Three months to Israel's election: Why is Netanyahu really going to Washington?

[Music] Hello and welcome to the Harrods podcast. I'm Allison Kaplan Summer. Since we launched this election podcast about a month ago, a lot has changed when you consider the race, the political landscape, but a lot has stayed the same and it seems that week after week, we open the podcast, thinking and reflecting about the national mood in which we are sure that perhaps any moment now we are going to be dragged into the continually escalating and then relaxing and then escalating one more time conflict between the US and Iran. For 13 nights in a row, the US attack Iran, Iran responded by hitting US bases in the Gulf and in Jordan, right next door to Israel. And this past Saturday night, all of a sudden, it stopped. Why? US President Donald Trump said for the umpteenth time, it's because Iran is really interested in negotiations and so we're going to stop the hostilities and now we're going to come to the table and work everything out regarding the streets of Harmuz and their nuclear capabilities. The media is telling a different story. The New York Times reported that Trump did not push the button on escalation in the conflict with Iran on Saturday because he was told by senior officials that renewed major combat operations could dangerously deplete his interceptor missiles, the patriots and other munitions that are needed to protect the US troops and bases across the Middle East. Then in the middle of all this, the White House confirms that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is ready to leave all of this behind and visit Washington, DC to meet Trump and to attend the late Senator Lindsey Graham's funeral. Here with me to discuss everything that's going on and most importantly to discuss the latest developments in the election campaign, which is guys 93 days away that doesn't sound very far. Esther Solomon and Joshua Leffer are top-notch colonists here for Harret. So how do we feel about our Prime Minister flying off when this is all happening, Iran and the United States on Tenter Hooks, plus we've got a renewed conflagration in the West Bank. There's still active fire both on the Lebanese fronts and now also on the Syrian fronts and day after day Israeli missile airstrikes are of course taking lives in the Gaza Strip. Why go to Washington now? The first sort of most cynical explanation would be the Netanyahu is also looking at the polls and he knows that the coup continues to lose projected seats in the latest polling. The party is in a bad situation. One recent poll showed that they were hovering at 20, which is low for where they could usually is. But I also think that if we try to stitch together all the various headlines over the last couple of weeks, there are developments that suggest a certain kind of out of stepness between Netanyahu and Trump and I think that Netanyahu wants to try to hash out some of those differences. So what I'm thinking of is just you know from the recent headlines, there was the announcement by Trump that they were that the United States was going to sell F 35s to Turkey and then just this morning Trump said actually that's not going to happen. Then there was the announcement that the Trump administration was going to work with Saudi Arabia on a civilian nuclear program and then seemingly without consulting any other member of his administration Trump announced that actually that initiative is contingent on Saudi normalization with Israel this morning. Then again the Syrian president Ahmed Asshara says we're actually ready to make peace with Israel that requires resolving the dispute over the Golan Heights in favor of as well. We know that that's something that actually like there is some kind of security agreement deal that was written and waiting for Netanyahu to be signed and that he refused to sign it. And there is this question of Iran and you know usually when it's now flies the United States it's it's to convince President Trump to jump back into the war and I think that that's probably what he's wants to do under the pretensive going to mourn the late Lindsey Graham but the Iranian issue is just one part of a much broader kind of lack of coherence that's developed in their relationship. So if you're helping it back to politics or how do you think it will look at home for Netanyahu to be sort of pulling this old trick out of his head oh I'm going to go to Washington and look important and that's going to boost my political standing versus that he's kind of you know leaving the house when it's on fire. Well I think we have to remember that Netanyahu does still think that the photo walk with Trump is going to play well for him even though it's not entirely clear if Trump is going to provide exactly the kind of celebratory hugs that he thinks or hopes that he's going to provide. But Netanyahu is now in a situation where he has to pull out every single stop and he is doing that across the board whether it's in terms of military operations every kind of political manipulation or strategy that he has in order to pull every last possible vote for his block that he can because as you said. His block of parties that would support them to be prime minister after the election is not winning too much momentum at the moment and the opposition is. So let's look at the polls that we're referring to that are not I mean you know you say there he's not getting any momentum moving forward he's even moving backward according to the latest hard selection tracker which averages together all of the polls across all of the media outlets and polling firms in Israel. It shows the Netanyahu's Lee Kud party and Eisenkotzia Shah literally neck and neck 21 seats each in the polls but more significantly all of the largest most successful parties are solidly in the anti Netanyahu camp LaPita and Bennett's centrist together party the left wing Democrats and Avigdole Lieberman's a center right party at 14 11 and 10 seats each. They've been depleted by Eisenkotz surge but they're still there and the end result is that the anti Netanyahu block has now reached 60 seats according to the tracker which is really