Netanyahu’s January 6 Moment
· The Atlantic
No one can mistake me for a supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or an apologist on his behalf. Over the years, I’ve published hundreds of articles criticizing him and warning of the great damage he has caused to Israel. My criticism only grew stronger after October 7, 2023, when my entire family was almost murdered under his watch.
Still, in conversations with American friends who share my dislike for Netanyahu, I often find myself rejecting and correcting one line of criticism: “Netanyahu is just like Trump.” The two populist leaders are close in age and share a similar style of politics, but until recently, they were also separated by a major difference, one that Netanyahu, to my mind, deserved credit for: Unlike Donald Trump, he was not an election denier. When he won—and he did, most of the time—he took the win. But when he lost, he didn’t try to throw out the votes of the Israeli people in order to remain in power.
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Sadly, this distinction between Trump and Netanyahu no longer holds. Over the past two weeks, Trump has more or less accepted his party’s crushing defeat in the U.S. midterm elections (apart from one social-media post, which I’ll touch on in a moment), while Netanyahu has refused to respect the results of Israel’s election last month and has tried to overturn them in ways that resemble the U.S. president’s role in stoking the events of January 6, 2021.
This is something new. When Netanyahu lost reelection in 1999, after his first term as prime minister, he accepted defeat without challenging the foundations of Israeli democracy. He did the same when he led the Likud party to its worst-ever result, in 2006. After his return to power in 2009, he won two more elections, but in 2019 and 2020, he failed three times to win a majority in a series of deadlocked elections. In none of these elections did he try to dispute the results, even though they were uncomfortable for him.
The gap that once existed between Netanyahu and Trump was most obvious in 2021. In the first week of that year, Trump’s refusal to accept Joe Biden’s victory, and his cries of a stolen election, paved the way for an armed insurrection. Netanyahu lost power six months later, when Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid succeeded in creating Israel’s short-lived “government of change.” Unlike Trump, he didn’t deny the results or incite his supporters to question the legitimacy of the election. Instead, he moved to the opposition benches of the Knesset and staged a comeback the following year, when the Bennett-Lapid government collapsed.
Some fellow Netanyahu critics would point out, correctly, that when Netanyahu lost power in 2021, Biden was in the White House, and therefore any attempt to stage an illegal power grab would have run into strong headwinds from Washington. This is true, but until recently, I believed that even without the threat of a harsh American rebuke, Netanyahu still would have done the right thing and allowed for a peaceful transition of power. The events of the past weeks have convinced me otherwise.
On Monday, Trump put up a social-media post in which he questioned for the first time the validity of the midterm results. America mostly shrugged. For now, the president has shown no sign of the dangerous urgency with which he disputed Biden’s victory in 2020. Trump’s original response to the Republican Party’s collapse—he distanced himself from the results (“I wasn’t on the ballot”), blamed specific lawmakers for their losses, and said that the Iran war was worth the electoral shellacking—seems more authentic than his rant about how wrong the polls turned out to be.
Israel, however, faces a real crisis that has received relatively little coverage by American media, which has been singularly focused on the midterms.
This crisis began in the days leading up to the October 27 election, when public-opinion polls predicted that Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up approximately 20 percent of the country’s population, would be voting in historically high numbers. In the previous election, in 2022, just over half of Arab Israeli voters cast a ballot, while just over 70 percent of the overall voting population did. The parties representing the Arab population won only 10 seats out of the Knesset’s total of 120.
Before this year’s election, Yousef Makladeh, the top pollster surveying Israel’s Arab population, estimated that approximately 70 percent of Arab Israelis would vote this time, and that the parties representing them would receive at least 17 seats. Because the seats in the Knesset are allocated to parties based on their proportion of the vote, Makladeh’s prediction (which ended up being too cautious) meant that the bloc of parties supporting Netanyahu—his own Likud party, the ultra-Orthodox parties, and the far right—had no chance of winning a majority as it did in 2022.
[Gal Beckerman: The bursting of the Tel Aviv bubble]
On Friday, October 23, four days before the election, Israel’s Channel 12 aired a news report stating that Likud was preparing to dispute the results of the election with unfounded claims of widespread irregularities in Arab cities and villages. Israel doesn’t allow early voting of any kind, except for diplomats stationed abroad and soldiers serving on remote bases—which means that this news item was broadcast before a single vote had been cast in any Arab polling station anywhere in the country.
