's been the national screen minister for a very long time. It's also just like ignoring the fact that the U.S.-Israel relationship is has an outsized presence in American politics for a variety of reasons, right? Like Israel's defenders care deeply about the U.S.-Israel relationship. Israel's critics care deeply about the U.S.-Israel relationship. The October 7th, the Gaza war, the war of the Iran, like all these things have been really important things that we've all been talking about for better or for worse. For many years, but God forbid you learn about the place that, you know, we're all focused on. Well, and because it's not irrational. Again, we provide them with a tremendous amount of assistance. I mean, I'd like to think we'd care just based on the, you know, common humanity that we might feel for what Palestinians are going through. It's also the case that we give them all this money. But it's also the case that the sitting prime minister of Israel convinced Donald Trump to start a war that has destabilized the American global economy. Yeah. These are not things that we can just ignore. And flew to the United States to give a speech in 2015 trying to undercut Barack Obama for cutting a deal with Iran. Yeah, there was that. It's like, it's just so annoying and cynical. Like, sorry for getting triggered here, everybody. We're going to get back to the substance here. Okay. So let's talk about scenarios going forward, Ben. Because the way the process works is now the president of Israel will meet with the leader of each party that got seats. I think every party leader kind of recommends someone to tap first to build a coalition. Often it's the party, the leader of the party with the most seats, but not always. And then that person has, I think, 42 days. I think you can like, it's like four weeks and then you can get an extension on your homework for like two more weeks if you need one to build a coalition. If the first person fails, then it will likely go to Netanyahu if he wasn't tapped first to build a coalition. The problem with all of this is that Netanyahu is the caretaker prime minister until the government forms so he can do a lot of shit to complicate things. He could restart the war with Iran. And like time is on his side. That's sort of the problem. That's sort of the point. And so in terms of outcomes going forward, there's a few options we could just kind of talk through. One is Eisenkot goes into coalition with Arab parties. There's a government. The second kind of hybrid version of that is where he would form a minority government. So what that would mean was a bunch of some substantial number of Arab parties or MKs, members of the Knesset, abstain from voting, which lowers the number of seats you need to get a majority. So then Eisenkot would need like a few. Arab party supporters to vote for him, but then the rest would abstain. I think the most likely outcome is he gets some votes from Rahm, but the joint lists party members abstain. So that's another option. Then there's the option where Netanyahu just does what he always has done and peels off members of parliament from the Eisenkot block and builds a coalition his own way. That's something we should keep an eye out for. And then there's the kind of unity government option that we talked about earlier in the week before the elections on Tuesday. That would glue together members of the. Netanyahu coalition with parts of the opposition coalition. The benefit there is they would probably jettison Itamar Ben-Kavir. He would no longer be part of the government. They would probably jettison like some of the ultra orthodox parties that people don't like. We don't know. It would probably require having rotating prime ministers, but it's almost certain that Netanyahu would demand that he go first. And the reason that's a bad idea, and everyone knows this, is that the last time Benny Gantz got into a coalition like this with Netanyahu, he never got in. He never got a chance to serve as prime minister because Netanyahu basically had the government collapse before that could happen. Then there's final the final option is is the one you mentioned at the top end, which was there could be no government formation. Israel can just hold another set of elections. And that's probably the most likely outcome. And it's also one that is probably quite beneficial to Netanyahu because tens of thousands of Israelis flew home to Israel to vote in this election. The odds of all of those people doing that. Again, and spending all that money again, feel pretty low. But, you know, hope springs eternal, I guess. But what do you think of those various options, Ben? Which ones are you like kind of looking at as most likely? Look, I hazard to say what's most likely in the kind of strangest of Israeli politics. But I will say that the best option would be if Eisenkot would just go into a coalition with some of these Arab parties, because that would both end the Netanyahu era. And it would signal that, you know, Eisenkot is, you know, qualitatively different and that he's kind of willing. To build that kind of coalition, even if he doesn't kind of share my politics. We'll see if that happens. I think that the one thing to just reinforce something you said, Netanyahu's game here is to play for time, is to step back and watch these other politicians fail to get it done, to tie themselves in knots if they won't enter in a coalition with the Arabs, tie themselves in knots, trying to make agreements with each other and fighting about that, and then to either be standing there. He has three scenarios that I think would benefit him. One is that he can step in and he can peel off some of the parties from the Eisenkot coalition and actually form a government. The second is, as you said, you know, there's some weird unity government arranged and Netanyahu gets to be the prime minister for, say, the next couple of years overlapping with Donald Trump's presidency, which I think would be quite dangerous given what we've seen them already do together with the war in Iran and just try to use that time. To shift the political realities inside of Israel. So I don't think that's a very good option. And the third option is it all kind of doesn't work and there has to be another election and he's still the caretaker prime minister and might be in a stronger position in that election. Those are the three Netanyahu scenarios to be concerned about. The thing I would add to this, Tommy, is that people should know like this is this has happened before. Like Netanyahu is good at playing this game. I mean, one of my great what ifs is way back in 2009 when we were. At the beginning, the Obama administration, when Netanyahu returned to the prime ministership, he actually Zippy Livni did better than him in the election. But then Zippy Livni couldn't form a government and Netanyahu was able to step in and form a government. And the other thing that we've seen repeatedly is they're often these figures that kind of come in from outside of Israeli politics. And for a moment, they're popular. We saw this with Yair Lapid. We saw this with