Could a Jewish politician joining an Islamist party shake up Israel's elections?

**Allison Kaplan Sommer** (0:05)
Hello, and welcome to the Haaretz Election Podcast. I'm Allison Kaplan Sommer. Yet again, we are recording with one eye squarely fixed on the upcoming Israeli election and the other eye on the conflict between Iran and the United States. Israelis were braced for Donald Trump's threatens large-scale weekend strike on Iran, which seemed certain to pull them directly into the conflict. And then, early Sunday morning, came the news that US President Trump said he had canceled, yet again, a strike against Iran after Middle Eastern countries asked Washington to hold off claiming that the outlines of a deal with Iran had been agreed upon. So there may or may not be more Iranian missiles in Israel's future, but there will definitely be an election and there is certainly a campaign. Joining me to discuss the developments of the past week, how they are affecting the conversations among potential Israeli voters, and as we will get to about Israeli citizens who may choose not to vote, are Haaretz columnist Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin and Haaretz correspondent Nagham Zbeedat.
Welcome Dahlia and Nagham.

**Dahlia Scheindlin** (1:22)
Thank you for having me.

**Nagham Zbeedat** (1:23)
Thank you for having us.

**Allison Kaplan Sommer** (1:24)
I am not in the studio, as you see, as those watching on YouTube can see. I'm recording remote during a stay in the United States, which currently has a travel warning to Israel. That's reassuring. The Israeli military is still on high alert, preparing defense systems for a possible escalation, which if we believe Trump today is not happening for now, but could still happen.
Dahlia, Nagham, tell me first of all, how you are holding up there, how the people around you are holding up. We've been through all of this before, but the roller coaster ride is not a lot of fun. And mostly, how is all of this uncertainty with Trump and Netanyahu, who was at the White House last week, affecting or not affecting the mood around politics and the election campaign?

**Dahlia Scheindlin** (2:08)
Okay, I think that on the personal level, I'm going through what everybody's going through, which is fundamentally, I think, a sense of insecurity. It's hard to plan. People don't know if not only, I mean, I think a lot of people talk about, can we go on vacation or not? Can we fly or not? For 100% of the people, it's a question of, will we be locked into the neighborhood? Do we have to run into shelters? It's much more of a day-to-day reality than just the question of whether you get on a plane or not over the next few weeks. So I think that it's a different mentality when the wars are on, because you really plan minute to minute, barely. Everything you try to do during the day is interrupted all the time. You have a whole different set of noises around you. You hear the different kinds of alerts on your telephone. You develop an associative response to them.
You know, it's hard to think about things in a concentrated way. And that's a whole different mindset from regular life. That's on the personal level. I think that at the political level, in a way, I think that Israeli society has gotten used to the fact that there's never really a clear end for anything.
That's what they got used to with Gaza. That's what they got used to with Lebanon. And that's what they're getting used to with Iran. And I don't see how it fundamentally changes the political dynamics we're seeing in surveys, because all of that has been factored in. And yet, the surveys, as any listener has heard me say for a very long time, for about two years have been extremely stable.

**Allison Kaplan Sommer** (3:32)
Nagham, do you see things the same way?

**Nagham Zbeedat** (3:33)
For Palestinian citizens of Israel, the possible breakout of war with Iran will only add another layer of wars that we have been experiencing, whether it was in the crime violence in the Arab community, the violence in the West Bank, the ongoing war in Gaza Strip. It won't add a really significant difference, but rather another addition of trauma, of stress, of anxiety, which will refocus Palestinian voters from this upcoming election, because for now the question will be, will there be another war?
Will our summer plans be any different? Or will another war with Iran only add another layer of struggle?

**Allison Kaplan Sommer** (4:21)
So let's go over as we like to do with a look at the numbers, as aggregated in the Haaretz election tracker, which averages all of the major polls over the previous week. Breaking things down by political block, there has been a tiny little fluctuation since last week. The Netanyahu block of the current coalition partners, Likud, the Ultra-Orthodox and the extreme right has made it back up to 50 seats after dropping to 49 last week, which looked really low. The Jewish slash Zionist parties that are opposed to Netanyahu, who say that they will refuse to join in a coalition with him, are hanging on at 60 seats within striking distance of the 61 seats needed to form a coalition.