{"text":[[{"start":6.468,"text":"Five years ago, Israel’s opposition leaders crossed a political Rubicon. Desperate to end Benjamin Netanyahu’s then 12-year hold on power, Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman and allies from other Jewish parties brought an Arab faction into an Israeli government for the first time."}],[{"start":24.491,"text":"In the wake of this week’s election, seen by many Israelis as one of the most important in the country’s near-80-year history, a similar cast of opposition leaders is facing a similar choice."}],[{"start":35.308,"text":"When counting finished on Thursday, the bloc of Jewish opposition parties centred around former general Gadi Eisenkot’s Yashar party found themselves trailing Netanyahu’s far-right coalition. Just as five years ago, co-operation with Israel’s Arab parties would enable them to oust Netanyahu. But this time, they are hesitating."}],[{"start":54.531,"text":"“The opposition has 67 out of 120 seats. They won,” says Dan Ben-David, head of the Shoresh Institution for socio-economic research. “If they lose now it’s of their own making.”"}],[{"start":65.365,"text":"The hesitation is partly a reaction to what happened five years ago. Spanning Israel’s political spectrum from rightwing to left, centrists and Islamists, and with little in common beyond a desire to oust Netanyahu, the change coalition quickly fell apart as he worked relentlessly to undermine it. Barely 18 months later he was back in the prime minister’s office."}],[{"start":null,"text":"

"}],[{"start":86.145,"text":"But it is also a reflection of how Hamas’s attack on October 7 2023 has reinforced the Israeli public’s decades-long shift to the right and deepened the already profound suspicion and hostility between the country’s Jewish majority and the Palestinians who make up 20 per cent of its population."}],[{"start":103.076,"text":"“There has been a decrease in the number of Jewish Israelis who think . . . that an Israeli who identifies as part of the Palestinian nation can be also a loyal citizen of the state of Israel,” says Tamar Hermann, senior research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based think-tank."}],[{"start":120.47,"text":"“More and more people think that this is impossible because, in the eyes of many [Jewish] Israelis, the two sides have incompatible aims and visions for the future.”"}],[{"start":120.97,"text":"A half century of change"}],[{"start":130.208,"text":"The tectonic plates of Israeli politics began shifting long before October 7."}],[{"start":137.137,"text":"For almost 30 years after its establishment in 1948, Israel was dominated by Mapai, the socialist party set up by the country’s secular founding leader, David Ben-Gurion. But the left’s monopoly on power was finally broken when Menachem Begin’s Likud won a landslide victory in the 1977 election. That changed everything. Likud has been in office for 38 of the past 50 years."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":163.8,"text":"Israel’s leftwing forces reasserted themselves during the 1990s flurry of diplomacy that produced the Oslo Accords and briefly raised hopes of a land-for-peace resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the collapse of that process in the early 2000s, and the subsequent Palestinian uprising known as the second intifada, cemented Israel’s rightward course."}],[{"start":186.84,"text":"Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza accelerated the process, enraging the growing religious-nationalist settler community, which regarded the disengagement from the Palestinian territory as a betrayal and galvanising it into a decades-long push for greater influence in Israeli society."}],[{"start":203.86,"text":"The rapid Hamas takeover of the enclave, and the wars that followed, eroded hope of a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians even further among mainstream Israelis."}],[{"start":212.88,"text":"“In the nineties we could still talk about two camps in Israel, the peace camp and the greater Israel camp,” says Shmuel Rosner, an Israeli pollster. “This ceased to be true after 2000 or 2001, and the Israelis never went back to the approach of the early nineties.”"}],[{"start":229.56,"text":"The rightward shift has also been driven by the changing demographics of Israel’s Jewish population. In 2009 Israel was home to 750,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews, known in Hebrew as Haredim, who accounted for 10 per cent of the country’s total population. By last year, the community, much of which holds highly conservative views on religious, social and cultural issues, had almost doubled to 1.45mn, and its population share had grown to 14 per cent."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":257.88,"text":"In conjunction with growth in other demographic groups that lean to the right, this has reduced the share of population represented by the secular Israelis from which the liberal opposition bloc traditionally draws most of its support."}],[{"start":269.894,"text":"“Demography has played a very critical role here because the birth rate of the traditionalist, national-religious and ultra-Orthodox segments of Israeli society is much higher than among the secular,” says Hermann. “And these three groups are almost totally to the right.”"}],[{"start":285.625,"text":"October 7 only reinforced the rightward trends. Hamas’s attack was the worst security failure in Israel’s history. In a nation born out the horrors of the Holocaust and in which an acute sense of vulnerability is never far from the surface, it dredged up the deepest traumas in the national psyche."}],[{"start":303.423,"text":"When Gad Yair, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, surveyed people about their feelings in the aftermath of the attack, the phrases “Holocaust” and “new Holocaust” came up repeatedly."