“Is This Ship Sinking?” Inside the Collapse of the Campaign Against Netanyahu By Amir Tibon and Ben Birnbaum
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Last Sunday, Tzipi Livni passed through the noisy hall of her Tel Aviv campaign headquarters. It was two days before Israel’s election, and Livni—who, a few months earlier, had been the chief negotiator with the Palestinians and the Justice Minister under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—was feeling bullish about her chances, with running mate Isaac Herzog, of unseating her former boss. Netanyahu is “the one who broke his own government, and he regrets it now,” she told us. Livni turned around and flashed two fingers at one of the blue-and-white posters featuring her and Herzog. “Because of this.”
“This”—the merger between Herzog’s Labor Party and Livni’s upstart Hatnuah—was the big story of the campaign. It resurrected Livni as a candidate and put Labor in serious contention to form a government for the first time since 1999. For months, Herzog and Livni’s Zionist Union and Netanyahu’s Likud had traded a one-seat edge in the polls, but over the past week the opposition had opened a three-to-four-seat lead. Suddenly, Israelis were seriously considering the prospect that someone other than Netanyahu might be Prime Minister. But now, less than forty-eight hours before the polls opened, the campaign had taken a turn, and just about everyone at the Zionist Union headquarters but Livni seemed worried.
After months of carefully projecting an aura of invincibility, Netanyahu had suddenly launched what was being dubbed the “gevalt campaign” (after a Yiddish expression of alarm), warning that Israel was at imminent risk of being taken over by “a left-wing government supported by the Arabs” that would “create a second Hamastan in Judea and Samaria” (the right’s preferred name for the West Bank). Internal polls in all campaigns were detecting a last-minute exodus of voters from Naftali Bennett’s hard-right Jewish Home party to Likud.
“The gevalt is working,” Amos Yadlin, Labor’s candidate for defense minister, admitted in the same hallway—a claustrophobic space plastered with campaign signs and movie posters with Herzog’s face pasted onto James Bond and Captain America. Yadlin was still optimistic that Herzog would get more seats than Netanyahu, but he noted that the final outcome would depend on whom some of the smaller parties supported the morning after.
“If you had to bet your life on it right now, who do you think’s going to be Prime Minister?” Yadlin, a former intelligence chief, thought about it for a moment. “Herzog,” he said. He sounded less than convinced.
The gevalt campaign was not the Zionist Union’s only source of anxiety. The previous night, the leaders of most parties had been interviewed in succession on Israel’s “Meet the Press” program. Herzog’s turn had gone well—that is, until it ended, and Netanyahu, who was scheduled to go next, remotely, appeared on a giant monitor behind him. The contrast between Netanyahu, standing coolly with an Israeli flag in the background, and the diminutive Herzog, in his studio seat, was not flattering to the challenger.
The brief exchange that followed was even worse. At one point, Netanyahu accused Herzog of wanting to divide Jerusalem. A flustered Herzog countered that he would preside over a “united Netanyahu.” The Prime Minister chuckled. Hours later, hundreds of thousands of Israelis received an anonymous text message, with a link. “Bouji,” it said, using Herzog’s nickname, “for three months you’ve been demanding a debate. And in your moment of truth against Netanyahu, you get confused? How will you stand up to the world?! Watch Bouji’s gaffe.”
Labor Knesset members fretted that Herzog’s performance had just cost them the election. “It’s like he was in front of an open goal and couldn’t score,” one complained. At the campaign headquarters, we watched as aides, their eyes locked on iPhones, tried to contain the damage. In another room, a clutch of television cameras filmed Herzog, Livni, and part of their Knesset slate making last-ditch calls to Israeli voters. In yet another, Clinton veteran Paul Begala, who had been hired several weeks before as an adviser, huddled with the campaign’s top strategists. In a fourth, the campaign’s youth arm plotted to distract attention from a Netanyahu-Bennett rally set for that night in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square.
The collective mood was still cautiously optimistic, but memories of Election Night in 1996, when the country “went to bed with Peres and woke up with Netanyahu,” hovered. The Israeli left had been conditioned to expect a breakdown at the critical moment. At one point, an aide burst through the front door of the main office and yelled, “Hey, friends, what’s happening? Is the ship sinking?”
Back in mid-November, Tzipi Livni received a call on her cell phone. It was Isaac Herzog. He wanted to meet, and soon. Livni made the four-minute drive from her house, in Tel Aviv, to Herzog’s, and the two sat for what would be the first of several pivotal discussions.
