According to a survey conducted for the Israeli news site Walla! a few hours after the murderous, Nov. 18 attack on a synagogue in the Har Nof neighborhood of Jerusalem, if elections had been held that same week, the three right-wing parties would have been able to form a coalition of 63 Knesset members.

In the 2013 elections, the three right-wing parties — Likud, Yisrael Beitenu, and HaBayit HaYehudi — amassed a total of 43 mandates. According to the latest poll, they would have been able to form a right-wing government without partners from the center or the ultra-Orthodox parties. The Likud, under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would have 27 mandates, HaBayit HaYehudi's share would soar to 19, and Yisrael Beitenu's mandates would increase to 17 Knesset members. The Labor Party's mandates would have fallen from 15 to 10, and Yesh Atid's would plummet from 19 to 6. By comparison, another poll conducted for Israeli TV Channel 10 on Nov. 17, before the attack, estimated that the three right-wing parties would garner 55 mandates.

The gloomy, but not surprising, conclusion emerging from the data is that terror pushes the Israeli public to the right. Meretz Party head Zehava Gal-On dared to say on Nov. 23 that the government’s preoccupation with the nationality bill at this particular moment, when spirits need to be pacified rather than incited, proves that it is comprised of irresponsible pyromaniacs. According to Gal-On, those cabinet members pushing the bill are only interested in scoring political points.

The connection between terror and voting patterns has been demonstrated in the work of Anna Getmansky (Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy, and Strategy at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya) and Thomas Zeitzoff (School of Public Affairs at American University). They published their findings in the article “Terrorism and Voting: The Effect of Rocket Threat on Voting in Israeli Elections,” in the prestigious American Political Science Review (Aug. 2014). The researchers examined the effect the range of rockets fired from Gaza had on Israelis' voting patterns in four elections. The elections analyzed were held in 1999, when a rocket threat did not exist; in 2003, when 1% of Israelis were within the range of rocket fire (10 kilometers [6.2 miles]); in 2006, when the proportion of vulnerable residents went up to 3% (20.4 kilometers [12.7 miles]); and 2009, when 14% of residents (43 kilometers [26.7 miles]) were threatened by terror from rockets.