The Israeli Left’s Moment of Reckoning

Last week, on the eve of an election that pitted neo-fascist Benjamin Netanyahu against former Israeli Defense Forces Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, New York Magazine’s Abraham Riesman posed a provocative question: What has become of the Israeli left?

On Tuesday, the nation’s electorate provided an answer of sorts. While final votes are still being tallied, Netanyahu will eke out a fifth term as prime minister, with Likud securing 65 seats in the Knesset to the opposition Blue and White’s 55. Perhaps more telling, the Labor Party, which governed Israel for the first 29 years of its existence, under different names and alignments, won just 4.5 percent of the vote. Labor’s six seats represents the party’s worst showing in its history. As the New York Times’ David M. Halbfinger observes, “It’s Netanyahu’s Israel now.”

“Benjamin Netanyahu’s apparent re-election as prime minister of Israel,” he writes, “attests to a starkly conservative vision of the Jewish state and its people about where they are and where they are headed.”

Upon reelection, Netanyahu has pledged to pursue the annexation of the occupied West Bank, a move that is flatly illegal under international law. This promise follows President Donald Trump’s decision to recognize Israel’s claims to the Golan Heights, which Israeli forces have occupied since its capture from Syria in 1967. Indeed, throughout the campaign process, Netanyahu has trumpeted his close ties with the American president, featuring him prominently in campaign speeches, billboards and social media videos. (He has even dismissed the potentially indictable corruption charges against him as a “witch hunt.”)

A Nation-State Bill, which the Netanyahu government enacted earlier this year, formerly recognizes the country’s Palestinian population as second-class citizens, declaring Israel “a national nation-state of the Jewish people only.” Meanwhile, millions have been denied the right to vote in Gaza and portions of the West Bank, even as they are subject to the movement restrictions of the Israeli government.

“The Israelis have chosen an overwhelmingly right-wing, xenophobic, and anti-Palestinian parliament to represent them,” Hanan Ashrawi, who serves on the executive committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), said in a statement. “The extremist and militaristic agenda, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, has been emboldened by the Trump administration’s reckless policies and blind support.”

The election alone would appear to substantiate his claims. On Wednesday, the Israeli PR firm behind a Likud Party initiative to place 1200 hidden cameras in voting stations across the country, Kaizler Inbar, openly boasted about intimidating Arab Israelis. “Thanks to us placing observers in every polling station we managed to lower the voter turnout to under 50 percent, the lowest in recent years!” read one of the company’s Facebook posts.

If British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s most lasting victory was the formation of a conservative opposition in the form of New Labour, then Netanyahu’s may prove to be the destruction of Israeli Labor itself. While Blue and White has emerged as the country’s putatively centrist coalition, there is almost no daylight between it and Likud on the Palestinian question. Gantz even campaigned on bombing parts of Gaza “back to the stone age,” with multiple ads featuring the unabashedly authoritarian message that “only the strong win.”

The Labor Party has been denied the prime ministership since Ehud Barak left office in 2001, and its path out of the political wilderness appears unclear. Netanyahu’s victory, which now ensures he will surpass founding father David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, may ultimately represent a moment of reckoning for liberal Zionists: They can have a democracy or they can have a Jewish state, but they can’t have both.