According to a poll conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute, only 29% of Israelis believe that this month’s election will end the diplomatic deadlock.
Just 29% believe the election would have a definitive picture as to who will be the next Prime Minister.
According to the IDI Israeli Voice Index, more than 32% of Israelis want Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s graft trial to be deferred if he manages to win the election and leads the new administration.
Although a major part of Jewish Israelis still denounces an alliance that depends on Arab-majority groups, interest in Arab-Jewish political collaboration is growing among those who identify as centrist or right-wing.
The result of a poll published less than two weeks before Israelis vote in their fourth election in two years, revealed that neither major bloc has a clear path to a Knesset majority. Four parties are on the brink of crossing the 3.25 percent electoral threshold.
With 28 of the 120 Knesset seats, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party remained Israel’s strongest party. The Netanyahu-led bloc will have 47 seats considering other parties pledged to support him in his bid for premiership.
The coalition of parties vowing to replace Netanyahu, the poll suggests, would have 60 seats, with Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid taking the lead with 19.
Yamina, led by Naftali Bennett, has made some gains and is now expected to be the third-largest party in the Knesset, with 13 seats, surpassing New Hope, Gideon Sa’ar’s newly made party.
Finding allies would be difficult for Netanyahu. Despite polling indicating that right-wing parties will take the majority of seats, some of their leaders have expressed their refusal to cooperate with Netanyahu. Perhaps for this reason, Netanyahu has done the unexpected by courting some of the most radical electorate among the “48 Palestinians” – the indigenous Arab people who immediately became residents of Israel due to their existence at the time of independence.
This is while the weak performance of other Israeli political parties, especially those on the center and left, does not increase the probability of a Jewish-Arab partnership. The Joint List, Labor, and Meretz – Israel’s middle and leftist parties – are currently projected to win little more than 20 seats in total. having no chance lacking about 40 seats.
Despite the fact that Likud is the strongest of these right-wing groups, Israel’s political turmoil is mostly due to the party’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the graft and bribery accusations he is facing. This is the primary reason why Israel will hold its fourth election in two years on March 23, with no credible means of electing a party with a strong majority to form a government that is not dependent on coalitions.
In order to cross the 61 Knesset seats threshold, whichever party leader is in a position to form an alliance would almost definitely require support from the Arab parties running in the election.
Racism is rooted in Israel’s denial of the authority of Arab parties in the country, including rejection of their funding from outside the coalition. It was a lesson learnt from Yitzhak Rabin’s experience in 1994, when he relied on the votes of five Arab MKs from outside the alliance to support his government and accept the Oslo Accords.
This move triggered bringing his government’s and the Accords’ credibility into question, a challenge that ended with Rabin’s assassination on November 4, 1995, by right-wing extremist Yigal Amir, who believed he was operating in compliance with a Judaic law that allowed him to assassinate the prime minister.
