The Israel general election has come down to a contest between the two Benjamins: Benjamin Netanyahu, who has ruled the country since 2009, and Benjamin Gantz, a former general political upstart who is being viewed as the first credible challenger to the Likud party’s decade-long reign.
Gantz’s Israel Resilience is the centerpiece of the Kahol Lavan (‘Blue and White’) alliance, which includes the centrist Yesh Atid party and Telem, a new party headed by Moshe Ya’alon, another formal general who previously served as defense minister under Netanyahu.
Netanyahu’s coalition heading into the April 9 polls is markedly more right-wing than previous incarnations. His alliance includes a merger of the small but radical Jewish Home and Jewish Power parties. The latter party is particularly controversial, as its followers espouse the views of Martin David Kahane, an extremist US-born rabbi who believed Zionism to be incompatible with democracy and advocated stripping Israeli Arabs of their citizenship and banning inter-faith coupling. Netanyahu’s move to include Jewish Power in his coalition drew rare criticism from AIPAC and the American Jewish Committee, two institutions that generally remain at arm’s length from Israeli domestic politics.
Seats in the Knesset are assigned based on a party’s proportion of the overall vote, with 3.25% being the threshold to enter parliament (raised from 2% in 2014). The low threshold favors smaller parties and encourages merges and alliances when two parties would not otherwise qualify. Such was the case with the Jewish Home and Jewish Power merger in February. Increasing or decreasing the threshold can have a profound impact on coalition formation.
Down to the Wire
The two alliances have been neck-and-neck down the home stretch. One television poll from Channel 12 on Sunday showed Gantz’s Kahol Lavan taking 31 seats and Likud 28. Another more recent one showed both parties in a dead heat with 30 seats each. After the vote, the largest party will be asked to form a government and its leader will likely (but not always) become prime minister.
Recent events have heaped uncertainty on what had once looked like a sure win for Gantz. Though Netanyahu’s legal troubles are well-known at this point, there are new accusations of improprieties being leveled at Gantz, who had previously been viewed as an outsider untouched by the corruption of the political elites. Specifically, the accusations revolve around a 2015 no-tender contract that went to The Fifth Dimension, Gantz’s cybersecurity company.