At the time, Livni, who was once seen as a future Prime Minister, was polling at just above the 3.25-per-cent threshold necessary for a party to secure any seats in the Knesset. If the landscape looked unforgiving for Livni, it was, in a way, even more so for Herzog and Labor. The Party, which had ruled for Israel’s first three decades, was now polling at half Likud’s strength. In some polls, Labor was in third, behind Bennett’s Jewish Home. Since Labor’s last election victory, in 1999, the party had gone through eight leaders, and none had managed to stop its descent. The reality was that, in post-intifada Israel, there were more right-wing voters than left-wing ones.
But there were some reasons for hope within Israel’s opposition. Netanyahu, despite being widely seen as the only plausible Prime Minister, was far from popular, with approval ratings in the thirties. And, after the hardline Foreign Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, ended his party’s alliance with Likud and the popular former Likud minister Moshe Kahlon launched his own party, the right was more fractured than usual. Then there was history: no Prime Minister had ever been elected three times in a row. Netanyahu was, in theory, a vulnerable incumbent. But Herzog somehow needed to change the dynamic of the race.
At Herzog’s first meeting with Livni, he suggested that the two of them should run together. As it happened, Livni had been contemplating that idea herself. Both she and Herzog had instructed their pollsters to test the prospects of such a union, and both had been encouraged by the results. Separately, their parties were projected to bring in around seventeen seats (if Livni’s managed to pass the threshold), and the momentum created by joining forces could draw voters from the center and push their joint party above the twenty-seat mark.
Over the coming days, negotiating teams for the two leaders discussed every aspect of a possible union, and Herzog and Livni themselves had several more meetings. The conversations became increasingly public. At the annual Saban Forum, in Washington, D.C., Herzog joked, “I told my wife that I would invest time in my couplehood with Tzipi over the weekend.”
On December 10th, Herzog and Livni appeared at twin podiums under a banner that read “Winning Together: The Zionist Union,” to announce their merger. The news surprised no one. But, all along, the question had been what Herzog would give up to win Livni’s support. The answer came right after the press conference, when the Labor leader announced that, if he were to become Prime Minister, he would give his job to Livni two years later.
Herzog’s reputation in Israel is complicated. He was viewed as having been a competent minister—first of tourism, then of social services—among other roles, and few doubt his intelligence. He was undeniably left of center, but pragmatic. Above all, he was seen as a nice guy, a mensch. Yet, to many Israelis, he was too nice—too weak—to be Prime Minister.
The deal with Livni seemed to underscore that perception. “I can’t but fear what Herzog, who gave a rotation to a failed politician who wouldn’t pass the electoral threshold, would give the Palestinians during talks, under heavy pressure,” a Likud minister said at the time. But the public didn’t seem to care. In the days following the announcement, the Zionist Union leaped ahead of Likud. The assumption that there was no alternative to Netanyahu began to change.
But the lead proved shortlived. Likud was not exactly experiencing a burst of enthusiasm, but its right-wing alternatives were collapsing. Several top members of Lieberman’s party were indicted for corruption, and the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party was undergoing a schism. Meanwhile, the Zionist Union had failed to agree on a platform, much less a coherent message. The left wing of the Labor Party continued to view Livni’s centrist party with suspicion. At one point, Herzog and Livni settled on a slogan, “It’s us or him,” apparently not aware that when pollsters asked Israelis whom they preferred for Prime Minister, a plurality went with Netanyahu—if, at certain moments, just barely. (The Prime Minister promptly started using the slogan “It’s us or the left.”)
As Herzog and Livni’s small lead in the polls receded, so did their chances of putting together a government. It would not be enough, after all, for Labor to win one more seat than Likud. (Livni had done just that, as the head of the Kadima Party, in 2009, and still failed to become Prime Minister.) Even with a plurality of seats, the Zionist Union would need to convince at least sixty-one out of the Knesset’s hundred and twenty members to recommend Herzog to President Reuven Rivlin —and this would be a difficult task, given the right wing’s natural majority. For Herzog and Livni, the numbers weren’t adding up. Netanyahu, on the other hand, had many possible coalitions.
