Israel’s opposition agrees to stop fighting itself, but not how to replace Netanyahu - analysis

The leaders of the four “change bloc” parties who met at Yair Lapid’s home on Saturday evening reached a non-aggression pact. They did not, however, agree on how to form a government.

The distinction is crucial.

Monday, September 28 marks a cumulative 19 years of Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister, spread across three periods in office since he first assumed the premiership in 1996.

Removing Israel’s longest-serving prime minister is the cement holding the four change-bloc parties together. But agreeing that Netanyahu must go is not the same as figuring out how to muster the 61 seats needed to do so.

The first achievement of Saturday night’s meeting, an agreement to direct their slings and arrows at Netanyahu rather than at one another, makes sound campaign sense. The absence of the second, however, exposes the bloc’s central strategic weakness: Its leaders have agreed on how to campaign together, but not on how to govern together.

That became clear almost immediately.

Yashar head Gadi Eisenkot, whose party leads the polls and is far ahead of the bloc’s other three parties, Bennett and Lapid’s B’Yachad, Yair Golan’s Democrats and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu, has ruled out a coalition with either the haredi or Arab parties unless they accept the principles he has laid down. Those include universal military or national service and recognition of Hamas as a terrorist organization that must be dismantled.

Golan, however, said Sunday morning that, as far as he is concerned, the Arab parties, or at least Mansour Abbas’ Ra’am party, remain a viable coalition option.

Arab parties could make the difference between forming a coalition or not

That is not a minor disagreement. It goes directly to the question of how the bloc could reach 61. With the Zionist opposition parties that make up the ‘change bloc’ currently falling short of a majority, the difference between including Abbas and ruling him out could mean the difference between forming a coalition and falling just short.

So while the Saturday night meeting may have solved some problems, it did not deal with all of them. Another glaring omission was the lack of agreement on whom the bloc would recommend to the president as prime minister.

The four leaders said they would eventually reach an agreement. But they did not spell out how, through what mechanism and according to what criteria, they would do so.

Eisenkot has said, logically enough, that the leader of the party that wins the most votes should be the bloc’s candidate. Since Yashar currently leads the bloc by a considerable margin, that formula would obviously favor him. Whether the others are prepared to accept it remains unclear.

Still, this does not mean the meeting was meaningless.

The four parties agreed to establish three joint teams: one to increase voter turnout and help ensure the election’s integrity; another to coordinate communications and responses to “disinformation” and political attacks; and a third to draft principles for the next government.

The first two tasks should be relatively straightforward. The third, drafting agreed principles for a government, will be much harder.

Bloc differs widely on a number of issues

The bloc includes Liberman and Bennett on the Right and Golan on the Left. Beyond their shared desire to remove Netanyahu, they differ widely on issues such as the settlements, the diplomatic process, and how to prosecute the current war.

Drafting a common platform broad enough to accommodate all of them, and that goes beyond merely saying “no More Netanyahu,” will be a formidable challenge.

Even so, the decision to stop attacking one another should not be minimized. Mutual sniping risks cannibalizing the bloc’s own support, depressing enthusiasm among its voters and reducing turnout, all of which would help Netanyahu.

A non-aggression pact also lets each party focus on the segment of the electorate it is best suited to reach.

That could be particularly important in an election bringing hundreds of thousands of new voters into the electorate. An estimated 550,000 to 600,000 young people between the ages of 18 and 22 will be eligible to vote for the first time.

In addition, an estimated 55,000 to 60,000 Russian-speaking adult immigrants have arrived since the last election in 2022, many in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Rather than compete over the same pool of voters, the four parties can now divide their political labor.

Eisenkot’s party, which features no fewer than nine religious Zionist candidates among its first 22 slots, can concentrate on attracting so-called “soft-right” religious Zionist voters.

These voters may be unhappy with Netanyahu’s dependence on the Haredi parties and his failure to pass a meaningful Haredi conscription law.  The party has already taken out ads in the right-wing Makor Rishon newspaper under the banner of being a home for religious Zionist voters.

Liberman, with his long history of right-wing positions, can also try to pick off disaffected Likud voters, particularly those angered by the party’s position on the draft. Dan Illouz, number 10 on the Yisrael Beytenu list and someone who left the Likud precisely over that issue, is emblematic of the constituency Liberman hopes to attract.

B’Yachad, meanwhile, can focus on holding the center, trying to prevent voters from drifting toward the reservist-economics ticket headed by Yoaz Hendel and Yaron Zelekha. The Democrats can concentrate on consolidating the Left and ensuring that their voters turn out.

In other words, the non-aggression agreement gives the parties room to expand the bloc rather than merely redistribute votes within it. That is tactically important.

But tactical coordination does not fill the strategic vacuum.

Eisenkot's coalition principles and the bloc's unity are pulling in opposite directions

The change bloc may now have agreed on how not to lose votes, by refraining from attacking one another, but it has not yet agreed on how to win enough votes from the other side, whom to recommend for prime minister, or how to build a coalition. Indeed, the bloc’s newfound unity and Eisenkot’s coalition principles are pulling in opposite directions: The bloc is becoming more organized, even as its viable route to 61 grows narrower.

If Eisenkot rules out both the haredi and Arab parties, and both are unlikely to accept his cardinal principles, he is left with only a handful of options.

The first is for the four change-bloc parties to win an outright majority, something the polls currently indicate is improbable.

The second is to bring in Ofer Winter’s People of Israel party, the Hendel-Zelekha ticket, or both. Together, those two parties are polling at between eight and nine seats, enough, conceivably, to put Eisenkot over the top.

But such a coalition would contain a significant ideological gap between Winter on the Right and Golan on the Left, raising questions about how long it could hold together and what policies it would pursue.

The third option would be to induce post-election defections from the Likud. That is possible, particularly if Likud MKs conclude that Netanyahu cannot form a government and that the alternative is a prolonged stint in the opposition. But it is hardly a strategy Eisenkot can safely rely on before the votes are counted.

Saturday night’s meeting was therefore an important acknowledgment by the bloc’s leaders that their internal competition and mutual name-calling could suppress enthusiasm among their own voters and inadvertently help Netanyahu.

It did not resolve who will lead the bloc, bridge the significant policy differences among its elements, or explain how it will reach 61.

The four parties now have a way to campaign against Netanyahu. What they still lack is a convincing pathway to replace him.