The Israeli elections ended in a tie, which is actually a rather resounding defeat for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is only two weeks before the dramatic hearing awaiting Netanyahu by Israel’s Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit on Oct. 2-3, and we can already declare that the prime minister will not be able to form an “immunity coalition” (a right-wing coalition that could pass legislation protecting Netanyahu from indictment).
Israel’s judicial system has been salvaged; the High Court of Justice has been spared from annihilation. Even the media can breathe a bit more easily now. Netanyahu is five seats short of the 61 seats he needs to complete the dismantling of Israel’s democracy and this, evidently, will not happen.
The Israeli soap opera exceeds all imagination. Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Liberman, who has been languishing at the bottom of the political heap in recent years, reinvented himself in a spectacular maneuver and morphed into an exclusive kingmaker and dragon-killer. Assuming there are no major surprises, Liberman will emerge as the one who inflicted the final political blow on Netanyahu. The man who served as Netanyahu’s faithful assistant in the late 1980s, became the prime minister’s political hangman.
The bad blood between those two had continued over many long years. Liberman blames Netanyahu for building a case against Yisrael Beitenu just prior to the 2015 elections (senior Yisrael Beitenu members were suspected of corruption); this thwarted, so he believes, Liberman’s big plans to become Israel’s prime minister. Later on, when Liberman served as Netanyahu’s defense minister, the prime minister blocked all of Liberman’s initiatives and turned his former assistant into a scarecrow. In the course of the present campaign, Netanyahu went for Liberman’s jugular with all his strength. The Likud went to tremendous efforts and invested much money on the Israeli Russian voters, in their attempts to kick Liberman out of his own territory. That goal failed. Now it’s Liberman’s turn to kick back.
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