P. DAVID HORNIK: THE RIGHT WEAKENED IN ISRAEL- BUT STILL STANDING
http://frontpagemag.com/2013/davidhornik/right-weakened-in-israel-but-still-standing/print/
According to the first exit-poll results for Israel’s elections Tuesday night, Binyamin Netanyahu will almost certainly continue as prime minister. But it may well be with a considerably more patchwork, wobbly coalition than almost all surveys leading up to the elections had projected.
Netanyahu’s own Likud Beiteinu Party—a merger of his original party, Likud, and the Yisrael Beiteinu faction—had plummeted to 31 seats (out of a Knesset of 120). Plummeted, because in the outgoing Knesset the two parties had a total of 42 seats between them. The merger had been celebrated by some as a brilliant move, denounced by others as a blunder of epic proportions. The denouncers won that round.
Also on the right side of the political spectrum, the Habayit Hayehudi faction of the much-celebrated Naftali Bennett—the young, “hip,” nationalist-religious, hi-tech wunderkind whom the world media decided to turn into a Big Story—was showing a disappointing 12 mandates from the Israeli public. But with three other right-wing parties (two of them ultra-religious) totaling 19 seats between them, it still meant the right had a majority of 62.
Which (to repeat, out of a Knesset of 120) is not as slim as it sounds—since the 58 on the other side of the spectrum include 8 seats or so for Arab parties that take an oppositional stance toward Israel as a country and have never been part of any governing coalition.
In other words, among the predominantly Jewish voters, the right wing had won by perhaps 62-50—a considerable margin, yet much less than expected.