David Hermelin says Israel’s left has failed to sell its ideology, and now hopes to defeat Netanyahu by pulling right-wing votes through a “fake right-wing” alternative.
David Hermelin’s analysis of Israel’s political map is blunt: Netanyahu remains the preferred realistic candidate for prime minister among a wide majority of right-wing and center-right voters, but that does not mean his victory is automatic.
According to Hermelin, the real danger for Netanyahu is not that these voters suddenly prefer the left. It is that some of them may dislike parts of the Likud list or Netanyahu’s political allies enough to risk weakening him at the ballot box. In his view, this creates an opening for a right-wing or center-right party that presents itself as an alternative to Netanyahu, but later joins the opposition bloc.
Hermelin compares this danger to the Bennett-Lapid government, when votes from the right were transferred into a coalition ultimately led by the center-left. He argues that the left and its international backers understand they cannot convince Israelis to return to their old ideology, so their only path is to pull votes away from Netanyahu’s bloc through another “right-wing” vehicle.