Fool me once: Did the Joint List make a mistake backing Benny Gantz?

In the face of a global health disaster and a constitutional crisis in Israel, Blue and White leader Benny Gantz shattered a year’s worth of commitment to voters on Thursday by agreeing to enter a “national emergency government” led by Israel’s very, very long-serving prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

The details of the government are not yet final, but the decision shook Israel like an earthquake. It generated political chaos among Gantz’s supporters, and sliced his party in half.

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The best possible payoff for the Joint List, and all the opposition parties, would have been for Gantz to form a minority government that would put an end to Netanyahu’s rule. It was never likely that Blue and White would invite the Joint List to be a coalition partner — no independent Arab party has ever entered a governing coalition in Israel. But the Joint List could have supported a vote of confidence for the minority government without joining. Israeli society would have witnessed how the Arab-Palestinian citizens played a key role in a long-awaited transfer of power. The scenario would have been ground-breaking.

Gantz crushed those hopes; but the Joint List did not make a mistake.

The Joint List cannot measure its success or failure based on the composition of the next government. Its significance lies in the greater historic journey of Israeli society.

Coalition politics in Israel are a short-term story of political intrigue and short-lived governments. Like most centrist parties in Israel, Blue and White was destined to die anyway after a few electoral cycles. Gantz didn’t just break a coalition promise by agreeing to serve under Netanyahu — he broke the party’s purpose. Hence its immediate demise.

The Joint List is on a different path altogether. Palestinian citizens of Israel are on a journey, and the party’s actions have jump-started the next leg of the trip; renewed political engagement is the fuel for the future. When the Joint List was founded in 2015, it re-energized Arab voter participation, after nearly 15 years of significantly lower turnout than Jewish citizens. Arab-Palestinian citizens had grown weary of small, powerless parties, and were relieved by the formation of this political alliance in the face of an increasingly racist onslaught from far-right nationalist governments.

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