“New situation, realistic conclusion.” This is how Knesset member Orly Levy-Abekasis on April 12 summed up her decision to jump ship from the political center-left to join the right-wing, ultra-Orthodox bloc led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Thus the woman whose tiny Gesher party had run on a joint ticket with Labor and Meretz in the March 2 elections, and who was elected to the Knesset by center-left voters after failing to cross the electoral threshold on her own in previous elections, crossed the political divide after the results came in.

According to Channel 12 News poll results released April 13, if elections were held today, Gesher and the Derech Eretz faction of Blue and White Knesset members Zvi Hauser and Yoaz Hendel would each garner some 1.4% of the vote, far below the 3.25% required for Knesset representation. In other words, the three lawmakers who deprived Blue and White Chair Benny Gantz of the Knesset majority he needed to form a government owe their seats to center-left parties and their center-left voters.

Gantz has now missed two opportunities — after the September 2019 and March 2020 elections — to become Israel’s next prime minister. Gantz himself put it succinctly when, according to a November report by Channel 12 News reporter Amit Segal, he said, “I am not prime minister because of Yoaz and Zvi.” Gantz and his associates have never denied the report. Clearly, however, the problem for the center-left is not limited to Levy-Abekasis, Hauser and Hendel, whose right-wing political views are well known. Their getting elected to the Knesset were impressive political feats. They could not have succeeded had the center-left political leadership not sought out right-wing candidates to bolster their camp's legitimacy, lending them power and influence they would not have accumulated by running alone.

Since Benjamin Netanyahu's election as prime minister in 2009, there has been a sense among the political center-left that only a party modeled along the lines of the centrist Kadima under former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert can attract enough votes for them to form a government, as happened in defeating the Likud in 2006. Since that victory, however, as Al-Monitor reported March 5, the centrist parties have more resembled the 2009 version of Kadima, under the leadership of Tzipi Livni, who failed to form a government despite winning one more seat than Netanyahu and Likud.