one finger scratching distance all you need is 61 seats to build a coalition. Netanyahu's loyalist blocks the current parties Lee Kud plus ultra orthodox plus the far right they've sunk under 50 seats 49 seats according to the election tracker so that's looking pretty bad and part of it I mean the only like significant change I can see is this new kid on the block a Zionist home reservist party which is now polling at an average of four seats. So Esther can you tell us about this new entity and who they are what they stand for how they fit in and how they manage to pull out you know in their debut four seats in the kiteset just to say that you know often new parties get a little bit of bump because everyone's excited when they establish themselves it doesn't necessarily mean they have staying power but this is a center right party perhaps in other parts of the world it would be called right wing rather than center right but this is a very important thing to do is to get a little bit of a change in the way that they want to do it. So they're called right wing rather than center right but this is our reality here. They believe in establishing what they call a broad Zionist government so what does that mean that means basically they refuse to define themselves as pro or anti Netanyahu which is a little bit of political Yes it's kind of political to do so they basically want to say that they would sit in a government that would include anyone except for the ary parties or perhaps the left the Zionist left as well. They are led by two politicians who have seriously moved around the kind of center right of Israeli politics, Kili Troppo and yours handle. They are very much trying to channel the fury of the Israelis who have served extraordinary periods of time and reserved duty and are very very angry about you. They are very angry about the possibility of a permanent exemption for the ultra-orthodox. So that is a fury that has been created by Netanyahu's own government himself. So they are trying to pull off some of those voters who can't bring themselves fully now to vote for the liquid or for the right wing parties. But the issue is how if they say that they are neither pro nor anti Netanyahu the obvious question is wouldn't they just jump into bed with a Netanyahu coalition after the government. So if you are being cynical and we are in a somewhat cynical frame of mind at the moment you could say that this is basically a kind of non-executive Trojan horse but this is a kind of attempt to pull back some of those voters who have been alienated by Netanyahu's government but in the end they will go get into bed with Netanyahu after the election. Josh, you agree and but if they get into bed with the Netanyahu they are also getting into bed with the ultra-orthodox parties who are presumably the source of their main issue which is the lack of recruitment and the idea for the ultra-orthodox. So how do you figure that out? The theory for the party like a person. this comes out of the precincts of kind of like the center right think tank world basically. It's actually the idea behind what they are describing as who wide is a government or a broad is a government is something that the sort of philosopher, public intellectual Miche Goodman for a long time has been pushing. The idea is basically that if you take away the chaladim and you take away the left slash Arabs as they phrase it. There's actually consensus among Israeli Jews about like 70% of issues. And in some ways like there's a kernel of truth in this which is that if you look at the parties that are running right now, I think the Lieberman is a right wing party. The Fadli Bennett and Nia Glepe are a quasi right wing party. Gadi Eisenkot's party is amorphously we can talk more about what their orientations I think that they are secretly more left wing than they are appearing to be but they are also appealing to be a centrist party. And then also if you take and this is where this vision enters into the realm of fantasy, if you take the normally coup to what extent there that exists is the is where they're wrong, then you end up with a very large potential coalition of parties. Now some of the like of the theory of change so to speak of this group of people say something like you know we don't boycott anyone. In other words they sort of fantasize about the possibility that let's say Nafdali Bennett were to be the largest party. This is not the case. But they would say why can't a lecude that is not Netanyahu or maybe even with Netanyahu sit in a coalition that is a center right oriented underneath such a number. We don't so they say we don't cancel anyone. We're really going to sit with with with whatever then a little thing or the last thing else I think there's also a demographic element to this which is that yours and it comes from the religious Zionist movement and giri tour was also comes from the religious Zionist movement in the small are small Z sense and they are responding to a genuine phenomenon which is that there is a segment of religious nationalists voters who do not feel represented by the current coalition and who don't feel like smote which represents them. These are not left wing people and who don't think that Bennett represents them anymore because he's teamed up with that because Bennett is a leftist in their eyes and their politics are very hard to pin down and in some sense confused they also comprise a potentially very large segment of the Israeli Jewish electorate like assessing who exactly is a religious Zionist or the Thelumia is sort of hard in Israeli-diagonal graphics but it's anywhere from 10 to 22% of Jewish Israeli voters and so in theory they're responding to a pitch basically which says there are all of these voters who essentially want to vote for some party whose leaders wear a keeper and that party can't be smote which because he's too extreme and he's also gone too far in appeasing the Khadrathim and the issue for them about the draft is huge. Item Agbenvier is not really appealing to this segment of people because these people are also highly educated largely living in affluent suburbs and understand themselves as a kind of