Benjamin Netanyahu win in Israel election over Benny Gantz projected

JERUSALEM — The stars appeared to be aligned Tuesday night for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to win a fourth consecutive term after a hotly contested election in which a new centrist party headed by former military chief Benjamin “Benny” Gantz won a significant chunk of the country’s parliamentary seats.

While initial vote counts showed Mr. Gantz’s Blue and White party in a dead heat with Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party, the hawkish prime minister who has forged a close alliance with U.S. President Trump was projected to come out on top because of Likud’s ability to link up with smaller right-wing parties in the 120-seat parliament known as the Knesset.

In a twist akin to a U.S. presidential candidate facing a tight race for the popular vote but still taking the White House because of electoral college calculus, Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition with smaller parties was projected to have well over 60 seats in the final vote count — meaning he would be propelled to a fourth straight term, his fifth overall.

Both leading parties were claiming victory early Wednesday, hoping to shape public perceptions ahead of expected party coalition horse-trading that will ultimately shape the next government.

But analysts said there was little chance Israeli President Reuven Rivlin will give Mr. Gantz and his center-left allies a stab at forming a coalition. Mr. Rivlin is slated to make that decision after a final vote count is made official, likely on Wednesday.

Should there be an unexpected last-minute loss for Mr. Netanyahu, it would mean profound changes for the Israeli domestic scene and for U.S. policy in the region. Mr. Trump has figured prominently in Likud’s campaign advertising and has taken a number of policy steps in recent months widely seen as trying to tip the scales in Mr. Netanyahu’s favor.

The more than 10,000 ballot stations around Israel did not officially close until 10 p.m. Officials said voter turnout heading into the final hours was roughly 61 percent in a bitterly fought contest widely seen as a referendum focused squarely on Mr. Netanyahu, who has struggled with mounting corruption accusations in recent months.

Despite recommendations by Israel’s attorney general that Mr. Netanyahu face criminal charges on corruption in the coming months, some political analysts say the prime minister still has a loyal following.

“Many people are convinced the charges are part of a media plot, the same way some believe that about what has happened against Trump in the United States, and that Netanyahu is innocent,” Shmuel Sandler, an analyst on Israeli politics with the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv, said ahead of the vote.

“Even if he’s not innocent, many would prefer him over his opponents,” Mr. Sandler said of Mr. Netanyahu, whose time in office over the past decade has coincided with the collapse in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a rising confrontation with Iran and an overall nationalist shift to the right of Israel’s political landscape.

But the Netanyahu government can also point to a strong Israeli economy, Mr. Trump’s gestures to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, and recent diplomatic breakthroughs with key Arab states.

Looking for friends

As the votes were counted, the big question in the fractured political scene was which leader had enough friends to cobble together a majority government.

The Times of Israel assessed that a compilation of exit polls showed a potential Netanyahu-aligned right-wing bloc with 60 to 66 seats in the Knesset, while a center-left bloc was forecast to get just 47 to 50 and Arab parties from six to 12 — a wide gap amid reports of low turnout among Israeli Arabs.

The country and its media have been on edge since Friday when final opinion polls projected the contest would come down to the wire. Mr. Gantz, a well-known military figure but a political neophyte, had allied with centrist Yair Lapid and a collection of other former top military officials to pose a strong challenge to Mr. Netanyahu’s long dominance of the political scene.

Mr. Gantz has said that if he wins, he will cede the prime minister post to Mr. Lapid, a former finance minister and journalist, after 2½ years.

Mr. Sandler cautioned against the reliability of the late-night exit polls or preelection polls.

“I don’t trust the polls because in the last election they were very wrong,” he told The Washington Times before the vote. “Any prediction now would be irresponsible.”

With such a close vote in prospect, there is a revival of talk that Likud and the Blue and White party could end up in a coalition together through some form of unity government in the coming days. Past grand coalitions have typically worked out well for Mr. Netanyahu and not so well for his leftist rivals.

Martin Kramer, an American-Israel scholar at Shalem College in Jerusalem, argued that if the final tally puts Mr. Netanyahu firmly on top, then the Blue and White party could reverse course and accept an offer to bring its centrist seats into a coalition with Likud.

