Israel is undecided. It is politically split. On Tuesday, for a second time this year, voters did what voters do, and the conclusion is still, well, inconclusive.

In the coming days, both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is the head of the Likud party, and his main political opponent, General Benny Gantz, who is the head of the Blue and White Party, will attempt to convince the president, Reuven Rivlin, that each has a greater ability than his rival to form a stable coalition to govern Israel. Currently, the numbers do not add up for either of them. The most obvious path for both to a stable coalition — a unity government — is something neither seems to want.

The fog of battle, in other words, is still thick this morning. But some new realities about Israeli politics may nonetheless still be discernible. The election pitted two camps against one another, one supportive of the prime minister and the other opposing him. But the interesting part was the tactics that both camps used as their main means of rallying the troops. Both identified straw men (and women) against which to campaign, scaremongering about the two least favorable groups in the minds of mainstream Israeli voters: ultra-Orthodox Jews, and Muslim Arabs. That such dueling tactics led to a draw not once, but twice, tells us something about why we may be witnessing the end of the Netanyahu era, even if he does manage to find a way to hold on to power.

Back in the old days of Israeli politics, when Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was in power, the boundary of the political mainstream was marked by his famous saying: “Without Herut and without Maki.” This phrase put the right-wing predecessor of Likud — Herut — and the Communist Party — Maki — beyond the pale of political acceptability. Today, Herut and Maki no longer exist in the same way. And yet, we can see echoes of this sentiment in Israeli politics: There is a mainstream, and a periphery that most Israelis find objectionable.

My new book, “#IsraeliJudaism, Portrait of a Cultural Revolution,” co-authored with the pollster Camil Fuchs, contains the data that best explains what this periphery looks like. Ask Israelis to rank the groups that contribute to the success of the country, and year after year they say the same thing: At the bottom of the list of perceived contribution to Israel’s success, one finds Muslim Arab Israelis, and just a notch above them, ultra-Orthodox Jews, or Haredim.

From such data, we can understand the two camps’ choice of straw men. And once we do, the election starts looking less like a contest between a for-Netanyahu camp and a never-Netanyahu camp, and more like a contest between a never-Arab camp and a never-Haredi camp — with neither winning outright.

Israeli voters have long been suspicious of Arab representatives, whose agenda they view as influenced by the “Palestinian” cause rather than the “Israeli” interest. For the prime minister and his allies, scaring Israelis into turning out with talk of Arab voters and politicians is an old habit. In the 2015 election, Mr. Netanyahu’s infamous last-minute battle cry to his supporters mentioned Arab voters rushing to the polls “in droves.” In 2019 he used the same bag of tricks, with a slightly different angle: he hurled accusations about possible Arab voter fraud (to be fair, there are signs that such problem exists to a certain degree), and held an “emergency” meeting of advisers to strategize against an expected rise in the number of seats won by the Joint Arab List.

The Blue and White party is vulnerable to anti-Arab campaigns because, as most Israelis understand and the polls confirm, it has no way of forming a coalition without Arab support, unless it forms a unity government with Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud. But the elections proved that Likud has its own Achilles heel: It is vulnerable to a never-Haredi campaign. Likud made a choice long ago to glue itself, politically speaking, to the ultra-Orthodox parties. It is now paying the price.

The alliance with the ultra-Orthodox was not unreasonable for Likud, politically speaking. The Haredi parties are loyal, well managed, disciplined. It is easy to trade with them: Give them what they want — such as funds for their special schools, in which students study Torah but no math — and get their votes in return. Since there is rarely a conflict between what Likud wants and what the Haredi parties want, the bond was natural and strong.

But Israelis dislike Haredi representatives, who utilize political power to close stores on the sabbath, and demand support for young Haredi students who skip military service. And in this election cycle, Likud leaders have had to face the possibility that their alliance comes at a cost. The more unacceptable Haredi parties become to the general electorate, the more Likud is vulnerable to campaigns alleging, with solid evidence, that by voting for Mr. Netanyahu one is also voting for ultra-Orthodox dominance.

So, Mr. Netanyahu has discovered that the other camp has a straw man too, one that functions in a similar way. Which is scarier? Here’s the irony: The more Mr. Netanyahu succeeds in getting the Palestinian issue off the table, the more the voters have time to worry about other issues, such as state-religious affairs.

The politician that identified these dynamics better than all others was former Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, head of the Israel Beitenu Party. Mr. Lieberman forced the second round of elections and ran a masterful campaign based on a simple strategy: He was the only one representing the mainstream, by tapping into both anti-Arab and anti-ultra-Orthodox sentiments.

Mr. Lieberman has a long history of rallying anti-Arab sentiment for his campaigns. He once tried to pass a law that conditioned Israeli citizenship on a loyalty oath; he wanted the government of Israel to encourage Israeli Arabs to move to a Palestinian state by offering them “economic incentives.” In this election, he turned the same tactics against a new group: the Haredim. Mr. Lieberman said that he will refuse to sit with ultra-Orthodox parties in the same coalition until his terms are accepted: among them, equality in military service, and math and English in Haredi schools.

Based on this strategy, Mr. Lieberman almost doubled the number of seats he will have in the next Knesset, and made himself an undisputable kingmaker — no bloc can form a government without his support. More importantly, he may have also reshuffled the old map of Israeli politics. The besmirching of Arabs and Haredim during the campaign, often in words that ought to make a decent citizen cringe, resulted in both of these communities rushing to the polls to make their voices heard. If exit polls are to be believed, Arab Israelis and Haredi Jews will emerge from this election with more representatives in Israel’s parliament than before. Still, their political positions did not improve. In fact, the great social challenge of their marginality just became more pronounced.

The new rules Mr. Lieberman imposed on the campaign mean that an Israeli voter no longer has to be in the pocket of a right-wing religious coalition to reject a political partnership with the Arabs. They mean that an Israeli voter no longer has to be a member of a center-left camp to oppose the ultra-Orthodox parties. Mr. Lieberman is no Ben-Gurion, but he managed to re-create “without Herut and without Maki” for a 21st century reality.

This looks like a realignment of the political map that sends a simple and important message to Israel’s leaders: The mainstream wants to regain its dominance; the mainstream refuses to let minorities govern its future. The mainstream has a message for Haredim and Arabs: influence will only come with the acceptance of certain norms.

The political results of this message may be complicated. The sentiment, however, is not.

Shmuel Rosner (@rosnersdomain) is the political editor at The Jewish Journal, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a contributing opinion writer.

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Shmuel Rosner is the political editor at The Jewish Journal, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute and a contributing opinion writer. @rosnersdomain

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