like vanguard elite successor to the labor Zionist and so that's where someone like Hendel and Topo come in to sort of peel off this demographic. The question really is like let's say in the 2022 elections the nominally liberal religious Zionists places like the Guchitseon, the Settlement, they voted for Ben Greer, the joint Ben Greer Smotrasilis. It's not clear at all that when those people get into the ballot box that they're despite their frustration over the draft that they're going to vote for a different party so I share Esther Skepticism that like I don't think that this party is going to continue to pull above the electoral threshold and in some polls it's already fallen back down. Another sign that Netanyahu seems to be getting nervous and pulling every trick that has worked in the past out of his hat is a video that everybody has been talking about using AI as I guess we should just assume that every major campaign video is going to be in one way or another using AI we're going to get a lot of it we need to get used to it. So what was this video that everyone was talking about? Why was it so upsetting and why are most people interpreting it as showing that Netanyahu and his minions are feeling extreme pressure and threat from Gadi Eisenkut? Okay so in this AI video it opens with AI Gadi running with outstretch hands through a kind of sunset lit field that kind of looks a little bit like the Elisine Fields or kind of heavenly Fields of some kind towards a young man who looks extraordinarily similar to his son Gal who fell a year and a half ago in an unsuccessful hostage rescue operation in Gaza and his son is wearing this kind of ridiculous but he's wearing a t-shirt that is on it is written the slogan unity for Israel. So the idea is that Gadi is running towards embracing his fallen son who also represents some kind of mythical idea of unity and basically in the video Gadi runs straight past him and falls into the arms of Mansor Abbas who is head of the United Arab List party. So what is the point of this video apart from its extraordinary port taste? The word port taste is not even sufficient to describe how depraved and obscene video that basically suggests that Gadi Eisenkut would you know throw his own son to the walls in order to you know shack up with Mansor Abbas which is clearly also kind of a race completely racist trope as well. Who successfully was part of an Israeli government coalition under Bennett without presumably the entire country imploding? Precisely. And Eisenkut you know has kind of wobbled a bit on whether he would be you know fully enthusiastic about setting up a coalition with Arab parties like Ram but he hasn't entirely kicked it out of the Ram possibilities. We can still take some comfort from the fact that there was genuine outrage along and across party lines to this video because it broke so many taboos about exploiting grief and manipulating anti-Arab racism. The whole thing is kind of ridiculous anyway because Netanyahu was in negotiations with Mansor Abbas to try and bring him into government after the last elections. Netanyahu has used his own fallen brother as a political client. Clearly Yonatan Netanyahu, the hero of Interby is a constant trope in Netanyahu's own political campaigning ever since Yoni died and Netanyahu actually created this whole iconography around him. Josh do you think that this will backfire? Do you think that this you know ended up being a bad exercise or do you think you know it excited the base and pushed Netanyahu's messaging forward the way it should and therefore was worth it? Did you have a take on this whole video controversy in the aftermath? The nature of Israeli politics and polarization today is that it both excites the base and backfires. And I think that's the dynamic that Netanyahu is struggling with which is that and this is something we see with populist leaders everywhere. Also, like the hardcore lekuld base which thinks that the October 7th was an inside job potentially by the leftist army to take down it to the end of the day. They love that stuff the same way, the kind of like Trumpians stop the steel conspiratorial right also loves whatever it is that Trump says that's kind of insane on any given day. But I think that it does backfire for the voters and they're not that many of them but they are important who remain undecided or wobbling as they say in the current elections. Those are especially the people who ironically are exactly the ones who want the political temperature in Israel to be turned down who do want to wear shirts that say unity for Israel. And the irony of the and this is where backfires of that video is that by being so divisive, I think that it discredits Netanyahu's ability to claim that he will be a unifier. He's now pivoted recently in his own speeches trying to put the polar responsibility for polarization on other members of his coalition and even saying himself he wants to establish a broad Zionist government and he's not committed to the religious right wing black, a Gushemuni that is continued to the you know includes Delta, orthodox and the Southers. But on the other hand, I don't think anyone really finds that to be credible. And I think that the moral repugnance of the imagery in that video will especially hurt Netanyahu in the places that I think I think I think I'll just try to pick up and let's say from more traditionalists or peripheral places that are looking for a kind of morally elevated politician. He's been trying to push the more unity oriented, less divisive members of Likud or recruit new members of Likud to the top of his list right? He's just lost an unsuccessful bid to try to shape the Likud list and get rid of their primaries. Well actually what he was trying to do is to make the Lecoods candid listen. completely his own creature so that he could dictate absolutely every single kind which is against what's the residual culture of the liquid party after all these years that he has basically turned into his kind of fiefton. He tried to get them to cancel the primaries completely so that he would just be able to dictate who was on that. He's both running on how much he has won for