While it is too soon to say whether the Likud and Blue and White parties will form an emergency unity government to confront the coronavirus crisis, one thing is clear: A minority government comprised of Blue and White and the Arab Joint List is no longer in the cards.

On March 10, Gesher faction head Orly Levy-Abekasis dropped a political bomb when she announced in a Facebook post — without informing her partners on the center-left Labor-Meretz ticket — that she would not vote for a minority government dependent on the support of Arab parties. She even hinted that she would not recommend Blue and White leader Benny Gantz as the country’s next prime minister. Her move stunned Labor Chair Amir Peretz who had moved heaven and earth in recent months to forge a partnership with her small Gesher party, fending off critics who warned that her heart was on the political right from where she hailed. Her decision could wipe out his long political career and could also be the last nail in the coffin of the Labor party.

The leftist Meretz party, which received Levy-Abekasis as part of its package deal merger with Labor ahead of the March 2 elections, and even agreed that she be in second place on the joint ticket after Peretz, is now conducting a damage assessment.

The merger of Labor, Gesher and Meretz, which pushed back the only Arab representative on the slate of candidates — Meretz member Issawi Freij — to the unrealistic 11th place, was perceived as a strange, eclectic ticket. That is probably one of the reasons that many Jewish Meretz supporters switched to a Joint List ballot this time around. For example, in the suburban Tel Aviv town of Ramat Gan, the number of Joint List voters doubled from 289 in the September 2019 elections to 573. In neighboring Givatayim, 325 residents voted for the Arab alliance compared with 179 in the previous elections. In Tel Aviv-Yafo, the Joint List got 11,413 votes in the March elections, compared with 8,446 in September.