After the Peace Plan

March 2: Israel Parliamentary Elections
Likud: 29.5%
Blue and White: 26.6%
Joint List: 12.6%
Shas: 7.7%
UTJ: 6%
Labor–Gesher–Meretz: 5.8%
Yisrael Beiteinu: 5.8%
Yamina: 5.2%

Around five weeks before Israel’s national election on March 2, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood on a White House stage, a broad smile on his face as Donald Trump unveiled a peace plan that seemed to fulfil many of Netanyahu’s wildest dreams: almost all of Jerusalem would remain in Israel’s hands; the 750,000 Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem and the West Bank would stay put, with large swaths of the West Bank annexed to Israel. The plan also made an offer to Palestinians: the establishment of what the White House referred to as a Palestinian “state,” conditioned on a set of internal reforms in governance, education, and finance. A demilitarized semi-autonomous entity, it would be surrounded by Israel. Israel would maintain overarching security control, such as the ability to make arrests in the Palestinian territory. Palestinian leaders, who were not consulted on the plan, rejected it even before it was released as falling hopelessly short. Netanyahu endorsed it, saying it pointed to a “brilliant future.” 

Israeli commentators called the plan’s timing a boon to Netanyahu. A close ally of Trump, Netanyahu was looking weaker by the day after more than a decade of continuous rule. Having failed to form a ruling coalition after two previous elections in April and September 2019, he was now facing a third. And he was confronting grave legal trouble: Israel’s attorney general had charged him with bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. Netanyahu is accused of trading regulatory favors in exchange for positive media coverage, offering to help a publisher if he burnished Netanyahu’s image in his newspaper, and accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts from billionaire associates. (His trial starts March 17.) 

Netanyahu’s rival, the retired general Benny Gantz of the center-right Blue and White party, hammered on the indictments, proclaiming that a prime minister facing charges was unfit to serve. Netanyahu’s refusal to step down and Gantz’s refusal to partner with him to build a broad coalition led to the stalemate of Israel’s repeat elections.

Israel’s March election was held as the country, like so many around the world, is trying to contain the spread of the new coronavirus. According to Israel’s emergency medical service, around 4,000 quarantined Israelis voted in special polling places, with poll workers wearing hazmat suits and voters donning plastic gloves and face masks. But fear of the virus didn’t stop Israelis from heading to the polls; the country saw the highest turnout of the three elections over a year-long period, with 71 percent of eligible Israelis voting. 

Now that the election has passed—and Netanyahu has once again failed to gain a majority—it’s time to look at whether Trump’s pro-Israel peace plan did in fact aid Netanyahu in his quest to remain in power. Netanyahu did well but potentially not well enough. His Likud party garnered 36 seats as opposed to Blue and White’s 33. In partnership with other right wing parties, he can form a bloc of 58 seats—three seats shy of a majority coalition he needs to rule. The next step in the process falls to President Reuven Rivlin. Rivlin holds a largely ceremonial role except for elections, when he chooses which candidate will get the first crack at forming a parliamentary majority. Rivlin will make his decision after asking parliament members whom they support for the task; it’s safe to assume that more will endorse Netanyahu than Gantz. 

But if and when Netanyahu is handed the chance to cobble together a government, it’s not at all certain that he’ll be able to do it. If he can’t get at least three defectors from centrist or even left parties to join him, then his hoped-for fifth consecutive term may fall through his fingertips. That would likely leave Gantz to try next, but the math doesn’t necessarily add up for him either. The two leaders have so far resisted a partnership; there’s still a big chance that Israelis will return, Groundhog Day style, to the polls for a fourth election.

“Nothing is clear yet,” Gideon Rahat, a Senior Fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, told me “I’m sure that Gantz lost but I’m not sure that Netanyahu won.”

Netanyahu campaigned on annexation and his record as an international statesman. Gantz promised to fix Israel’s ailing infrastructure and improve healthcare while criticizing Netanyahu for not doing enough to deter rocket attacks from militant groups in Gaza. The two are not entirely far apart on policy—both emphasize Israel’s security—but they differ slightly on the peace plan. Gantz takes a more cautious approach on making the settlements a permanent part of Israel. 

The final days of the campaign were especially nasty, with leaked recordings of private conversations that smeared both sides. In one, a political strategist for Gantz is heard betraying fears that his candidate could endanger Israel because he won’t have the “guts to strike Iran.” In a previous election, Likud plastered Israel with posters of Netanyahu shaking hands with Trump. But this election’s most notable Likud ad had racial undertones; it included a photograph of Gantz with Arab parliamentarian Ahmad Tibi, suggesting that Gantz needs Arab support in order to form a government. Gantz’s billboards, on the other hand, drew a distinction between himself and Netanyahu in the face of Netanyahu’s upcoming trial. Gantz “cares about Israel” they read, while Netanyahu “cares about himself.” 