Israel since October the 7th at the same time he doesn't really want people to be talking about. October the 7th and one of the things about this video is it reminds people of the cost of the war and how many people in Israel have paid that price but it also reminds people of not just netanyours lack of any kind of human feeling towards Gadi Erzenkot's own bereavement but the fact that you know there were hundreds of thousands of Israelis out on the street for years trying to bring back the hostages were also some of whom died because Netanyahu and his government refused to do anything to bring to a ceasefire that would bring them home alive and they died in captivity. The idea that Gadi Erzenkot is the one that doesn't value human life or unity is simply ridiculous and I don't think that many Israelis can seriously buy it. Moving on to the next big campaign event of the past week were the primaries of the Democrats party. Now as we always have to say not the American Democratic Party the Israeli Democrats Party we know it's confusing. This primary by all accounts if you believe the Pentatocracy in Israel blew a blast of energy back into the ailing Zionist left and some say put the issue of the occupation back on the table. There seems just to be some kind of attention between the you know the rank and file of the Democrats who come from labor and and merits and further left they want to be a true left and talk about the occupation talk about the Palestinians and the leader of the party Yaya Golan who kind of wants to be seen as a prime ministerial consensus candidate focus on Netanyahu's failures on October 7th focus on the fight from democracy. We just had a note before you your way in a piece in harits of this group of 2000 mostly young people within the Democrats they call themselves the young Democrats who are trying to pressure that party to really put a diplomatic solution and an end to the occupation on the table and support the candidates who commit to it. So Josh what do we make of all this and the Democrats primary and the result. So without minimizing the importance of that pressure group which is called Fom Dove I think that the tension between the head of merits and the bases overblown and I'm going to rank all I think my hyper critical friends on the left and say that I don't think it's the case that Yilgolan has avoided talking about the occupation and its effects on his really society he became famous for his processes speech in 2016 or 17 I want to say where he alluded to the fact that Israel was becoming a fascist country in large part because of the tendencies that he had seen when he was a general in the occupied West Bank becoming to dominate the political culture in Israel he said things that are far more controversial than many other members of the list for instance his comment I think a year ago about a moral army does not kill children for fun and so I don't think that it's really fair to say that this is a person who is avoiding talking about the issue on top of that the list that the Democrats elected is way more to the left than previous incarnations of labor Zionism I mean like this is a list that includes Gabi Laski the attorney who is who is I to Mimi's lawyer it's a list where someone like Yaya Fink who is a left wing religious Zionist but who also crowdfunded for the Palestinian victims of the settler attack on Khawarat like it's I just don't think it's fair to say that these are people who are avoiding the issue of the occupation Gidad Kareev is a very strident supporter of human rights in the kineset and has spoken also a lot about settler violence and the occupation now I think that what's true is that their criticism tends to be within the bounds of let's say conventional liberal Zionist discourse which is that these are not our values this is not the real Israel we repudiate the settlers yet doesn't often get to the brass tax of what a negotiated solution with the Palestinians and the revival of a Tuesday process would look like but that doesn't that also isn't to say that there aren't people in the party who are doing that it's very easy for us on the left to be like oh but Golan is in as a general and he sometimes says also super hawkish things like those need to maintain the occupation in Lebanon and I but I think that in some ways this is an old problem in the sense that it's not going to be even though we've made him retroactively into like an ultra dove was much closer to that kind of peace inclined hawk that Golan is modeling then he was to the peace now movement in some sense the current democrats which include merits which include labor or woods left of them and also and this is also important a very large segment of those pro of the protest movement that arose in the wake of the judicial overhaul that's sort of the other pillar of the party and those people have been radicalized in a substantially I would say from a kind of naive liberal Zionism to much more anti occupation while I too wish for a more ambitious left-wing party to put the contours of a future solution on the table I think it would be wrong to to discount the fact that like in a lot of ways the left one the fight over the character of that party and I think that's also part of the reason why there is a lot of energy I mean I was surprised the night of the primaries to see that all of the political junky telegram channels in Israel were broadcasting live from the primaries of the democrats years ago no one would have even thought to report from like the merits conference just like a snoozer I think it's a mistake to overlook it you guys are both big hungry watchers Joshy just returned from from hungry yes or you've been writing about it for ages I mean democrats democracy should they be the ones leading the charge you know against what this government is trying to do in terms of the very structure should we be following in the footsteps of the anti-orban forces who focused very hard on anti corruption and the the steps that that orban was taking are there lessons that the democrats should be taking from that should that be like a wider effort between all of the opposition parties to an extent there