By the end of Israel’s 2019 election campaign, only two political camps were left: the pro-Netanyahu camp and the anti-Netanyahu camp. Ideology went out the window and nuances received a dog’s funeral. The energy storms created by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s supporters and opponents shook the country with great force, crushing everything in its path. Blue and White, a hybrid party composed of foreign elements soldered together by Benny Gantz’ Israel Resilience, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid and Moshe Ya’alon’s Telem, destroyed the Labor party and thirstily swallowed up all the center-left votes while Netanyahu did the exact same thing to the right. He, too, swallowed up his camp’s votes.
The premier’s luck is that the constituencies of Israel’s right and ultra-Orthodox factions are much larger than the closed voters’ pool of the center-left. This year, Gantz and Yair Lapid provided the exact same number of mandates that the Zionist Camp and Yair Lapid brought the last time around in the 2015 elections: 35. That number — together with what remains of the Labor party, Meretz remnants and the two weakened Arab parties — offer sort of a repetition of those 2015 elections where Netanyahu assembles around him a majority right-wing camp. And so, Netanyahu has proven that he is the greatest of Israel’s political magicians of all time. His achievement is unbelievable, although it does not grant him immunity vis-a-vis the criminal process that will be speeded up the day after the elections. It is altogether possible that Israel may find itself facing elections again next year.