If the peace plan helped Likud pick up extra seats in the March vote (in the previous election it had won four fewer), it might be because it served as a distraction from Netanyahu’s legal woes. Netanyahu positions himself as a politician who almost single handedly transformed his tiny country—there are just 8.7 million Israelis—into a major player on the global stage. The cover on his Facebook page is a video of Netanyahu meeting with world leaders—handshakes with Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, hugs with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro—as action movie music plays. Netanyahu often touts his behind-the-scenes ties with Gulf states that share with Israel a common enemy in Iran. These ties appear to be warming in spite of the fact that Israel continues to rule over the Palestinians. Historically, these states have predicated their acceptance of Israel on an end to its military occupation. 

The peace plan and the optics of its release—while Trump met with Gantz about it as well, only Netanyahu stood by the president’s side at the unveiling—may have helped Netanyahu regain the narrative that he’s a statesman, not just an alleged crook. The timing aided this point. Netanyahu withdrew his request for parliamentary immunity, which would have protected him from prosecution while in office, as Trump was getting ready to release the plan. It wasn’t a show of sudden humility; the parliament would have likely rejected his request anyway. 

When the formal charges landed on January 28, Netanyahu likely hoped they looked frivolous in comparison to his undertaking with the Trump plan. And yet, Rahat believes that Netanyahu knew the distraction would only last a few days. That’s why he had to come up with new ways to impress the Israeli voting public, like negotiating the release of an Israeli imprisoned on drug charges in Russia, or traveling to Uganda, where he met with Sudan’s transitional head of state in an effort to thaw chilly relations with Israel.

Netanyahu also used one element of the peace plan to speak directly to his right wing voters: the promise of West Bank annexation. After initially indicating he would do it right away, he changed his tune to wait until after the election, apparently bowing to U.S. pressure to hold back. Annexation would turn the settlements, now under military administration like the rest of the West Bank, into official Israeli cities and towns. (Today Israeli settlers are under regular Israeli law; Palestinians, who are not Israeli citizens, are under Israeli military law.) 

By focusing on this one aspect of the plan, Netanyahu sought to distract from some of the blistering criticism of the plan emanating from part of his security-minded nationalist base; settlers don’t like that the plan offers the Palestinians any territory at all. Still, Netanyahu has long courted—and often gained—settler votes, and he delivered some key settler trinkets in this round. A week before the election, he advanced the construction of thousands of Israeli homes in an open area near Jerusalem known as E1. Building there will cut East Jerusalem from parts of the West Bank, making it harder for a Palestinian state to take root. 

Gantz, who also supports the peace plan, similarly tried to use annexation to his advantage, when he toured the West Bank’s Jordan Valley, which the Trump plan proposes as Israel’s new eastern border—looking like a “very pale version of Netanyahu,” Haaretz noted—to talk about making it part of Israel. But Gantz soft-pedaled on the annexation-speak, saying that he would only do it in “coordination with the international community,” knowing full well that most countries vehemently disagree with such a move, which would obliterate the two-state solution.

It seems like the peace plan could have also energized Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up about 20 percent of Israel’s population. On Monday in Baqa al Gharbiyye, an Arab-majority town in northern Israel, voters said they took the Trump plan personally. The town is one of several in the so-called triangle, an Israeli area that abuts the West Bank. Trump’s proposal made the explosive suggestion—one not new in Israeli politics—that the triangle could become part of a future Palestine. That would mean the people there would be stripped of Israeli citizenship. (Netanyahu said that he would not implement this part of the plan.)

At a polling station inside a school with sky blue columns, 19-year-old Leen Abu Toumeh told me the Trump plan motivated her vote. “We will decide where we want to live,” she said. “Trump wanted to mess with the elections. The opposite happened—more people are coming out to vote.” 

She voted for the Joint List, a consortium of Arab parties that has decried the Trump plan. This election, the List undertook a vigorous get-out-the-vote effort which included last-minute pleas from activists broadcasted over loudspeakers on mosques, according to Haaretz. It seems to have paid off; the Joint List bumped to 15 seats from 13. The List’s candidates, mostly Palestinian citizens of Israel, reflect diverse ideologies, including Communists, Islamists, secularists, anti-Zionists, and others. They run as a unit to increase their power in the Israeli parliament. 

Historically, the parties that make up the List have been focused on ending the Israeli occupation. That’s still a priority, but in recent elections they’ve also talked about improving life for Palestinian citizens of Israel. Over the past year they have emphasized reducing violent crime in Arab areas, staging a protest movement against what they call police neglect in order to get the authorities to confiscate weapons and imprison criminals.  

As for the fate of the settlements, Netanyahu’s strong showing could allow him to annex them soon. But if Gantz somehow ends up as prime minister, they’ll almost certainly stay put even if they’re not annexed right away. There’s hardly any political will in Israel to uproot the settlements, which have been growing for the past five decades and now host a third generation of Israelis. And now the settlements, deemed illegal by the United Nations Security Council, have an almost direct line to the White House. The American ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, is a staunch supporter; he helped underwrite a Jewish school in Beit El, outside Ramallah, the headquarters of the Palestinian Authority.

With all the talk of annexation before the election, Rahat says that the peace plan has become little more than a campaign talking point, especially since Palestinians have already rejected it. It makes him skeptical of what it might be able to achieve for Israelis and Palestinians. “If a peace plan is just an electoral spin, that is not the way you get peace.”