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ISRAEL: Call Livni or Netanyahu? Go With Peres

Analysis by Jerrold Kessel and Pierre Klochendler

JERUSALEM, Feb 12 2009 (IPS) - Who wins a tie? That was U.S. President Barack Obama’s dilemma Wednesday on whom to congratulate as the winner of Israel’s general election.

Benjamin Netanyahu and Tzipi Livni both continue to claim victory.

The outcome of Tuesday’s election was indeed almost a tie – in terms of votes and in seats won. This was confirmed when the final results were announced Thursday evening: Livni’s Kadima 28, Netanyahu’s Likud 27.

The final results do not alter Israel’s political make-up that was already determined by the voting which showed a major surge to the right – to Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud and its allies further to the right. That means, most probably, Netanyahu alone can form a viable coalition.

So, the scramble to win the right to form a coalition looks oddly like the election campaign itself is simply continuing. Despite the Kadima party maintaining its one-seat lead over the Likud, there’s only one winner and it isn’t Livni. In Israeli politics, the winner gets to build the governing coalition. That almost definitely will be Netanyahu.

Livni continues to vow relentlessly she’ll “make every effort for the sake of her voters” to get the nod from President Shimon Peres to have the first opportunity to form a government coalition. She has been courting the nakedly anti-Arab Israel Beiteinu party in her bid to thwart Netanyahu who, on paper, commands a solid hard-right phalanx of 65 backers in the 120- seat Knesset.

And, she stepped up the anti-Netanyahu rhetoric further on Thursday, declaring, “I can also put together a coalition that is united around the peace process. Netanyahu doesn’t want that, and couldn’t do it even if he did.”

Netanyahu remains adamant – “absolutely certain” – he’ll form the next government. The real uncertainty is where he intends to take Israel, which parties he takes with him.

Netanyahu faces two choices – his heart or his head. His choice determines if a lid can be put on the Middle East cauldron. Or, will he simply keep stirring the cauldron until it boils over?

Netanyahu’s strongest ally is, on the face of it, the hard-line Liberman. He has laid down a number of constraining terms for joining any coalition. They are all the more ominous because Israeli politics is becoming hamstrung by the absolute proportional representation system which always requires a coalition of several parties.

Likud won less than a quarter of the popular vote. Its potential coalition partners, the smaller parties, are big enough to punch their way above their weight precisely because the lead party is too small to punch above its light weight.

On paper, Netanyahu has enough suitors in his ideological family to reject Livni and to form a coalition on his own. With the Likud as its left flank, however, such a government, he knows, would be the most extreme in Israel’s history.

So how does Netanyahu see his best option, Israel’s best option, and what would be the Middle East’s least-worst option?

On his mind, Netanyahu has already made plain, are two formidable challenges: the Iranian threat – from Gaza, from Lebanon, from Iran itself – and the global economic crisis. How he means to tackle those challenges will be determined by how he constructs his coalition.

The mood within the Likud family is crystal clear. They sense “an historic opportunity” to reverse the “capitulating” policies of recent years, end “the endless giving in to terror.” For these rejectionists, a tough rightist government heralds the revival of the old Likud dream – of “Greater Israel”, of holding steadfastly to all settlements, of no-accommodation with the Palestinians, of no-comprise over occupied land.

Netanyahu’s dilemma is this: should he allow himself to embrace the Likud dream, his dream, without becoming hostage to that dream? He may well be asking himself – is this really the victory of which he dreamt?

Netanyahu loyalists say he knows that he has to resist the temptation, to reject confrontational aspirations and form a government that, in his view, can lead Israel to safer shores.

If Kadima does eventually decide to give in to Netanyahu and bite the bullet of having come out first and landed up second, this is unlikely to alter the fact that a Netanyahu-led government will remain resolutely right-wing.

If there is an indication whether Netanyahu wants to be the left marker or the right marker of a Likud-led coalition, it’s in the way his lieutenants are almost pleading with Livni not to turn her back on a broad coalition. Likud spokesman have said openly that they would welcome Kadima joining the Likud and would even be prepared to give Livni and her deputy, Shaul Mofaz, the critical foreign and defence portfolios.

Ehud Barak, still the post-election favourite of most people, including Netanyahu himself, for the critical defence post, looks like being relegated to the sidelines; the mood within his battered Labour party is “to sit on the opposition benches and to engage in thorough soul-search of what went so wrong,” said Sheli Yehimowitz, one of the few Labour legislators to survive the debacle.

Three days after the vote, who will lead the new government, and who will be in it, are still very much open questions.

So, when President Obama finally put the call through to Jerusalem – he called neither Netanyahu, nor Livni, but President Shimon Peres, reportedly congratulating him on the “robustness of Israeli democracy.”