The Blue and White Party knows that even if they succeed in getting a government mandate, they too will have to return it this time. Personal legislation from the outside • And the disappointing result of the "right" in the elections is not only the fault of Naftali Bennett

• The assembling game began. Counting of votes in insulator cards in Sham, this week

  Photo:

  Coco

After blaming Netanyahu for an Erdogan dictatorship, blue-and-white heads proved that the real anti-democratic danger lies in their camp. Aided by large parts of the media, Blue and White Law Initiative against Netanyahu. Instead of winning elections, the discriminating party prefers to hide behind laws that change the state of the country from its inception.

After all, in every election campaign, from the first Knesset, the winning party could have used the majority in its possession to enact a law against the opponent's candidacy. Ben-Gurion could have done it. So does Menachem Begin. And all those who came after them, but no one thought it would.

The unfounded law allows blue and white to go with and feel without. Rejecting Netanyahu without paying the price of a meeting with the Arab MKs from the joint list. So does Lieberman. Becoming a member of the government supported by Ahmad Tibi and Hiba Yazbak may be harshly criticized, but doing one hand in outside legislation is another story. Getting the support of 62 non-Knesset members in the right bloc reflects better than anything else in the new Knesset coalition. While 58 MKs are willing to sit together in a joint government, the remaining 62 MKs refuse to unite around a candidate and prefer to use the majority to exclude the second candidate.

To be clear, despite the results of the election and the Likud's success, if Gantz manages to form the majority of the Knesset around him, it is legitimate that he first receive a mandate from the president to form a government. That's what Yitzhak Rabin did when he succeeded in producing a block block for Isaac Shamir in '92. But Gantz knows that even if he gets the mandate, he has no way to continue from here. Like last time, he will have to return it after many weeks of trying to quarter the circle, which will end in failure this time as well. Therefore, as in the campaign, he needs external assistance. In legislation, and of the legal system that may back it up, otherwise it will not be able to move forward.

After the election results became clear, Gantz's disqualification of Netanyahu is illegitimate. The legal norm states that Netanyahu can continue to serve in the midst of a trial against him. After the election, it becomes clear that these are also public norms. You can like it or not, but the public has said it. The Likud is the largest party in the Knesset, as opposed to any prior appreciation and feeling. In fact, Gantz did not rule out Netanyahu, but everyone who voted for him. While he has done it before, but now, a minute and a half after the number of people who voted Likud bypassed every vote for any party in the country's history, it has been purity and condescension on another level.

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Over the past year, which included almost weekly polls and two true results in the 2019 A and B elections, the Likud did not approach the result it actually received. The lag behind white and blue was steady and steady. The right block also lumbered behind. In white and blue they thought they were on the wave. That the fact that Netanyahu had already been indicted, and that the waiver of immunity had meanwhile led to the composition of judges and the start of the trial, would already do the job for them to lower Likud's borrowed lies. They were so sure of it, that in fact they relinquished every other message in the campaign, leaving the legal matter as a single issue.

It was a colossal mistake. Anyone who remains with Netanyahu so far, after the police recommendations, the decision of the Yishuv, the final decision after the hearing and everything we have passed so far - will remain with him to the end. Those who oppose him - object to him for a host of things that the legal issue is not the main one. With a criminal investigation into the Fifth Dimension affair, the company headed by Benny Gantz, hiding behind Ashkenazi-Mandelblit recordings under a bans, and even Israel Bachar recordings, which revealed bizarre acts by Benny Gantz, made names in a blue-and-white campaign. Gantz has no government without the common list also seeped in, nibbling on the Cockpit Party more and more.

If the law against Netanyahu does not pass or pass in the High Court (by the way, it will be interesting to hear what the court's opinion on the legality of this law is, and whether in blue and white if it announces that there is a legal impediment to its legislation), Netanyahu will actually be forced to return to the starting point, where He was standing just a few months ago, with no possibility of forming a government based solely on the right-wing camp. This time too, the prime minister will be forced to offer a rotation to Bnei Gantz or to turn to other factions such as Labor or Israel Betinu, in order to form a coalition. Since there seems to be no jumping on this wagon right now, it may not be possible to make a fourth choice, delusional as it sounds.

The source of the Likud victory lies to a considerable extent in the primaries held by the party's leadership after Gideon Sa'ar's challenge to Netanyahu. The internal elections forced on the prime minister woke up the Likud area and revived it. When Minister Katz assumed responsibility for the headquarters in the general election, he determined that victory in the elections must pass through the territory, touch people, wake the activists. The Likud branches, which over the years have become dormant and dusty cells from disuse, have suddenly shaken and in recent months have become noisy activists.