}],[{"start":315.56,"text":"“The tilt towards the right . . . is based on a constant that has unified [Jewish] Israelis for decades, which is this existential anxiety,” he says. “This [sense] of being persecuted and the entire world being against us was intensified. It was made evident that this is not our forefathers’ story, this is our story.”"}],[{"start":332.771,"text":"Research by the Israel Democracy Institute suggests that the number of Israelis who identify as rightwing — which was as low as 39 per cent in 1986 — has risen from 54.9 per cent on the eve of October 7 to 61.3 per cent today. The share of those identifying as leftwing dropped from 14.1 to 13.5 per cent."}],[{"start":354.884,"text":"The shift rightward is also reflected among Likud’s opponents. Both Lieberman, a hardline former defence minister, and Bennett, a former settler leader, started out on the hard right of Israeli politics. Both reject a Palestinian state and are at least as hawkish as Netanyahu on Iran. But they are now part of the opposition."}],[{"start":372.49,"text":"At the same time, what it means to be rightwing in Israel has become more extreme. During its four years in power, ultranationalist members of Netanyahu’s government, such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have advocated positions such as emptying Gaza of Palestinians, “encouraging” their emigration from the occupied West Bank and “Judaising” Arab-majority parts of Israel. The new parliament will include extremists such as Moshe Feiglin, who said in 2025 that “every child, every baby” in Gaza was an “enemy”."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":405.341,"text":"‘Everybody’s talking to everybody’"}],[{"start":407.951,"text":"In this week’s election, the rightward shift in Israel’s political class did not translate into more seats for Netanyahu’s far-right bloc. Although Likud again emerged as the biggest party, both it and his coalition saw their seat tally fall sharply."}],[{"start":422.696,"text":"But the shift had a dramatic effect on the outcome. The policies that Netanyahu’s government has pursued against the country’s Palestinian minority drove Arab voters — many of whom regarded the prospect of another four years of his coalition as an existential threat — to turn out in record numbers."}],[{"start":440.92,"text":"The surge gave the two Arab parties, Ra’am and the Joint List, 19 seats in the Knesset, and left both Netanyahu’s bloc, which won 53 seats, and the Jewish opposition, which won 48, short of a majority."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":454.56,"text":"That outcome has triggered a bout of soul-searching in Israel’s opposition. Netanyahu went into the election weaker than ever, weighed down by public anger over the failures that allowed October 7 and a controversial judicial overhaul pushed by his coalition in the early months of his government."}],[{"start":470.81,"text":"Rather than sealing his demise, the election underscored how narrow the liberal opposition bloc’s path to power has become."}],[{"start":478.71,"text":"For some, such as the leader of the leftwing Democrats, Yair Golan, co-operating with the Arab parties is the obvious — and right — solution."}],[{"start":486.26,"text":"“We must no longer accept Netanyahu’s racist division between Jewish votes and Arab votes,” he wrote on X. “We have an opportunity to form a government of change in partnership with Israel’s Arab citizens. A government that will serve all Israeli citizens.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":498.88,"text":"Others in the opposition bloc believe that its future lies in looking to the right for alliances. “The 48 seats [collectively held] between Yair Golan and Bennett or Avigdor Lieberman . . . they — we — are the biggest group in Israeli society, but it’s not a majority of Israeli society and it won’t be,” says Asaf Zamir, the deputy mayor of Tel Aviv and a former centrist MP."}],[{"start":523.295,"text":"He adds that since the Jewish opposition bloc “won’t be the majority, it needs to decide in what direction it wants to head . . . and the truth is that the people that are closest relatively in their aspirations, wants and needs [to the opposition parties] are Likud voters.”"}],[{"start":538.024,"text":"Netanyahu has sought to raise the political costs of an opposition alliance with Arab parties through a relentless campaign of delegitimisation. He has accused the Arab parties of attempting to “steal” the election and claimed that any government depending on them would “endanger Israel”."}],[{"start":555.22,"text":"Coalition negotiations could drag on for weeks and much is likely to depend on what the more rightwing figures in the opposition bloc, Bennett and Lieberman, decide to do. Both have ruled out an alliance with Arab groups — a position Lieberman reiterated on Friday. But they both ruled out taking such a step in 2021 before ultimately doing so."}],[{"start":572.813,"text":"“Everybody’s meeting with everybody,” says one opposition official. “A lot depends on Lieberman. If he agrees [to work with Ra’am], it gives everyone else cover. But he is also the person who keeps everything closest to his chest.”"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":585.542,"text":"Given Israel’s demographic trends, it is unlikely to be the last time that Israel’s liberal bloc faces such a dilemma. At the start of the new school year in September, 25 per cent of first-year schoolchildren were enrolled in ultra-Orthodox schools, 16 per cent in national-religious schools, and 23 per cent in Arab schools. Only 35 per cent were set to go to secular institutions."}],[{"start":609.8,"text":"“It’s a structural issue,” says Simon Davies, a partner at Number 10 Strategies, a consultancy that has advised various Israeli parties. “The centre and the left have to reconcile themselves to the fact that you can’t be a bloc of 45 — on a really good day maybe 50 — seats, and say: ‘we won’t sit with the Arabs, we won’t sit with the ultra-Orthodox, and we won’t sit in the unity government with Netanyahu’. You can’t say no to everyone.”"}],[{"start":638.56,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1793430198_9374.mp3"}