Free Republic

Earlier on Monday, Israeli-Arab lawmakers recommended that former army chief Mr Gantz should become prime minister. The Joint List, a bloc of Arab parties that came third in the election, said it wanted to remove Mr Netanyahu from power. It was the first time since 1992 that an Arab political group has issued an endorsement for an Israeli prime minister. Ayman Odeh, leader of the Joint List, told President Rivlin that his alliance's priority was to prevent Mr Netanyahu from serving another term. The Joint List won 13 seats in the election. If Mr Gantz had the endorsement of all...

Unless he convinces Israeli lawmakers from outside his party to join him in a national unity government, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s 10-and-a-half-year run in office may soon end following inconclusive results inhis country’s parliamentary elections this week that appeared to deprive him of a governing majority in the Knesset. President Donald Trump took a hands-off approach when asked about the elections in America’s foremost ally in the Middle East. “Our relations are with Israel, so we’ll see what happens,” he told reporters while touring California. In Israel, Netanyahu has leveraged his ideological affinity with Trump as a selling point...

The US media coverage of the Israeli election has misrepresented the results of Tuesday’s vote. This isn’t necessarily deliberate. Israeli elections are inscrutable for most foreigners, particularly for Americans who are used to the clarity of the presidential system and two-party system. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not lose and his challenger, former IDF chief of general staff and Blue and White faction chief Benny Gantz did not win. Despite the fact that Blue and White won 31 seats in the 120-seat Knesset to Likud’s 31 seats, Gantz cannot form a government under any circumstances. He cannot build a majority...

WASHINGTON — The results of Tuesday’s election left U.S. followers of Israeli politics in a state of confusion, with Israel’s political future seemingly harder to predict than ever. While it is clear to everyone in Washington that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu lost the election, it is much less clear who actually won it. Also unclear: Whether Israel will have a government in the next few months or if another election will have to take place in the winter. With 98 percent of the votes counted on Thursday afternoon, Netanyahu had almost certainly failed in both of his election objectives. First,...

With political machinations and intrigues in full swing following Tuesday’s election, both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White leader Benny Gantz have said they want a national unity government. Netanyahu,however, said that he wants such a government to include his ultra-Orthodox and religious-Zionist allies, which Gantz and his party oppose. Support for a national unity government without the ultra-Orthodox parties is actually widespread, with some two-thirds of the Jewish Israeli public backing such a coalition, including half of all Likud voters.

According to Channel 13, 97.6% of the votes from Tuesday's elections have already been counted, Blue and White stands at 33 seats and Likud at 31 seats, with Blue and White leading by a narrow margin. It is important to note that these are still not the final results. Overnight, the committee was counting the near quarter of a million soldiers' votes cast by Israeli soldiers. The Central Election Committee (CEC) has been updating its website since the close of the polls at 10 p.m. on Tuesday. The last update was at 10:40 a.m. on Thursday: 4,354,991 votes had been...

How is 56 greater than 60? Call it Netanyahu’s new math. “After we established the right-wing bloc, there are only two options,” Netanyahu said. “Either a government led by me, or a dangerous government leaning on Arab parties.” Netanyahu’s only chance to remain prime minister is by making sure that his potential coalition partners don’t start wandering over to Blue and White’s side. The way to make sure they don’t do that is to promise he will stay with them and not follow what seems like the more obvious path to a coalition, to reach across the aisle himself.

Right-wing factions convened at the Prime Minister's Office in Jerusalem Wednesday afternoon, deciding to establish a "right-wing bloc" headed by Prime Minister Netanyahu, that will work for the establishment of the next government. It was decided to form a joint coalition negotiations team for all factions in the bloc. In addition to Netanyahu, the meeting saw the participation of Minister Yariv Levin and faction heads: Yaakov Litzman, Moshe Gafni, Naftali Bennett, Ayelet Shaked, and Bezalel Smotrich. Minister Aryeh Deri met with Prime Minister Netanyahu earlier this morning, as he was unable to attend the meeting due to the memorial ceremony...

The last one, held in April, looked like a victory for Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud party. But when Netanyahu failed to get enough support from smaller parties to form a government, he was forced to call new elections. So here we are. The polling for the new election is too close to call. Likud is locked in a tight race with the centrist Blue and White party, which is leading the opposition. The ultimate outcome depends on a lot of things that are really hard to predict, ranging from minor party vote share to post-election parliamentary haggling.

Tuesday's election will not only be a contest between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Blue and White leader Benny Gantz but also between their American pollsters. John McLaughlin stood beside Netanyahu in a video he posted on Friday explaining why Otzma Yehudit would not cross the 3.25% electoral threshold. In explaining why he was so sure, Netanyahu pointed at McLaughlin and said that he was the pollster for US president Donald Trump. Blue and White's American strategist Joel Benenson also made the news this past week, when Netanyahu accused him of being behind a false report in Politico accusing Israel...

