JERUSALEM -- Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t win Israel’s election. He certainly didn’t lose, either. Neither he nor his chief opponent has a clear path to form a government.
What is clear is that Netanyahu performed far better than anyone carrying so much political baggage would have any reason to expect.
His opponents, led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot, sailed into Tuesday’s fateful vote having consistently led in the polls and confident that their goal, an outright majority relying only on predominantly Jewish parties, was within reach.
Netanyahu limped into Election Day by comparison, dragging the public’s fury over his failure to take responsibility for the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack; its weariness with a four-year term in which he tried to gain power at the expense of the courts; and its frustration with his refusal to force ultra-Orthodox Jews to share in the sacrifice of military service.
And yet, initial results in Tuesday’s election showed that his Likud party outperformed all others. The result has left Jewish opposition leaders pondering an exceedingly difficult choice.
They now can give up on conclusively defeating Netanyahu and look to join him in a potential unity government that dispenses with some of his more extremist allies. Or they can try to form a governing majority themselves, by overcoming their reluctance to partner with predominantly Arab parties that Netanyahu -- and the majority of Israeli Jews -- have treated as outside the bounds of political acceptability. In the meantime, Netanyahu keeps his job.
How Netanyahu managed that feat, however, was anything but a surprise. The veteran Israeli leader, renowned as a political escape artist, did not unveil any new tricks. But he may have uniquely grasped that his old ones would serve him well.
Chief among them is Netanyahu’s knack for playing on Israelis’ fears.
Netanyahu argued to Israeli voters that if they thought what had happened Oct. 7 -- the most calamitous day in Israeli history -- was bad, that was nothing next to the nightmare that could come from the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank.
It was a transparently bogus argument. Only the most left-leaning of Israel’s opposition leaders, Yair Golan of the Democrats party, had spoken positively about a two-state solution -- and even he called Palestinian statehood unachievable anytime soon, especially after Oct. 7.
Still, nothing the opposition said could rebut the accusation as pungently as how Netanyahu leveled it: with skyscraper-sized billboards screaming “Yamin o Filastin” -- right-wing or Palestine.
Netanyahu also played on many Israelis’ fears about Arab citizens of Israel and their political leaders wielding power.
Israeli Jews have been polarized over Netanyahu for years, leaving opposition leaders perennially short of a parliamentary majority without the votes of Arab lawmakers. If that held true again, Netanyahu’s political challenge would actually be fairly limited: To stay in power, he need only make Jewish opposition leaders afraid to consummate a full partnership with their Arab allies.
So he relentlessly depicted Arab politicians like Mansour Abbas -- who had served in the government in 2021 and 2022 -- as enemies within and a sinister threat to the country if they were allowed to wield power.
One of his many artificial intelligence-generated ads showed Abbas and Golan, of the Democrats, in the belly of a Trojan horse being dragged inside the walls of an Israeli citadel. Another showed Abbas, languidly smoking a hookah with his feet up on the Cabinet table, vetoing proposals for anti-Palestinian security moves by an Eisenkot-led government. Abbas then perks up and approves the “evacuation of Jewish communities to build trust toward a Palestinian state.”
All the anti-Arab groundwork Netanyahu had laid served him well when Arab voters flocked to the polls in record numbers Tuesday. Netanyahu turned the historic turnout into a red alert for the right, posting a stream of images on social media showing Arabs flocking to the polls in head coverings or on camels, and urging right-wing Israelis who might have backed other parties to instead vote for Likud as if it were “a matter of life and death for us.”
“I think he recognized long ago that a high voter turnout in the Arab street is actually not going to be bad for him, if the conversation in Israel is going to delegitimize the Arabs,” said Shira Efron, an Israeli analyst at Rand.
In fact, Abbas and his Raam party have worked to gain acceptance from Jewish lawmakers and from the Israeli public, eyeing participation in a future government and even a Cabinet post. He acknowledged that Israel was and would remain a Jewish state and -- in a bold preelection move -- named a Jewish lawmaker, Yoav Segalovitz, to the No. 2 spot on Raam’s candidate list.
The larger of the two Arab parties, an alliance of three smaller parties called the Joint List, includes a Palestinian nationalist faction and is seen as more antagonistic toward Zionism. Its leader, Yousef Jabareen, said he was ready to cooperate to topple Netanyahu’s government, but few expect the Joint List to help other than by supporting a new premier from outside the governing coalition.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.