Israel, more than most other Western democracies, demands extraordinary sacrifice from its citizens. Its army, which conscripts most Jewish-Israeli men and women and whose values permeate society, requires soldiers to run towards danger. Its officers are taught to lead from the front, no matter the personal risk. Now some of that same spirit may be required of centrist members of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in defence of the country’s liberal democracy.
Yair Lapid, the outgoing prime minister, and Benny Gantz, his defence minister, fought five elections in four years to remove Binyamin Netanyahu and then keep him out of the prime minister’s office. Now, after 17 months in opposition, Mr Netanyahu is on his way back, having won a parliamentary majority by pandering to a vile assortment of Jewish supremacists, homophobes and far-right religious zealots gathered under the umbrella of the Religious Zionism bloc. If he embraces them in a coalition government, as he said he would while campaigning for the election on November 1st, he could undermine Israel’s democracy and grievously wound its judicial independence. To prevent this, centrists may have to do the unthinkable, and enter government with Mr Netanyahu in order to keep them out.
It is no small thing to ask centrists such as Mr Lapid, whose party came second, to link up with Mr Netanyahu, a street-fighting politician who has often left his coalition partners feeling bruised and degraded, and who trampled democratic norms during his 15 years in office. Many Israelis who voted for the parties of centre and left would see it as a betrayal of trust and principle if their leaders were, after all, to join a government led by Bibi, as Mr Netanyahu is widely known.
Israelis are proud of living in a country under the rule of law, albeit that Arabs in Israel proper and those in the Israeli-occupied territories tend not to share that feeling. Jewish Israelis believe that no fellow citizen is above the law. They note with satisfaction that a former prime minister and a former president were sent to prison—one for corruption, another for sex crimes. Past Israeli prime ministers have resigned promptly when accused of financial impropriety. Mr Netanyahu, who is on trial facing charges of bribery and fraud, has refused to do so.
More strikingly, Mr Netanyahu seems willing to shatter the taboo long upheld by Israel’s main parties, including his own Likud, that has prevented them from entering into governing coalitions with parties of the far right which patently deride the basic tenets of a liberal democracy. His electoral alliance with the Religious Zionism bloc breaks that mould, since it includes the Jewish Power party led by Itamar Ben-Gvir, a rabid racist who has been known to admire Meir Kahane, a Jewish supremacist who exulted in violence against Arabs and was jailed for terrorism. Mr Ben-Gvir is ferociously hostile to Arabs and suggests that those who have Israeli citizenship—about a fifth of the total population—should be expelled from the country if they are deemed “disloyal”. Mr Ben-Gvir also wants to be the minister in charge of the police, who have investigated him several times for inciting violence.
The bloc’s other co-leader, Bezalel Smotrich, is a homophobe who wants to segregate Arabs from Jews within Israel. He plans to curb the courts’ power to strike down legislation that contravenes Israel’s Basic Laws, which protect human rights—to ensure, for instance, that Jewish settlements on the West Bank can be made legal. He also wants to scrap from the statutes the crime of “breach of trust” that Mr Netanyahu has been charged with. A far-right coalition would also need the backing of the ultra-Orthodox parties, which want a weaker Supreme Court.
Yet there is still a slender chance that Mr Netanyahu could be dissuaded from forming a government with such horrible allies. Under Israel’s system of extreme proportional representation, elections are invariably followed by horse-trading. Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, a decent man of the old centre-left, will have to offer Mr Netanyahu, whose party won the most seats in the election, the first shot at forming a government. But he is also likely to urge him to ditch the extremists and instead make a coalition deal with the parties of the centre who have been in government for the past year and a half.
Messrs Lapid and Gantz have both ruled out going into a coalition government with Mr Netanyahu, whom they detest and want to see behind bars. Both would find it hard to break their word. They should take a deep, patriotic breath. To defend the principles they stand for—liberalism, democracy and the rule of law—they should do whatever it takes to keep out those who would junk them. For his part, if he has a shred of honour, Mr Netanyahu should turn his back on the worst of Israelis. ■