“I don’t think that Gantz joined politics to sit in the opposition,” he said. “I think he would cast it as saving Israel from the alternative extreme-right partners who would bring about the alienation of Israel from the United States, American Jewry, etc., etc. So, it would become sort of an emergency situation.”

But some theorize that Mr. Gantz’s party might offer to accept Likud into a coalition of its own — on the condition that the divisive Mr. Netanyahu steps down. Such a development could stave off a looming legal standoff in the Knesset around the corruption accusations against Mr. Netanyahu, who has denied wrongdoing and vowed to fight what he says are politically motivated charges.

Mr. Netanyahu pulled out all the stops during the final days of campaigning. At one point Tuesday, news cameras found him scrambling along a beach north of Tel Aviv to rouse people from the sand and surf, where many Israelis are known to spend the election day holiday, to make sure to vote.

“If they stay at the beach and don’t vote, they’ll wake up tomorrow with Yair Lapid as the head of a left-wing government,” Mr. Netanyahu said, according to the Israeli news website Haaretz. “If you want to continue with Likud, and with me, then you need to go vote. Go to the beach after!”

Wooing the right

Mr. Netanyahu, 69, also spent the final days appealing to the bloc of smaller, far-right parties that Likud will need to form a coalition to retain power. The 59-year-old Mr. Gantz, meanwhile, hurled invective at the prime minister, telling voters that such a coalition would amount to a government of extremism.

While the issue of Israeli-Palestinian relations was largely avoided for much of the campaign, it became a centerpiece down the stretch, with Mr. Netanyahu saying he would support annexation of controversial Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank — a position long advocated by far-right parties in the Knesset and decried by Palestinian leaders.

Mr. Gantz refused to stake out a hard position on the matter but suggested that Blue and White wouldn’t support any unilateral move to wield sovereignty over West Bank settlements. He also said Mr. Netanyahu was engaging in reckless theatrics to stir up right-wing voters.

“Releasing a strategic and historic decision in an election campaign bubble is not serious,” Mr. Gantz said in an interview with the Israeli news website Ynet. “Why not ask how it is that, for 13 years, Netanyahu could have annexed and didn’t?”

Mr. Sandler told The Times that the annexation issue “is the dividing line, and you must remember that the majority of Israelis are still against annexation even if they vote for Likud.”

“I don’t think Netanyahu will actually do it,” he said. “He’s just saying it. He knows there’s opposition to it in the United States and in Europe, and I don’t think even Trump would support it, and Trump is Netanyahu’s best friend. So, it’s just a way of trying to stir up votes on the far right at the last minute.”

The Trump administration, which is slated in the coming weeks or months to roll out its long-anticipated Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, is watching the vote closely. While Mr. Trump is seen as a personal friend and political ally of Mr. Netanyahu, the president has stayed neutral on the election. He told an audience of Jewish Republicans in Las Vegas over the weekend that both Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gantz are “good people.”

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, meanwhile, said he hoped the outcome of Israel’s election, whatever it may be, will help Israel “come to the negotiating table” with Palestinians.

“Our hands remain extended in peace,” Mr. Abbas said from his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, according to The Associated Press. He stressed, however, that Palestinians would reject a peace brokered by the Trump administration, which Palestinian leaders say is far too favorable to Israel.

Some leading Palestinians said the voting results were not encouraging for a peace deal.

“What the exit polls suggest is that Israelis have voted to preserve the status quo, they have said no to peace and yes to the occupation,” said veteran Palestinian diplomat Saeb Erekat. “The fact that so far only 18 out of 120 elected members of the Israeli parliament support the two-state solution on the 1967 border is a consequence of the culture of impunity granted to Israel.”

Another major focus of the campaign has been getting younger Israelis to vote. With more than 40 percent of Israelis younger than 25, issues such as traffic congestion, apartment prices and marijuana legalization — something Mr. Netanyahu has said he will consider if he wins — have often taken center stage.

Local news outlets have had a field day with the marijuana issue, with reports regularly describing thick pot smoke at rallies, including among some held by right-wing candidates.

The left-leaning newspaper Haaretz ran with a headline Tuesday that said: “Israeli Election’s Dangerous Surprise: Pro-pot Jewish Evangelist Who Wants a Holy War.”

It was a reference to far-right candidate Moshe Feiglin, who is advocating for marijuana legalization. It was not clear, based on exit polls, whether Mr. Feiglin had won a seat in the Knesset.