I am a dual citizen of the Unites States and Israel and I exercise my rights to vote in both places. I arrived in Israel for the election nine days before the vote took place. Full disclosure: I have been a supporter of Meretz for many years, having been a member of a kibbutz and an activist in the peace movement. I am biased towards Meretz of course.

Here is some background information on the four election lists that are generally considered as being the Israeli left, although there is not full agreement on this. The groups/parties are: Meretz, Labor (Avoda), Hadash-Ta’al, and Balad-Ra’am. When I refer to Arabs in this article, I am speaking about Palestinians who are Israeli citizens and have the right to vote in Israeli elections.

Meretz has focused on ending the occupation and on civil rights issues such as LGBTQI+ rights, women’s rights, etc. It was formed by a merger of a few different groups, including Mapam (Kibbutz Artzi movement and Hashomer Hatzair youth movement) and Ratz (Shulamit Aloni’s civil rights movement). Meretz has often been led by women (rare among Israeli parties), including current leader Tami Zandberg and prior leader Zahava Galon. Of the top six candidates on the Meretz Knesset list, there were three women and three men. The top six included three people of color (a Palestinian Muslim, a Druze award-winning high school principal, and an Ethiopian immigrant). Meretz has typically received most of its votes from Israeli Jews, but this time it received more than 25% of its votes from Israeli Arabs. Meretz received 4 seats in the new Knesset (down from 5 seats).

Labor was historically the ruling party from the pre-state (Yishuv) era until the Likud electoral victory of 1977. The current party leader, Avi Gabai, is not a traditional Labor Party supporter, and sees himself as the CEO of the party, having come from a management background. He forced out an Arab Knesset member (Zuhair Bahlool), and he publicly humiliated former political partner Tzipi Livni in a horrible misogynistic rant. He refused to agree to have Labor and Meretz run together in a single election list, and waited until the last moment to inform Meretz leader Tami Zandberg of his decision. The rest of the Labor Knesset members are fairly progressive, but the drop to 6 seats in the new Knesset (from 24 seats) left out Meirav Michaeli, whose life partner is the best political satirist on TV in Israel (and does a good job of ridiculing every party except Labor).

Hadash-Ta’al is a coalition of the Communist Party-dominated Hadash (The Democratic Front for Peace and Equality) and the Ta’al Party led by Dr. Ahmed Tibi. Hadash is led by Ayman Odeh, who used to be the head of the Joint List, which in the prior Knesset encompassed all four Arab political parties. Hadash is a mixed Arab-Jewish party, but the overwhelming majority of its supporters are Arabs. Hadash-Ta’al had the best election advertisement. Since on election day in 2015 Netanyahu said that “the Arabs are headed to the polls in droves”, the Hadash-Ta’al ad said that “Jews and Arabs are headed to the polls in droves.” They received 6 seats.

Balad-Ra’am is a coalition of the Palestinian nationalist party Balad and the Islamic-oriented party Ra’am. They received 4 seats. In the prior Knesset, the Joint List (Hadash, Ta’al, Balad, Ra’am) had 13 seats instead of the current 10 seats.

This unfortunately left the left with only 20 seats in a Knesset of 120 seats.

I was surprised when talking to many friends who have traditionally voted for parties on the left that a significant number of them were planning, for tactical reasons, to abandon the left in this election for the (slim) chance of defeating Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Blue and White, a new political party led by former general Benny Gantz and other former generals, Likud refugees who have feuded with Netanyahu, and “Centrist” Yair Lapid, possibly had a chance to get more votes than Netanyahu’s Likud party. People on the left were desperate to change the prime minister. They had the illusion that if the party of generals got significantly more votes than Netanyahu, then they would be able to form a government. The fallacy with that theory is that the number of seats on the right significantly exceeds the number of seats on the left within the Knesset. The “Centrist” generals’ party would be unable to find enough coalition partners to form a government. This would occur because the center was taking votes from the left, but not from the right. In order for this tactic to work, at least 6 seats from the right would have to move to the center left, which means around 270,000 rightist voters would have to move leftward. This was an illusion, but a lot of people fell for it.

Another issue is the minimum number of votes that a party needs in order to get into the Knesset. The threshold is 3.25% of all of the votes cast throughout the country. Parties that don’t get this number of votes do not get into the Knesset and those votes are wasted. If many voters abandon the left, that could cause one or more parties on the left to not meet the threshold and further reduce the number of seats on the left. Two of the four parties on the left (Meretz and Balad-Ra’am) came close to not receiving the minimal number of required votes.

Another problem is related to what happens to excess votes. For example, if one party gets enough votes for 5.5 seats and another party gets enough votes for 7.5 seats, which party gets the seat? There is a complicated mathematical formula to determine this called the Bader-Ofer Law. Bader was from the Likud party and Ofer was from the Labor party, which at the time was a very large party. Their law, of course, favored large parties over small parties. This only worked if a both parties met the minimal threshold of votes AND the parties had set-up an excess votes agreement prior to the election. In this election, the parties on the left set-up an excess vote agreement with each other. The party of the generals did not set-up an excess votes agreement. This means that if they received enough votes for 35.9 seats, they would only receive 35 seats and the votes for the fractional (0.9) seat would be wasted.

The party of the generals had declared that it would not form a government with the two political groups that were supported predominantly by Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up more than 20% of the Israeli population. By declaring this up front, it further decreased the possibility of forming a center left government, and also helped to suppress the vote among Palestinian citizens of Israel.

All of these factors led to the very difficult situation in which the Israeli left finds itself today. We have lost many Knesset seats, Netanyahu is strengthened, and the left need to figure out ways to convince its supporters not to follow the same tactical illusions next time. The right votes for the right, the center votes for the center. We need to ensure that the left votes for the left.