Yesterday it was announced that new Israeli Knesset elections will be held in March. That means today there were rumors, and tomorrow there will be rumors, and so on and so forth until March, of various electoral strategies and party slate maneuverings that could change everything or nothing at all. Today’s rumor started the great Season of Speculation off with a bang: Gideon Sa’ar, Benjamin Netanyahu’s recently-resigned second in command, is reportedly considering challenging Bibi for the Likud leadership in the party’s early-January primary.
There are also rumors that Tzipi Livni, in need of a life raft, will join Labor to bring along enough seats to top a stagnant Likud. Livni has also been acting as though she’s angling for a combined slate with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, which was the great centrist hope and therefore, like all great centrist hopes before it, has been fading precipitously since its debut election. Could Livni be some sort of kingmaker for a centrist party? Could she–would she–turn heel on her pedigree and help crown Labor? Will Elijah the Prophet appear from the mists and announce a joint slate with Naftali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi? Hey, it’s the Season of Speculation; anything’s possible.
Americans often find Israeli politics perplexing, and this goes double for the American members of the press. Early elections, and the silly season they inspire, are a fixture of Israeli democracy. Americans are used to a de facto two-party system. But for Israelis looking for an alternative there always seems to be another option or two or ten. So it’s easy for a foreign observer to get caught up in the endless possibilities, even if those possibilities rarely transform into reality.
But the belief in the wide-open character of Israeli leadership at any moment has been a huge mistake for the Obama administration. That’s because the Israeli electorate tends to care less about which specific party has how many seats and more about the general shape of the government.
The key moment that established this pattern in recent years was, not coincidentally, the beginning of the second Netanyahu era. I’ve referred to it before: the 2009 elections saw Israeli voters give Livni’s party one more seat in the Knesset than Bibi’s. But she had no one to form a government with because her potential coalition partners were rightists who didn’t want her at the head of the government. She won the popular vote because Israelis assumed Netanyahu had it in the bag and voted instead for other parties to Bibi’s right to ensure the shape of the ruling coalition would be a center-right government. And that’s what they got.
The Obama White House learned precisely the wrong lesson from it. They saw what looked like the two-party system of old–Labor and Likud hovering over the polity, with only minor satellites rotating in orbit around them. But the fact that Labor wasn’t involved–that this time it was Likud vs. a splinter faction–should have told them something. They thought Livni was a genuine rival to Netanyahu, and that she was an alternative waiting in the wings. Livni supported the peace process so Washington desperately wanted to believe she was personally more popular than she really was.
Fast-forward almost six years. Livni had six seats in the dissolved Knesset, with polls showing her getting as few as four in the next elections. It wasn’t Livni that was popular in Kadima (a party she left anyway to found Hatnua); it was the remnant of Ariel Sharon’s popularity. The delusions of the Obama White House required completely ignoring the will and intent of the Israeli people. And so it has been six years of missed opportunities.
The Sa’ar rumors illustrate that perfectly. Sa’ar has been at odds with Netanyahu, but he also didn’t believe he could beat Bibi in a primary. When he abruptly announced his retirement from the Knesset in September (but not until he could help Ruby Rivlin win the presidency–a not-insignificant footnote), it was not to start his own party. The broad speculation was that he would wait Bibi out and then return to reclaim the Likud.
Sa’ar was one of the few who could afford to do so. The other Likud bigwigs are around Netanyahu’s age (65); Sa’ar is 47. It’s possible he now believes he has a chance to beat Netanyahu in a primary, though. This prospect is being taken seriously. While Sa’ar is still the underdog, such an upset is not totally unthinkable.
And what would the fallout be? Well, you’d have a transfer of power from Likud to … Likud. This is what Obama never understood about Bibi: the most likely alternatives have been Lieberman, then briefly Bennett, now possibly Sa’ar. Of those three, Sa’ar is the furthest left, yet he is no squish. Obama wants Shimon Peres (the one Israeli he might actually like) and Tzipi Livni (the one Israeli he believes he can control).
It’s always possible the left will make a comeback, and it might be sooner than anyone thinks. Who knows. But six years of delusional American policy toward Israel have revolved around trying to undermine a prime minister who has been in office this entire time, and who heads a democratically elected coalition that has been trying to pull him right, almost completely unsuccessfully. It turns out that all this time, the Obama White House had an ally in the Prime Minister’s Office, if only they would have been willing to admit it.
