24th Knesset: Another round of abnormal elections

• Author: SUSAN HATTIS ROLEF
• Date: 17 January 2021
• Published date: 17 January 2021

The results of the elections to the 21st, 22nd and 23rd Knessets, and the results of opinion polls regarding the predicted outcome of the elections to the 24th Knesset, all indicate that the Israeli public is more or less split down the middle on the question of whether Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should remain in power or be ousted, with a slight advantage to the latter.

In any normal country, this would be taken as a clear indication that what is required is a government made up of all the parties that are more concerned with national unity and reconciliation than with the personal interests of a certain political leader, or with realizing their ideological platforms, which will at long last cut us loose from the Gordian knot that is threatening to stifle us.

In the first of the four election campaigns, Netanyahu, at the head of the Likud, and his right-religious bloc, were confronted by a single conglomeration of three centrist parties that had decided to run together as Blue and White, a rapidly diminishing Labor Party, the relatively stable Meretz, and the newly formed Joint List, made up of four Arab parties that were forced to join together by the qualifying threshold being raised from 2% to 3.25%, which had been initiated by Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman, in order to try to get rid of at least one of the Arab parties.

By the third round of elections, the center-left "just not Bibi" bloc was first joined by a right-wing party,Yisrael Beytenu, and following these elections another right-wing party – Naftali Bennett's Yamina – half-heartedly joined. However, the new bloc, which had a majority in the Knesset, was unable to form a government because there was no agreement about such a government being supported by the Joint List, with its 15 Knesset seats, so that in practical terms the majority was sterile.

In the current round of elections there are three right-wing parties running under the slogan "Bibi must go," after a group of Likud MKs broke away from the Likud and formed a party under Gideon Sa'ar. Of the three, Yamina does not identify itself as a "just not Bibi" party.

However, the most significant change on the political map is the fact that almost nothing remains of Blue and White, following the decision of its leader, Benny Gantz, to join an emergency government led by Netanyahu several months after the third round of elections, contrary to his promise to Blue and White's voters that he would not sit in a government with...