The prevailing view ahead of the April elections to elect members of the 21st Knesset was that the main, if not only, obstacle to a sweeping right-wing victory of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party were the various corruption scandals dogging the prime minister. The assessment-hope among his opponents, from the extreme left to the liberal right, was that the virtually daily revelations about the Netanyahu family’s allegedly corrupt conduct would determine the election outcome.
The results disabused them of their assumption. When counting Yisrael Beitenu as part of the right-wing camp, Netanyahu’s camp indeed received enough Knesset seats to compose a coalition. And it is safe to assume that most of the Israelis who voted Yisrael Beitenu wanted it to join a Netanyahu-led government. As it happened, Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Liberman refused to join a Netanyahu-led government, snatching victory from Netanyahu’s jaws.
