In the late evening hours of April 13, minutes before the expiration of the midnight deadline for Blue and White party leader Benny Gantz to form a new government, President Reuven Rivlin’s office announced that he had granted Gantz’s request, endorsed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, for a 48-hour extension.

However, even if Gantz and Netanyahu form their power-sharing government by midnight on April 15, Gantz’s decision to join forces with Netanyahu and the nerve-wracking negotiations Netanyahu put him through in recent weeks have dealt the Israeli left a crushing blow. Gantz’s move, which resulted in the dismantling of his original Blue and White party, has left voters of the center-left disappointed and frustrated, some angry that their votes were “stolen” and handed to the Netanyahu bloc, and all realizing that the hope Gantz offered when he formed his center-left alternative to Netanyahu is dead.

“Netanyahu no longer has any rivals. When he buys off your leader so easily, it’s frustrating, painful and leads to despair,” former Knesset member Issawi Freij of the left-wing Meretz Party tells Al-Monitor. Freij is frustrated not only by Gantz’s surrender, as he puts it, but also by the decision of his own Meretz Party to place him low on its list of candidates for the March 2 elections, which left him out of the Knesset despite his broad popularity that had drawn thousands of Arab citizens to vote for Meretz in previous elections. “The final knife was the one Meretz stuck into the back of its only Arab candidate,” he says. Freij is not referring to the implications for himself personally, but rather to the message this conveyed to Arab voters. If the left does not want the Arabs, he explains, all they can do is vote for an Arab party — in other words, for the Arab Joint List (as an estimated 87% did in the last elections).

Jewish voters are experiencing similar, deep-seated disappointment with their leaders. The series of betrayals that transferred votes from the left side of the map to Netanyahu was much more than they could take. First, Gesher head Orly Levy-Abekasis crossed the lines, stunning her former running mates in Meretz and the Labor party. Then, Labor party leader Amir Peretz and Labor Knesset member Itzik Shmuli violated their campaign promises without batting an eyelash and crossed the line to Netanyahu’s side — by way of joining Blue and White — without offering their stultified voters a reasonable explanation.