WASHINGTON — Wednesday was a hard day for pro-Israel liberals.
Some of the dejection arose from sheer surprise over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s victory, and especially the size of his margin. The pre-election polling — by law, polls can’t be published within five days of voting — showed Netanyahu’s Likud Party trailing Isaac Herzog’s Zionist Union, the main opposition that allies Israel’s historic center-left Labor Party with the smaller centrist party of former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.
On Tuesday, the exit polling found Likud essentially tied with the Zionist Union. Netanyahu’s apparent 30-to-24 seat advantage over Herzog in Israel’s 120-member parliament emerged only when nearly all the votes had been counted in Wednesday’s early morning hours.
But far more disturbing than Netanyahu’s electoral miracle was the way he brought it about. Seen abstractly as a matter of pure politics, his moves were brilliant. Viewed in light of Israel’s long-term survival, they were reckless, or worse.
Netanyahu’s only path to survival was to boost Likud’s vote and seat-share at the expense of smaller right-wing parties. And so he tacked hard to the right. He abandoned his publicly stated support for a Palestinian state and engaged in what The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg saw as a version of the old Republican “Southern strategy” that had been aimed at consolidating white votes.