Amit Segal

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At 77, Prime Minister Netanyahu finds himself in an uncharacteristic position: he is the subject of the coalition negotiations, but not their predicate. Put simply, his span of control over events is extremely limited.

Also, Israel’s partisan justice system, in today's edition of It's Noon in Israel.

open.substack.com/pub/amitsegal/…

Justice Noam Solberg, who chairs the Central Elections Committee, just issued an unusual statement on the Shin Bet probe into suspected foreign-funded interference in the election.

The key line: the classified information “has not yet matured into actual evidence, and it may never do so.” The evidentiary picture, he says, hasn’t changed since last week, when he declared the election was conducted properly.

Three more points:

- He checked with the investigators and found no case of the attorney general refusing a Shin Bet request, a direct answer to claims on the right that the AG is blocking Shin Bet chief David Zini.
- He thanked Zini personally and said the Shin Bet “deserves the public’s trust.”
- He went after the leakers. A classified opinion’s main points were published online before it even reached his committee. “Such a leak is a grievous evil.”

One hundred Israelis go to the polls on election day, all of whom are over 22 and all of whom also voted in the previous election. Fifty of them voted for the Netanyahu bloc last time, 50 against. How many of them changed their minds at the ballot box?

If you followed the polls, and certainly the coverage, you might think there were many. The overhaul, the massacre, the Haredim. The astonishing answer to the question of how many of the 100 switched sides is: one.

Yes, after the stormiest four years in the country’s history, 99 percent of voters voted for the same bloc. An in-depth study by TrendZone, a young new outfit whose election polls were more accurate than many others, examined the ballot boxes. Out of nearly 6 million voters, a meticulous look at the polling stations shows that 51,000 Likud and Religious Zionism voters voted this time for Eisenkot, Liberman and Bennett; 18,000 voters made the opposite journey. All the rest may have moved from Shas to Netanyahu, or from Netanyahu to Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich, or from both to Winter, or simply stayed home.

The remaining shifts stemmed from a crazy surge in Arab turnout, an increase almost equal in size between the coalition and the Change Bloc, and of course from the fact that last time Netanyahu’s opponents burned a quarter of a million votes under the electoral threshold, and this time it was parties that support Netanyahu, or don’t rule him out, that burned 300,000.

The situation is painfully frozen: the Democrats got exactly, but exactly, the turnout that Labor and Meretz together got in the previous election. Bennett and Lapid’s Together party didn’t really bring in Likud votes and piled up its votes in the very same strongholds as Lapid’s Yesh Atid. Eisenkot’s Yashar party absorbed all the votes of the Eisenkot-Gantz National Unity camp and half of Lapid’s supporters. Despite all the early predictions, the Likud grew stronger where it was strong and weaker where it was weak. In the peripheral city of Sderot the right went up; in the kibbutzim of October 7, Be’eri and Kfar Aza, the opposition grew stronger. From the election results alone, no one could imagine what horrors took place there; they left no political imprint, either way.

And that is strange, because at the Knesset swearing-in the years we’ve been through were certainly visible. Bereaved MKs, MKs disabled in the war, MKs wounded in battle. The elected changed; the voters much less so. A note to those planning another round at the ballot box next May and certain that this time everything will change.

open.substack.com/pub/amitsegal/…

“There’s a rule in politics: when Bennett and I are silent, it’s a sign something is happening,” Yair Lapid said on the day of the Knesset swearing-in ceremony. What does that say about the opposite situation, the more frequent one, in which Lapid and Bennett talk?

Also, the voters haven’t moved, and fighting an exception, in today's edition of It's Noon in Israel.

open.substack.com/pub/amitsegal/…