ABSTRACT
The elections for the twentieth Knesset were held on March 17, 2015, just over two years since the nineteenth Knesset was elected and about two years and eight months before its term was up. The collapse of the third Netanyahu government (Israel’s thirty-third government) was rapid and hard to decipher. One of the most experienced and astute pundits of Israeli politics, Nahum Barnea, wrote a column on the government’s downfall entitled: “They committed suicide” (Barnea 2014). The election campaign began with a lack of clarity about why the elections had been moved up. During the campaign, many of the politicians, journalists, commentators, and activists thought of the elections in terms of the 1999 elections, when Ehud Barak defeated Benjamin Netanyahu after his fi rst term as prime minister. Indeed, the Zionist Camp ran a negative election campaign focused on “Bibi,” assuming that, like then, many in the political community and general public had grown sick and tired of him.1 However, the 2015 elections were ultimately most similar to the 1996 elections. Benjamin Netanyahu, an incumbent prime minister fi ghting for reelection in 2015, achieved victory by enhancing and radicalizing the same approach of identity politics that helped him challenge Prime Minister Peres and win in 1996.