Netanyahu’s party “is examining a list of possible complaints regarding irregularities in the Arab vote, ahead of election day and afterwards,” the report said. “These include women voting with veils, voting hours in Bedouin communities, and the ages of election workers at the polls.” The same report also noted that Likud and Religious Zionism—a far-right party in the pro-Netanyahu bloc—“will dispatch 2,000 election-integrity overseers to polling stations in the Arab sector.”
Just as Trump’s claims of fraud in 2020 began appearing before the election and intensified once it became clear that he had lost, Netanyahu was laying the groundwork for a similar scenario. But unlike Trump, he found willing accomplices within the very institutions tasked with protecting the integrity of the election.
On the morning of the election, hours before the polls opened, the Israeli police announced that it had arrested three activists affiliated with the United Arab List, one of the two main parties representing Arab voters, on suspicion of “election bribery.” The statement included grainy photos of envelopes that were found in the activists’ homes, supposedly containing thousands of shekels that were meant to be distributed to citizens in Arab towns in return for their votes.
Netanyahu’s campaign pounced on the news, bombarding the airwaves and social media with angry and apocalyptic statements about an attempt to steal the election. My Haaretz colleagues Bar Peleg and Omer Benjakob calculated that Netanyahu published or shared more than 70 posts on election day warning of the high Arab turnout and the threat of the election being stolen.
Eleven years ago, during Israel’s 2015 election, Netanyahu tried to energize his base by publishing a panicky video statement in the middle of election day, warning that “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” That video was strongly criticized at the time by the Obama administration, Democrats in Congress, and parts of the American Jewish community, leading Netanyahu to issue a rare apology after the election and host several Arab lawmakers in his office for a lengthy conversation on the needs of their constituents.
Compared with the bluntly racist content that he shared on this year’s election day, the 2015 video looks like a polite infomercial. “Supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood are storming the polling stations and stealing the election,” he wrote in one post. “You have to watch this,” he wrote in another, sharing a video showing Muslim women with their faces covered outside a polling station in southern Israel. Three hours before voting ended, a journalist thought to be close to Netanyahu reported that Likud had filed more than 700 complaints about “irregularities” in the Arab sector with Israel’s Central Elections Committee.
[Graeme Wood: Netanyahu goes into full panic mode]
When the dust cleared on the morning of October 28, two things became obvious. First, that the Arabs had indeed arrived “in droves” this time, breaking every previous record and securing an unprecedented 19 seats for their political parties. Second, that Netanyahu’s campaign had been effective, to a point: His scaremongering drove up turnout in Likud strongholds, bringing the party to a surprisingly positive result of 27 seats.
Even so, Netanyahu has no path to forming a government. The Zionist parties that oppose him won 48 seats (one is held by my father, who ran as part of Naftali Bennett’s “Together” list). Combined with the 19 seats that the Arab parties won, this would be more than enough to keep Netanyahu very far from any possibility of assembling a coalition.
But instead of recognizing the results and accepting the fact that his bloc of parties had shrunk from 68 seats in the outgoing Knesset to only 53 in the new one, Netanyahu doubled and then tripled down on the stolen-election narrative, just as the Channel 12 report before the election had predicted he would do.
The place to watch this campaign of lies take hold in real time was Channel 14, the country’s most pro-Netanyahu television outlet. When Trump denied the results of the 2020 election, Fox News largely cooperated with his unfounded claims, specifically the conspiracy theory involving voting machines (which ended up costing the network hundreds of millions of dollars). Channel 14 played a similar role for Netanyahu, with endless broadcasts about the “stolen election” and the use of the term polling-sites terrorism to describe the Arab public’s participation in Israeli democracy.
In some ways, Channel 14 went even further than Fox. After all, in 2020, the Fox News Decision Desk, led by the analyst Arnon Mishkin, first placed Arizona in Biden’s column, ruining Trump’s plan to declare victory on Election Night before most votes had been counted. Channel 14’s pollster, by contrast, continued to show the pro-Netanyahu bloc winning a majority for long hours on election night, even when all other Israeli channels were predicting the exact opposite. When the final results resembled those channels’ exit polls and not Channel 14’s prediction, a useful explanation emerged: The Arabs had cheated and stolen the election.
