Attacks on U.S., Israel campaign trails

Whether it ends up being Joe Biden or Bernie Sanders as the target for presidential mudslinging, expect significant dirty tricks as Donald Trump emulates Benjamin Netanyahu who emulated Donald Trump.

Netanyahu sprang the Israeli equivalent of an “October surprise” just before his nation voted on Monday, and he dented challenger Benny Gantz just enough to gain a meaningful edge.

As usual, no party won 61 seats, which would be an outright majority in the Knesset, so cobbling together a coalition may take weeks or longer. But this unprecedented third election in less than a year has given Netanyahu’s Likud Party and its existing right-wing partners 58 seats, so they have a realistic chance of recruiting a few more partners to succeed this time — after failing last April and again in September.

Preelection polls indicated that Israel’s long deadlock produced no real change in voters’ intentions, but Netanyahu’s Likud Party ended up with 36 seats, an increase of four from last year.

The expectation had been that, like last year, Gantz’s new Blue and White opposition party would win a few more seats than Likud. There would again be rumors of both men forming a grand coalition, but the reality would set in that the reason Gantz ran was to force Netanyahu out of office. Just a few years ago, he was Netanyahu’s military chief of staff.

A partnership could surprisingly emerge, but Netanyahu will first try to entice defectors from other parties. He is unlikely, however, to weaken his commitment to his longtime right-wing cabinet members to keep all of Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Gantz, advocating an end to 11 years of Netanyahu’s rule and also softer policies toward Palestinians, will again team up with left-wing parties to total around 47 seats. That’s not even close to a majority, but Gantz controversially signaled that he might depend on support from the Joint List, a coalition of Israeli Arabs that met its goal of winning 15 seats.

An unattractive fact about Israeli politics is that Gantz said he would never invite the Israeli Arabs, who often identify themselves as Palestinians, to join his government as cabinet ministers. Some critics see that as a gross insult, as they consider the 21 percent of Israel’s citizens who are Arabs to be comparable to blacks and Latinos in the United States. No U.S. government would brazenly exclude ethnic minority politicians, but in Israel the reputation of the Arab parties is that they are disloyal to the Jewish state.

Netanyahu repeatedly has said that if Gantz were to become prime minister, the security of Israel would be in the hands of “terrorism supporters.” That particular smear was the result of a process that Trump also may go through this year: spewing allegations and negative legends for months until finding the one that could do the most damage.

The specific dirty trick that seems to have swung enough votes to give Netanyahu the lead, in Monday’s election, came late last week. A right-wing politician who happens to be a rabbi released an audio recording, in which one of Gantz’s top advisers says he is thought of as “stupid and a complete nobody” and “doesn’t have the courage to attack Iran.”

Don’t be surprised if surreptitious recordings become a feature of America’s campaign this year.

Netanyahu, while shopping for coalition partners, has a serious challenge less than two weeks away: the start of his trial on corruption charges. Even as Netanyahu imitated Trump’s fearmongering bombast, he now will want to imitate his friend Donald by surviving the ordeal of a public trial.

Dan Raviv of i24News is author of “Friends In Deed: Inside the U.S.-Israel Alliance.”