Could it really be over? As Israeli political reporters stand before their cameras or hunch over their keyboards, their brains screaming with caffeine, that is the one question they’re asking. As are millions of voters, who remarkably turned out on Tuesday in impressive numbers, despite their election fatigue.
As I write this, there are still a quarter of the votes in Israel’s general election waiting to be counted. Many of the ballot boxes come from Bedouin communities in the Negev desert and other Arab communities. Who knows, perhaps they could still change the outcome?
Mathematically it’s certainly possible. Israel’s multi-party proportional-representation election system is a machine with a lot of small moving parts and any one of them can change the overall result. But it’s becoming less and less likely by the hour.
The bottom line is that unless there are enough remaining votes to push two or three small left-wing and Arab parties over the electoral threshold of 3.25
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