Benny Gantz. And now we saw this with. Eisenkot. And the thing that happened to them in the past is that these people fell for, oh, sure, I'll go into some kind of coalition with Netanyahu. And their popularity always plummets because they lose that status that Eisenkot currently has is I'm the apolitical outsider coming in for the good of the nation. Once they start horse trading and getting a ministry or something and, you know, I don't know why this has happened to Livni. It happened to Ayyub Barak. It happened to Betty Gantz. It happened. into Yair Lapid. So if I'm Eisenquist, that's not what I would do. But again, my concern is that the more this drags on, the more it usually tends to redound to Netanyahu's benefit. And Netanyahu, he's a terrible human being. He's racist. He's corrupt. He's led Israel into crisis after crisis. He's responsible for what happened on October 7th. He's taken no responsibility. He is a great politician. And it is not ideal that the only people seemingly capable of challenging him are the most hard-charging fucking military leaders who have no political skill. Gadi Eisenquist apparently was just not good on the stump. He's not good at connecting with people. And Netanyahu plays politics so well. He brings these parties into his coalition, and then he leeches off of them. And he sucks away the members and bleeds them dry. If you're like Avigdor Lieberman or somebody, he just discards you. Ben, also, a stat I heard that was crazy was- Can I say, Tommy, that is such a smart point, because it's like, instead of having someone actually build a political movement as a politician, we've now seen this happen repeatedly, like Benny Gantz, Eisenquist. But to your point, not only does that mean they're not good at on the stump, and they're also not good at the backroom horse trading. Netanyahu has been playing Israeli coalition politics games for as long as I've been alive. And a guy like Eisenquist just hasn't. Remember when Wes Clark got into our presidential race? I almost made a Wes Clark reference, because it's a very Democratic Party instinct. Like, let's get a general. And we tried that with Wes Clark. And I remember being very excited when Wes Clark got in the race. And then within like two weeks, it was like, oh, shit, that guy can't be a politician. I'm trying to find the exact quote. It was like, Carol, help. He screamed to his PR person, because he was getting asked by the New York Times on his plane after announcing his presidential campaign, like, what his position was on the Iraq war, which- Yeah. And on like abortion, too. Like, you didn't think that went through. It was like something you should flesh out in advance. Ben, I heard a stat that every election that Israel has to hold costs $1.3 billion when you factor in like the hits of the economy from everyone not working that day. It's just like pretty crazy. Now, one wrinkle that's kind of fun and interesting is that when the new members of the Knesset who won get sworn in, they can then create problems for Netanyahu, because they could figure out a vote to replace the speaker. And then they would control the legislative agenda. They could try to pass things that create problems for Netanyahu. I've heard people talk about like, you know, a term limits bill or some sort of legislation that says you can't run if you're under active investigation for corruption or something like that. Who knows that they would get that far? But there are interesting ways that they could go on offense that hopefully we'll get to see, although, you know, knowing Netanyahu, I mean, it just seems like we are full throttle. I don't know if you saw there was a report today that the head of CENTCOM went to the White House and said, brief Trump on military plans for Iran. So it seems like we are just barreling towards another conflict. There's a report that like, you know, J.D. Vance is now sending letters to IRGC guys. But like every other time that's been a subterfuge, no reason to think it wouldn't be now. Yeah, that's a subtext that is about to become the text, which is that, you know, based on the reports we talked about, you know, Netanyahu was trying to gin up the war before his election. Trump has given every indication that he's prepared to escalate the war after the midterms. So what happens when there's a significant escalation and God help us, I hope it doesn't happen, but like if they're hitting civilian infrastructure in Iran and the Iranians are replying by not just firing missiles at the Gulf, but also firing missiles and drones at Israel, Netanyahu is declaring all kinds of emergencies. Like this whole thing could be scrambled in like five days by a major escalation of the war in Iran. And Netanyahu will do everything he can to kind of create a situation where he can escalate the war. A sense of emergency and necessity around his leadership. He's only been able to stay in power as long as he has, including after October 7th, by having this kind of permanent war. And that's clearly one of the tactics he's going to try to draw on. And that's why this should be concerning to us. Like, you know, is it that his political survival may in his mind be tied to more war and we don't need any more of that. Yeah. Well said. Anything else about this? You want to get off your chest? You should be just like ranting rail about, Michigan for a while in the Senate race there. I only, if you, if I'll match your Brett Stevens discourse point, which is my favorite were the people that were, um, the kind of right-wing pro-Israel online people who are like pointing to the Arab parties participation as a signal of the shining democratic example of the Israeli state. And they're the same kind of people that back the politicians that refuse to go into coalition governments with said Arab parties and do nothing about the apartheid conditions in the West bank. So anyway, um, uh, spare me the, the lectures about, uh, Israel as a beacon of democracy, the Arab parties are voting out of desperation. I'm glad they had that right to vote. That is important. Um, but that does not mean that you get a democratic bill of health, a shit we don't in this country, uh, even though we're about to have elections. It's so crazy. It's like, yeah, these guys are allowed to vote. No, we won't let them come into government. They're just not allowed to be represented. You know, it's like the majority of, of other political parties would not allow them to actually covering. I was, uh, felt like a, I felt like a bit of a cynical talking point, correct me if I'm wrong. Yeah, just a tiny bit. Uh, all right. Well, thank you for watching this episode of pod state of the world here on YouTube. We are back next week. Uh, you know, it'll be, we'll be filming the day of the midterms, so I'm sure we'll be, um, not at all anxious, but, uh, I'm not at all like refreshing, pointless, you know, polling commentary about the Michigan Senate race. Like I needed a big D I needed like trick or treat detox tomorrow. Yeah. I need to take like a, yeah, pass out until Wednesday. Um, anyway, thank you guys for watching. We'll talk to you soon.