The Common Sense of Israel’s Voting Public

I am an avid reader of Haviv Rettig Gur, and his latest essay in Mosaic, “How and Why Israelis Vote,” is a timely reminder of what makes him so good. In explaining Israel’s April 9 elections a week before they took place, he laid out the key elements clearly and thoroughly while providing balanced, trenchant, and thought-provoking analysis.

In responding, I want to offer three observations that build on what he wrote and that focus attention on Israel’s voting public, whose common sense and sound judgment have been obscured by the media’s incessant focus on what made this year’s campaign the ugliest since the 1981 elections. In buttressing my claims, I will make use of findings in the 70 surveys commissioned by the country’s leading news outlets during the course of the campaign (available in Hebrew here), three polls carried out by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI, accessible in Hebrew here), and of course the final results themselves.

First, despite oft-repeated claims that voters were successfully manipulated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s tactics of demonizing his opponents, or were seduced by the intervention of foreign leaders bearing gifts, the four-million-plus Israelis who voted were hardly swayed by either of those things. To the contrary, they demonstrated the stability of their commitments by remaining loyal to the ideological blocs with which they identified prior to the campaign. Even President Trump’s decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty in the Golan, and Vladimir Putin’s arranging the return from Syria of the remains of Zachary Baumel, an Israeli soldier long missing in action, caused but a momentary upward blip for the prime minister and the Likud party he heads.