Using state-of-the-art technology and an up-to-date database, branch heads and regional coordinators reached hundreds of thousands of Likud voters, most of whom failed to vote the previous time, and drove them to the polls on Election Day.

Katz, who also remains a small area animal in his role as foreign minister, has had to run this huge array in a light struggle with Likud's strategies, including sometimes Netanyahu himself, who has, again, tended to devote himself to videos, Facebook and the world that are all digital, and to take everyone out on tours, Sometimes four in one evening. This, plus the incessant live broadcasts on Facebook, gave Likud the long-awaited result when the party grew by four seats in the next Knesset compared to the outgoing Knesset.

Now Netanyahu's goal is to get the government's mandate first. According to Yariv Levin, the leader of the Likud negotiating team, and in fact of the entire right-wing camp, there is a reasonable likelihood that a government will eventually emerge and no more elections. He said before Netanyahu offered another rotation to Gantz and even calls for a unity government with them, Gantz announces that he is ready to sit down with Netanyahu at all, as it seems at the moment, Gantz and his friends are not at all interested. The only member of the cockpit who does not completely negate the matter is Gabi Ashkenazi, but his hesitant opinion on the matter is hardly audible against Gantz, Ya'alon and Torch.

A burst of mistakes

The blow they received in blue and white from the sample results was unbearable. Until the election day, when they walked around the field and were shocked to discover the intense presence of Likud activists, they thought the victory was in their pocket. That they can sit at home and count the stairs on the way to another victory speech. Only after two days did the color return to their cheeks when they found out in the truth that their situation had not improved as a party that fell in two seats from last time, but the fact that Netanyahu does not have a majority in the Knesset may play to their advantage, when he has no immediate ability to form a government and throw them to the opposition.

Peretz visited Blue and White's anti-Bibi campaign // Photo: Joshua Yosef

It could have ended differently. At the beginning of the road, Amir Peretz met Benny Gantz and showed him a survey according to which the union of work and white blue receives 43 seats. He suggested that he go along and start plowing the area to create a drift towards the Giant Party whose victory is virtually assured in advance with such numbers. Gantz, at the advice of his advisers, refused. Counselors believed that blue and white could bring votes to the right, and connecting with the work would keep them away from that goal. Only in the last realignment before the election, when Netanyahu managed to keep right-wing voters away from white, did they realize the magnitude of the mistake there and began to nibble at work with the intention of ending up as the biggest party.

Peretz did not want a union with Meretz. It was a call from the camp which she answered with no choice. Blue and white pressed on one side, and the Knesset members of both parties on the other. We are willing to pay in our chairs if it turns out that the whole will be smaller than his share, they told him, and indeed paid. The Labor Party has only three MKs today. The smallest representation since the establishment of the state.

Peretz did not like the direction blue and white drew. He often criticized the "anti-Bibi" campaign that led to it not being a work plan. In contrast to the right-wing camp, where Netanyahu allowed parties such as Shas, Torah Judaism and the right to embrace him, assure their voters that he would support him and even publish billboards with his picture, when Peretz did so and posted a picture of him and Nitzan Horowitz with Gantz, rushed in blue and white to petition him and order Remove the image.

In that sense, Peretz brought it on himself. When he announced in advance that the only option for him was a government led by Gantz, at that moment he turned himself into a rug at his feet. Suffice it to say that sitting under Netanyahu is also an option, and in blue, they would be careful, just like Lieberman's.

Right from there

Unlike the Likud and the ultra-Orthodox factions, who managed to get new voters out of the houses and increase their power, "right" did not deliver the goods and did not bring in a new crowd in this election. The Likud headquarters expressed disappointment with these results, which could have been others in more vigorous field activity and sharper messaging, which would have also increased the voting rate for this party and may also give the majority the right-wing bloc.

Not all the blame should fall on Naftali Bennett and his friends. Although Itamar Ben Gvir's disqualification and all the processes preceding the party unification left a bitter taste that kept potential voters away, Netanyahu's campaign also contributed quite a bit to the vote for Bennett and Shaked.

In the last few weeks before the election, Netanyahu did not miss a single stage in which he did not say that he had appointed Bennett to the defense minister just because he was negotiating with a blue-and-white to form a government led by Benny Gantz. The prime minister wanted to illustrate why the Likud election is the right one for those who want the right-wing government. In doing so, he left many of his right-wing voters in their own hands.