Netanyahu trapped between Trump, allies

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can breathe a sigh of relief at the results of the Israeli elections, even if the outcome hardly shows that the right is getting stronger. On the contrary, the disappearance of the furthest-right party in the last Knesset and the diminished performance of Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu and Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu indicate that the trend could be moving in the opposite direction. The right-wing bloc in the current Knesset is smaller than it was in the previous one. The parties that got stronger were the Likud and the ultra-Orthodox factions.

The referendum on Netanyahu did not end with his victory. The Likud won just 35 seats and will have to make do with 34, as Eli Dahan of the United Right was involved in an unusual maneuver that gave him the 27th spot on the Likud list. Netanyahu encouraged the unification of HaBayit HaYehudi with far-right Israel Power. To boost this union, the Likud agreed to include Dahan in its list. After the swearing in, Dahan will quit the Likud faction and re-join his United Right party. Meanwhile, Blue and White also won 35 seats, even though it seemed to come out of nowhere at the last minute.

In Netanyahu’s future coalition, made up of right-wing parties and the ultra-Orthodox, it looks like almost any potential partner can challenge Netanyahu’s narrow majority and limit his room to maneuver. Ostensibly, there is not a single party in the liberal wing of the Knesset that Netanyahu might convince to support him. The situation is very different from that enjoyed by previous governments, and certainly from Netanyahu’s last term, when the Zionist Camp was interested in forming a national unity government but was never invited.

As if that were not enough, Netanyahu’s rather transparent hope that he can thwart President Donald Trump’s peace plan by tossing out a few positive words about it and then waiting for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to reject it, is more problematic than the prime minister had likely thought. The United Right would not have passed the voter threshold without a massive dose of help from Netanyahu. Nevertheless, it has already announced that even if Trump offers nothing more than autonomy to the Palestinians, it will not sit in any government that adopts such a position.