A dramatic headline came out two days after the election: Israel’s Shin Bet, the intelligence agency responsible for, among other things, protecting Israeli democracy, was investigating an alleged attempt by a foreign country to influence the election by bolstering the Arab parties. The investigation began before election day but was made public only after the results had been published.
The current head of the Shin Bet is David Zini, a former general with close ties to those in Netanyahu’s orbit. He was handpicked for the job by the prime minister despite having no prior intelligence background, and despite being opposed by almost every living former chief of the organization. Zini has faced public criticism over the fact that one of his brothers has been charged with smuggling goods worth hundreds of thousands of shekels into Hamas-controlled areas of Gaza.
On election day, Zini gave a short statement at the headquarters of the Central Elections Committee, alongside Noam Sohlberg, a conservative supreme court justice who serves as the head of the committee. Zini said that the election had been “safe, proper, and supervised,” seemingly contradicting Likud’s claims of widespread irregularities. But a day later, he met Netanyahu and presented to him raw intelligence pointing to the possibility of foreign intervention on behalf of the Arab parties. According to reports in the Israeli media, only after sharing the information with Netanyahu did Zini update Sohlberg on his explosive suspicion.
Sohlberg gave Zini a formal letter permitting the Shin Bet to broaden its investigation into the allegations. Shortly afterward, that letter was leaked to the media, and was immediately followed by a bombastic Likud statement that the elections had been “stolen by Arab parties that support terrorism.” Netanyahu’s party accused the Arab parties of using “bribery, violence, threats, and cheating” to alter the election results. Never before in Israel’s history had a political party—certainly not the ruling one—issued such severe allegations against its political rivals.
Likud ministers and members of the Knesset quickly began demanding that the election be nullified altogether. Netanyahu stopped short of this but shared several videos on social media calling to annul the results and hold a new election instead. This message was then repeated endlessly by Channel 14 and other pro-Netanyahu media outlets. Netanyahu’s far-right allies, such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, also joined the call.
On January 6, 2021, the U.S. Capitol Police stopped an insurrectionist mob from taking over Congress and derailing the election-certification process. Federal and state judges played key roles in blocking Trump’s attempts to overturn the election with fake electors and other schemes. Last but not least, Trump’s vice president at the time, Mike Pence, refused to go along with the real-life plot against America.
[Joe Biden: What Trump did on January 6 ‘should follow him to his grave’]
In Israel, the plot fell apart once the courts and the attorney general got involved. The case against the three activists who were arrested on election day, supposedly on their way to deliver envelopes full of cash to potential voters, collapsed within days, when a judge pressed the police for evidence and discovered that little to none existed. The activists were released to house arrest and later had all restrictions removed. Multiple Israeli news outlets reported that the tip that had led to their arrest came directly from Netanyahu’s chief of staff, bypassing the chain of command in order to manufacture dramatic headlines just before the polls opened.
The Shin Bet investigation has also run into a dead end. Zini’s original suspicion, as presented to Justice Sohlberg, involved tens of millions of shekels that had supposedly been funneled to Israel’s Arab parties illegally. However, he has been able to show only one suspicious transfer of funds, to a retiring lawmaker, worth several hundred thousand shekels. The allegation is notable and must be investigated, but it is a far cry from the headlines that conquered the national agenda two weeks ago, when Sohlberg’s letter authorizing an investigation was published.
Israel’s attorney general and a senior police team that has been tasked to work with the Shin Bet on this investigation remain highly skeptical of Zini’s claims and, more crucial, of his motives. After igniting a public firestorm, Zini has so far failed to present any evidence to back up his accusations. Sohlberg, a religious justice who lives in a West Bank settlement and is respected by both liberals and conservatives in Israel, announced last week that the investigation will have no impact on the election results—and indeed, last week the Central Elections Committee officially ratified them. On Tuesday, a new Knesset was sworn in, including the 19 lawmakers from the Arab parties.
Netanyahu failed, but his fight is not over. He still hopes to remain in power and force another election on Israel. He’s likely counting on internal conflicts to sink the so-called change bloc, which now has a clear majority in the Knesset, but is divided over ideological questions. By peddling lies about a stolen election, the prime minister is trying to erode the legitimacy of any political cooperation between the Zionist opposition and the Arab parties. That way, he can discredit the results, even without having them overturned.