are in parallels between the two places there also many things that don't quite work as an analogy but I think that all of that is fundamentally built into what the platform of anyone from the center to the left already is offering to the voters that they will stop and hopefully push back on many of the anti-democratic moves that the that the netting out government has made and continues until the very last moment the question is whether all of this is going to be overtaken by also the discussion about the occupation and the conflict and diplomatic solution if this is going to be overtaken by a complete explosion of violence in the West Bank which will just reset the whole discussion there are not a few elements in the current government that actually very very definitely want war now in the West Bank. In fact they said completely openly but it's not just said at the end of last week we need a war in the West Bank and that's not only for electoral reasons although it would help netting out in the same way that it would help if Iran heated up again and that's why he's going to Washington. Would a conflict ratio though in the West Bank when it's clear that a lot of it was fueled by this provocative settler behavior would it really really help the right? Again every single conflagration that is provoked by settlers is immediately reframed by the right and often by the police and other institutions as terrorism by Palestinians so you're never going to get you know this idea that it is settlers who are deliberately going into Palestinian villages committing violence and then the villages themselves trying to defend themselves. That is never going to be the overriding narrative and they can always spin it the other way but yes if there is something akin to an interferer then it has the natural result just as when Iranian missiles are falling on our heads. People, their political horizons become much much smaller. Their worlds contract to their own personal safety. They lean much more easily on the old narratives that they have in their heads that Palestinians are the violent enemy and you know we've had three years of that from Gaza and now you know we were just waiting for the moment that this might explode in the West Bank. The fact is that if there is an explosion of violence in the West Bank it is not going to create many more left-wing voters in Israel. I think the scenario that Esther sketches out is the most likely one, but I don't think that it is necessarily inevitable. And what I mean by that is if there are brief politicians in Israel, they should be able to make the case that radical settlers are endangering actual people safety and the future of the country by doing what they're doing in these nightly raids and arson attacks and on Palestinian villages and turn the attention to the extremism on the right. There aren't enough people willing to do that and pay the political also, although I have to say again to go back to the Democrats, their representatives are taking that line in a way that if someone you look at like right wing journalists that meets Segal is really trying to attack them for even observing the basic facts of what has happened in the West Bank recently. The other thing that I think worries me also is that the right is in the position where it is one, looking at the possibility that it's going to be out of power and dealing with the fact that it did not achieve any of the goals that it set out to achieve at the beginning of this government and especially after October 7th when it began to dream of depopulating Gaza and transferring its inhabitants, rebuilding settlements and Gaza, annexing the West Bank. None of those things have happened, but the right wing politicians sold their base or the radical right sold their base on those things happening. Smote which says things like this in a way that he is sort of useful, he has no subtext. And so he just says things that I think we should take seriously. He says he thinks that he's afraid that a new government that would come into power that's not led by the right is going to make some kind of commitment in the way of compromise with the Palestinians and that this is the last chance that the settler right is going to have for a long time to stake its claim in the ground and end the possibility of a two-state position. And so I think that in the next, I don't know, 90 days until the election, we should be really worried that the right is going to do whatever it can. Ala assassinating Yitzhak Obin, they set their sense of desperation of what an Eisenkold government with 11 potential seats occupied by the Democrats, what that government could do is their literal nightmare. And I think that we should not be naive about the lengths to which they are willing to go to prevent that possibility from happening. Well, between that and an escalation in the world with Iran, we have a lot to look forward to this week guys. We haven't even touched on some of the other security issues we have here, but we have really gone over the political landscape and that's what we're for here. On the election podcast, we can deep dive into the security situation on some of our other podcasts. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Josh Esther, look forward to your upcoming appearances in the next count 'em, 93 days. Thank you. Thanks, let's put her being here. And that's it for this edition of the Harats podcast. Thanks so much to my guests, Harats columnist Esther Solomon and Joshua Leffer and to producer and editor Adi Shaham. If you want to read the great columns that Esther and Josh are producing as well as all of the rest of the news on Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, don't forget to subscribe to and follow Harats.com. But if you want to make sure you never miss an episode of this podcast, the election podcast, or our other weekly podcast at Harats, don't forget to subscribe to and follow our podcast, either on YouTube, Spotify or on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're so inclined, don't forget to leave us a five star rating and a comment. Until next time, I'm Allison Kaplan-Summer and Shalom from Tel Aviv.