Numbers, Not Narratives

Much of journalism comes down to framing: how you contextualize the news. Journalists everywhere failed, again, by preemptively declaring Netanyahu the winner of Israel's third election in 10 months.

We’re here, again. Another botched round of coverage of yet another Israeli election. I can only imagine we are as tired of it as this guy.

For the third time in 10 months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu likely failed to get the 61-seat majority he needed to form a narrow government, a vehicle he desperately needs if he’s to ride out the bumpy legal road ahead. His trial starts March 17.

He promised his voters he could govern while still showing up every day to court. Not as many of his voters bought the act as he needed.

Not that the lack of enthusiasm for Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, an honor he received while serving in an interim capacity as he passed founding father David Ben-Gurion, managed to prevent too many journalists from falling prey to the master manipulator’s narrative.

The founding editor of the Times of Israel, David Horovitz, initially proclaimed it a “dazzling victory” after exit polls showed modest gains for the right-wing bloc. This despite the exit polls in Israel being notoriously inaccurate in the last few election cycles.

Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog, today the head of the Jewish Agency, felt he had pulled off an impressive upset against Bibi five years ago, only to be stung by reality the next morning, when actual results showed Bibi truly made it back from the brink.

For Horovitz, though, there was no mea culpa. Just a slight change in the headline.

But Horovitz was not alone in having his rapid-fire take backfire.

The Israeli paper of record, Haaretz, also decided to let its writers work out their feelings across its pages. Here’s a sampling of their hot takes:

The US correspondent was first off the mark but was too consumed by his framing of the narrative in America to remember that patience is a virtue.

Ravit Hecht was demoralized to the point of showing an odd case of learned helplessness.

And Gideon Levy did Gideon Levy things by ignoring the large segment of Israel that wholeheartedly rejected Netanyahu, including the significant boost to the Joint List by Jewish defectors from the left-wing bloc, who were rightly disappointed with their leadership’s inability to include Israeli Arabs, who make up 20% of the population.

Should I have been surprised? Probably not. I had hoped, during the first round, that at least the Israeli journalists, some of whom I worked alongside of on that crushing night of March 17, 2015, at least they would know better, having experienced that disappointment on their flesh and soul.

I was wrong.

And it didn’t get better in September.

And the third time is certainly not charming.

Meanwhile, the actual numbers tell a different story.

With 96.5% of the votes tallied, Likud is indeed doing better than in the second round. But if you consider that it swallowed up Moshe Kahlon’s Kulanu, it is barely breaking even from its first round results.

The right-wing religious factions, Shas and UTJ are, as Israelis like to say, driving in full-gas on neutral. The alleged kingmaker, Avigdor Liberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu might receive a small bump from the military vote, but it still places them well below their September showing.

Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked’s Yamina also faltered near the finish line, with worse returns than September and abysmal returns since April, when they and their natural allies had more than 100,000 more votes.

Which brings us to the real story. Bibi is king only in cannibal island. Once again he is brought back from the brink, as Horovitz claimed, but only by taking a large bite out of his coalition allies.

Which means Bibi still can’t form a government. At best, he could form a narrow coalition that will be at the mercy of Liberman, and we know how fractious and tentative any such alliance can be. It’s how we got into this electoral nightmare to begin with.

The real story of this election is that right-wing anti-Arab racism drove more Arab Israelis to the polls than any previous campaign.

We know Labor-Gesher-Meretz capitulated and were stronger apart. Some of it is because their supporters left to the Joint List, having felt that their leadership was forgetting to include and represent 20% of the population. Placing popular MK Issawi Frej in an unelectable position certainly was a catalyst for the defection.

But more than, Blue & White failed to reach out to Arab voters. They failed to invigorate the liberal electorate or offer any legitimate alternative, any words that might make their voters believe a paradigm change was coming, not a mere return to the status quo before Bibi’s legal trouble led him towards the worst elements in his coalition.

Which is where I’ll end this early analysis. Israeli leaders need to treat their Arab neighbors not only as an important constituency in the political sphere, but as equal members in the fight to make Israel a country for all its citizens.

And journalists, both in Israel and across the world, need to spend a little more time looking at numbers and a lot less time crafting narratives that fit their easy frames.