The recent elections in Israel were held, as in past years, in a climate of resignation. No big surprises were anticipated, and no one for a minute doubted that Benjamin Netanyahu would be elected for a historic third time. Even when the results were announced, the landslide victory of the new party, Yesh Atid [there is a future], led by media celebrity Yair Lapid, was hardly a surprise. It is the third time that a vaguely centrist party with a vaguely anti-religious, patriotic agenda took a big chunk of the “average Israeli” votes. (Kadima is today the smallest party in the Knesset with 2 seats. In its first elections in 2006 it took 29 seats to become the largest party within the coalition government. Shinuy party won 15 seats in 2003 and disappeared in the 2006 elections.) With 17 out of 120 Knesset seats, Yesh Atid has become the second biggest party in Israel overnight, second to the ruling party. They were declared the “winners” and the Netanyahu-Liberman duo the “losers,” for losing a large portion of their mandate through the merger of Likud and Israel Beitenu.

The massive vote for Lapid, riding on a general discontent with politics, made it painfully clear how sectorial the “social justice” protest in the summer of 2011 was after all, which drew primarily on middle-class frustrations with dwindling economic prospects for future generations. The amazing creativity and energy of many young and more radicalized 2011 protestors dissipated much too soon. Difficult yet promising alliances forged at the time between Mizrahi neighborhoods in Tel Aviv and Palestinian activists in Jaffa found no political expression. The summer of 2011 was a moment when hundreds of thousands poured to the streets to demonstrate against the rule of the so-called “tycoons,” Israel’s business oligarchy. This seemed to have the potential to lead to an even broader, more threatening mobilization against the existing order. It didn’t happen. No serious opposition to the reign of the neoliberal hawkish right emerged from this outburst. The 2011 protest did not generate any visible crack in the tectonic structures of Israeli politics. The main players on the Israeli political map remain Netanyahu-Liberman, a spineless, inflated center, and a disproportionately strong settler-dominated extreme . . .

Read more: Israel Against Democracy: Post-Elections Analysis