Three Election Scenarios Nobody Is Talking About - with Gil Hoffman

Dan Senor (0:00)

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Gil Hoffman (0:27)

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Dan, I've written so many political eulogies of Netanyahu over the decades that I've covered him. And he's always found a way to come back. And you know, his father died at the age of 102 He's only turning 77 next week. He would try to be prime minister forever. And so, I think they should try to pass the indictment law and the term limit law and get him a pardon. Because then you know he's out of the way. And if he's been the cause of the political instability that made us have five elections in three and a half years and could make us have five elections the next three and a half years, then that could really be the key to stability. I think that's actually the key to everything.

Dan Senor (1:25)

It's 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, October 18th here in New York City. It's 4:30 a.m. on Monday, October 19th in Israel, as Israelis get ready to begin a new day.

Before we get started, two housekeeping notes, both about Thursday, October 22nd. First, just five days before the Israeli elections, Call Me Back will host a live taping at the Stryker Center at Temple Emanuel in New York City. I will sit down with Dan Shapiro, Dahlia Scheinlin, and Brett Stevens to discuss what's at stake in the election and what the results will mean for the U.S.-Israel relationship. Tickets are still available. To join us in person or to watch online, you must register in advance, so please follow the link in the show notes. I think it will be a very dynamic and rich and up-to-the-minute conversation with the elections only a few days away. Second, that same morning at 8 a.m. Eastern, we are hosting an open house for The Fold, our private community for listeners of Call Me Back and the rest of the ARC media family. If you've been curious about it, come see it for yourself before you join. I myself am on The Fold. You'll meet some of the people before the community, get a look at what's happening inside, and you can ask us anything. To register, follow the link in the show notes or go to arcmedia.org. Now on to today's episode. In just 10 days, Israelis go to the polls, and the conventional wisdom is that this election comes down to two possible outcomes. Either Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies win enough seats to form another government, or Gadi Eisenkot and the opposition parties manage to put together a coalition to replace him. But there's a problem with that framing. Israeli elections have a history of producing outcomes that nobody anticipated, and governments that look nothing like what voters thought they were voting for. Remember 2009?

Tzipi Livni's Kadima Party, which had been a new party at the time, won the most seats in the Knesset, 28, compared to Netanyahu's 27 seats. But Netanyahu was the one who became prime minister because he could assemble a coalition, and Livni could not. Or take 2021, Netanyahu's Likud was by far the largest party, but Naftali Bennett, whose Yamina Party had won just 7 seats, ended up becoming prime minister, leading one of the most unlikely coalitions in Israeli history. And this election, one that's days away may even be harder to predict. For one thing, the familiar left vs. right divide doesn't really describe the political landscape anymore. The coalition trying to replace Netanyahu includes not just centrist and left-leaning parties, but prominent right-wing figures as well like Naftali Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman. What unites these parties is less a shared ideology than a shared determination to replace Netanyahu. And even that may not be enough. Recent polls suggest neither bloc is guaranteed the 61 seats needed to form a government, which means that after the votes are counted, Israel could find itself facing weeks of negotiations, broken promises, unlikely alliances and political horse trading. Who might cross the aisle? Who might abandon an ally? And could someone other than Netanyahu or Eisenkot end up as prime minister? The outcome could be every bit as messy and unpredictable as the political circumstances that produced it. So today, rather than rehearse the two scenarios everybody's been talking about and that we have been talking about on this podcast in recent months, we're going to explore three scenarios that almost nobody is talking about. Joining us in a moment is Israeli political analyst Gil Hoffman, who's the former executive director of Honest Reporting, he's a political analyst for I24, and the author of a newly published book called The Blood Libel Machine. He is a prolific writer about Israel and Israeli politics. He spent decades covering the personalities, rivalries and backroom deals that shape Israeli politics. And since we recorded our conversation, President Trump offered his endorsement of Netanyahu.