Michael Oz

These graphs and polls tell the real story, even more than whatever results come out of the election. Israel's population continues to shift to the right, its youth above all. Terror on your borders will have that effect. Within the bigger picture, the results of the Israeli elections hardly matter. Two "solid" coalition results are plausible, though the first seems unlikely and the second seems very unlikely: 1. Netanyahu will squeak over the line and form a coalition similar to the one he has (and this could come down to whether Ofer Winter's party gets just slightly below or above the threshold), or 2. The group of four parties led by Bennett, Lapid, Lieberman, Yair Golan and Eisenkot will somehow manage to get the 61 seats required. But realistically, there is almost zero chance of 2. And even if they could, you would have a coalition of people who agree on almost nothing, beyond their popular, if not populist and unrealistic, demands that all the ultra-Orthodox serve in the army, and that Netanyahu can't be prime minister anymore. So they are starting from a base of faux unity over issues that are beyond their control—they can't lock up Haredi men by the hundreds of thousands, and financial motives aren't what drive them (the same theory-of-mind error, incidentally, that the same generals like Golan and Eisenkot made with Hamas). Further, a large portion of the public disagrees with them on Netanyahu, which is why his coalition will get a very large bloc of seats at minimum. Lieberman himself conceded—at a private event over the weekend—that an attempt to build a narrow or minority coalition with Arab parties would fall apart quickly, as it did in 2022, but worse, would leave a stench with the public, due to all the broken promises. That would mean a repeat of the 2022 election, when voters returned to Netanyahu after an 18-month "interregnum", after Bennett broke his oath to his voters not to sit with the Arab parties in exchange for his turn as prime minister. He insists that it's either 61 seats for the only four parties he is willing to work with, or nothing. When challenged—by a room full of his own financial backers—that this was implausible and unrealistic, he suggested trying to peel away members from Netanyahu's list. But Netanyahu will also have that option, as well as the option of demanding a coalition government. If he can come with a united bloc of even just 50 seats, he is in a good position to do that, particularly in light of the febrile regional situation. Eisenkot, even if he leads a 59-seat bloc, doesn't have the same leverage, since his bloc is much more fractured, including elements from the far left to the hard right, on every issue, with only the Haredi issue uniting them. Who can they peel away from Netanyahu's bloc? Not the Haredim or the far right! So who? Netanyahu's handpicked friends and allies, who would be tarred forever as traitors in return for a year of power in a fractured coalition, whose only guiding light is the fool's errand, if a noble one, of enlisting the Haredim? So that won't fly. Expect a grand coalition, perhaps under the premise of dealing with the reheating Iran conflict, or new elections in six months. The Israeli political system functions totally differently from others in the West. In most democracies, two-party systems are the default state. This has three effects: 1. Parties tend towards the median voter; the centrists need to be seduced, which is why voters so often split 50–50. 2. Extremists have nowhere else to go, so they try "entryist" tactics. 3. The politics of the parliament will tend to flip back and forth between right and left. Not so in Israel. Anyone who can get 3.25% of the people behind their flag has a party, a potential kingmaker. There's no need to persuade the centrists. But most importantly, there's no way to quickly shift the political map, since it is not possible to pry it away from the reality of people's inherent political beliefs, which change on a generational timescale, if at all. The graphs show this. Over 80 years, Israelis have shifted from left to right and the centre. There is almost no left left. It is arguably also a mistake to call Lieberman centrist. He is merely an anti-religious right-wing "settler". A narrow left-centre-right-but-hate-Bibi government is possible, but it will be very unstable. Meanwhile, the long-term trend rightward continues.

The Flydubai terror pilot wasn’t radicalised in his homeland of Oman, where there is no tolerance for jihadism. He was radicalised in Australia and the UK, and it’s totally pathetic.