Two days ago Qatar was the word Netanyahu least wanted to hear. His opponents built half their campaign on it. Three of his closest advisers, Jonatan Urich, Yisrael Einhorn and Eli Feldstein, are suspected of taking Qatar-linked money to push Doha’s line in the Israeli media while the war in Gaza was going on. Bennett called it treason. Netanyahu said he didn’t know his people were being paid.
Now, one day after the polls closed, Qatar is back. This time Likud is the one waving it. Central Elections Committee chairman Justice Noam Solberg has asked Shin Bet chief David Zini to look into suspected foreign funding and election bribery tied to groups that worked to raise Arab voter turnout. Likud says the money came from Qatar and Turkey. It has already named the affair Ra’amgate, after Mansour Abbas’s United Arab List, and is talking about a stolen election.
The timing does a lot of the arguing. With about 90% of the vote counted, Netanyahu’s bloc sits at 53 seats. The opposition holds 67, of which 48 belong to Gadi Eisenkot’s bloc and 19 to the Arab-majority parties, their best result ever. Eisenkot can’t reach 61 without those parties, whether they sit in a coalition or back a minority government from outside. Taint the 19 seats and the math that ends this government stops working. Likud said so within hours: no Zionist party should partner with the Arab factions. Itamar Ben Gvir went further and called for arrests.
What Likud leaves out is the evidence. None has been shown in public. Police have dismissed Likud’s claim of election fraud by the Arab parties. And even if every shekel of the alleged turnout money is proven, paying for buses and phone banks doesn’t invent voters. The people who cast those ballots are Israeli citizens who had every right to vote.
That doesn’t make the probe fake. The first information reached Solberg from the Shin Bet itself, not from a Likud dossier, and Solberg is a conservative justice, hardly a friend of the opposition. Zini is Netanyahu’s own pick to run the Shin Bet. Foreign money in an Israeli election is a crime no matter who it helps, and it should be investigated properly.
So watch the calendar. Eisenkot has already warned against using the investigation to push back the swearing-in of the new Knesset. A Shin Bet file can stay open while the Knesset convenes and a government is formed. If Likud tries to hold the whole transfer of power hostage to it, Ra’amgate is a stall tactic and nothing more.
For a year and a half Netanyahu called Qatargate a witch hunt against his own aides. Now he wants the country to treat a Qatar story with no public evidence as grounds to freeze an election result. That’s a hard sell.
Even for him.