“We’re just two seats away from victory. I need you. We can only win if we do it together,” Netanyahu tweeted Feb. 27. Flanking a picture of him looking off into the horizon was a link for potential volunteers to join a phone bank on election day. The purpose of that phone bank is to get Likud voters out to vote.
The message is that “Victory is within reach” — with “victory” meaning 61 seats without Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party. Netanyahu has been repeating it every evening at packed rallies and campaign events at Likud strongholds throughout the country, as well as on his social media accounts and in interviews with the media. He seems ready at any time or place to talk about the 300,000 Likud supporters who did not vote in the September 2019 election. Some were driven by sheer apathy, while others were convinced that a Likud victory was a certainty in any case. Everyone knows how it turned out.