With the campaign in crisis, Herzog brought in Reuven Adler, who had served as former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s chief media strategist for two decades, and who had a long history of running campaigns against Netanyahu. Adler conducted a top-to-bottom review of Zionist Union campaign materials. What kept catching his attention were the pictures of Herzog and Livni together. Livni was significantly taller. Next to her, Herzog looked like a thirteen-year-old boy posing for a bar-Mitzvah portrait with his mother. Adler asked for new, tougher-looking photos of Herzog, for campaign signs featuring him alone. After settling on the right shot, he spent several hours editing the image—the lighting, the angle, the expression. Careful attention was paid to Herzog’s chin.
As the new photo began appearing on billboards and buses across the country—with Herzog looking up and off into the distance, like Sharon—Netanyahu was experiencing a series of public-relations disasters.
A few weeks before the election, Herzog regained a narrow lead. But, inside the campaign, many believed that the promised rotation with Livni was holding him back. Adler thought that it was the only thing preventing a Herzog landslide. While Livni had undeniably brought a new cohort of centrist voters to Labor, the idea of two people leading the country had, from the beginning, struck many as odd. (An animated film made by Likud showed the co-leaders behind a desk with a ringing red phone, quarrelling over who should answer and speak to Obama.) Meanwhile, Livni herself had proved a problematic figure for some more moderate voters. Despite her Likud background, many perceived her as further to the left than Herzog. She was also disliked by some of Herzog’s potential coalition partners on the right.
Several days before the election, at a meeting of senior staff, Livni volunteered to forgo the rotation. Herzog resisted. Personally, he didn’t like the idea of reneging on his commitment. Politically, he feared that making such a drastic move right before the election would be seen as panicky. “We’re not apologizing,” he told the aides.
But, the evening before the vote, the campaign issued a press release from Livni, announcing that she would allow Herzog to govern for all four years. “I set aside all considerations to replace” Netanyahu, she wrote. “Now it’s your turn, citizens of Israel.”
Netanyahu’s clear victory on Tuesday night shocked even his most optimistic supporters. When Herzog went to sleep, in the early morning, exit polls and initial results showed him and Netanyahu in a dead heat. “We still have a chance to form a government,” he told his closest aides. “Nothing is done.” By the time he woke up, Likud had a six-seat advantage over the Zionist Union, and the entire right-wing bloc had expanded its Knesset majority from sixty-one to sixty-seven.
That morning, Herzog called Netanyahu from his home, in Tel Aviv, to offer his congratulations. The option of a national-unity government—the object of much speculation in the campaign’s final days—was not discussed. Neither politician was interested in it. On a personal level, Herzog and Netanyahu had always got along fairly well. During a recent Knesset speech, Netanyahu had praised Herzog’s late father, Chaim Herzog, who served as President of Israel, for his contribution to national security. And Herzog’s older brother Michael, a former general, had been among Netanyahu’s negotiators during peace talks with the Palestinians last year. After one of the most divisive elections in Israel’s history, Herzog and Netanyahu agreed that the Israeli public had been presented with two contrasting visions and made its choice.
Later that morning, Herzog and his wife, Michal, drove to a café on the boardwalk in Tel Aviv, one of the few cities where he had won a plurality. There he sat down for a meal with Livni and her husband, Naftali. While fielding calls from disappointed supporters, the Herzogs and the Livnis decided how they would proceed. All four agreed that the two leaders should stick together in the opposition, keeping their two parties’ twenty-four Knesset members under one flag.
From lunch, Herzog and Livni drove one last time to their Tel Aviv campaign headquarters. In a room plastered with posters proclaiming “Revolution 2015,” the two sat for a debriefing with several of their slate’s most prominent members. Herzog gave an uplifting speech, praising all those at the table for their hard work, which had succeeded in making Labor a force once again. “It’s funny,” one of the Knesset members said later. “If a stranger had walked in during the speech, he would have thought that we’d won.”
Many wondered aloud why they had not: Had the polling been wrong all along, or had Netanyahu’s gevalt campaign turned the tide? Did the fault lie with Herzog’s disastrous TV performance? Had Livni’s last-minute move sent a message of panic to the nation, as Likud operatives spun it? One by one, the Knesset members offered their best guesses. They all seemed to agree that their most obvious failure had been in their efforts to reach working-class voters in the peripheral towns far from Tel Aviv. These were the people who had suffered most from Netanyahu’s economic agenda, and yet they had voted for him once again because they didn’t trust the left with Israel’s security.
Herzog took it all in. “We have to do better next time,” he told the room.
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