Benjamin Netanyahu became Israel’s longest-serving prime minister on Friday, and he is favored to win the next elections in September. But the outcome is still uncertain. On Sunday, the President tweeted: “Congratulations to Bibi @Netanyahu on becoming the longest serving PM in the history of Israel. Under your leadership, Israel has become a technology powerhouse and a world class economy….” He continued: “….Most importantly you have led Israel with a commitment to the values of democracy, freedom, and equal opportunity that both our nations cherish and share!” Netanyahu quickly thanked Trump for his support, tweeting, “Thank you, President Trump, for your warm words,...

The Knesset voted Wednesday night to dissolve itself after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a governing coalition, sending Israel to a new election mere seven weeks after the last one. At the heart of the impasse was the issue of drafting ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students: Yisrael Beiteinu's Avigdor Lieberman, without whom Netanyahu can't form a coalition, refused to back down on the bill's terms, while ultra-Orthodox parties claimed they have already yielded enough ground. MK Avigdor Lieberman wrote on his Facebook page that Likud holds responsibility for the repeat election because of its refusal to vote on bill to...

The New Right party said on Thursday night, "The results that were published are not final, and we continue to fight. We expect the media to show some more seriousness in its reports.” "Over the course of the day, a war room was established at party headquarters that gathered about 1,000 failures and flaws in the voting process. At the beginning of the week we will receive the protocols and our hundreds of volunteers will compare them to the computerized results.” "We will also address all the extreme irregularities discovered in the counting of the double envelopes. We will accept...

on't be fooled by misleading stories about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's disappointing showing in Tuesday's election in Israel. Even if the centrist Blue and White alliance of former military chief Benny Gantz were to eke out a very narrow victory over Netanyahu's right-wing Likud Party, sending Bibi into retirement to face a near-certain indictment on corruption charges, the story of this election is not at all about the retreat of the right. On the contrary, the most far-reaching consequence of the 2019 Israeli election may well be that it verified, beyond any reasonable doubt, that there is functionally no left...

Imagine if Israel's prime minister Bibi Netanyahu had been defeated in yesterday's elections. You have to think Morning Joe would have heralded the news at the very top of today's show. That's big news, when the "right side of history" prevails. Instead, they led with major-league baseball and Brexit chaos. When she eventually got around to reporting Bibi's win, a bitter Mika Brzezinski sounded like she was sucking on lemons. Mika emphasized the negative, and made unsubtle, sarcastic analogies to President Trump. Get the rest of the story and view the video here.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s conservative prime minister for the past decade, and his chief rival, Benny Gantz, a centrist former military chief, emerged neck and neck from a tight race in Tuesday’s parliamentary election, according to preliminary results. But by early Wednesday, with most of the votes counted, Mr. Netanyahu appeared poised to win a fourth consecutive term in office, and a fifth overall. A count of the broader blocs needed to form a coalition government gave Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party a clear advantage over Mr. Gantz’s Blue and White.

n dozens of localities in Judea and Samaria, there were more votes counted than people with voting rights, and voting percentages were higher than 100%. Jewish Press reports in the village of Itamar, results indicate that Ahmed Tibi’s Chadash-Ta’al received 52 votes, Meretz received 1 vote, and Zehut received 0. No votes were disqualified. A number of Itamar residents claim to have voted for Zehut and none for Tibi, indicating possible problems at that station. However, some experts say the over-voting claim is inaccurate, as the election committee has not updated its numbers of registered voters for some towns, rendering...

Benny Gantz's Blue and White party triumphed over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Tuesday's elections, as exit polls released late in the evening showed the party winning 37of the Knesset's 120 seats. The victory could hand the premiership to Gantz, though his path to a coalition comprising at least 61 seats remains unclear. Netanyahu's Likud Party came in second with 33 seats.

Results that began trickling in early Wednesday morning showed Netanyahu has a solid lead over Gantz, with the Likud gaining 40 Knesset seats according to the latest vote tally. It is still unclear that neither leader would be able to easily assemble a majority sufficient for a ruling coalition among the right and left-wing blocs, although the numbers do favor the right.

TEL AVIV — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared victory here tonight as revised exit polls projected his clear path to forming a right-wing coalition and early official election results put Netanyahu’s Likud party ahead of his Blue and White rivals. “I am very moved on this night,” stated Netanyahu, addressing supporters at a victory rally in Tel Aviv. “This is a night of an incredible, incredible victory.” Netanyahu hailed a “fantastic achievement, an enormous achievement, which is almost unfathomable.” Even before most ballots have been counted, Netanyahu called his party’s purported victory “almost unprecedented,” asking, “When did we receive so...