Nir Hefetz, the Likud's head of public relations who hosted the event and stood by Netanyahu and his wife, called on Yair Netanyahu to get on the stage and stand by his parents. The prime minister, who must have sensed a sensitive issue, rushed to invite the entire Likud list to get on the stage and sing "Hatikva," Israel's national anthem, together with singer Amir Benayoun.
But it was an unnecessary gesture. None of the people who stood by his side on the stage that night had any impact on the results. The victory belonged to one man, who succeeded within several days to turn the negative momentum into a positive one and give his party an additional 10 Knesset seats, a 50% increase in the party's size.
The way it was done will likely be studied in departments of politics and government. Minister Silvan Shalom has been claiming for years that despite his image over the years, Netanyahu is the best politician in Israel and also the best campaigner.
He is probably right. That's the only way to explain how an unsuccessful prime minister, whose party was about to collapse according to all polls, managed within days to turn the tables and be able to establish a government for the fourth time, a stable and homogenous coalition which could definitely last another four years.
How did the Zionist Union's slogan go? It's either him or us? Well, it turns out that that's not the story. The story is: It's us, not him. We are the ones who didn’t see it. We in the media, the pollsters, the Israeli left, whoever believed a change was possible. It's not him. It's us who didn't see what we going on under our nose, who read the map wrong, who didn't see that there are two nations here, two ways.
It must be said that he is a campaigner who is completely focused on his target. On his way to the target, Netanyahu stopped at nothing: He shifted to the right without any considerations, and on the last day he completely retracted his commitment for two states for two people. He engaged in an unprecedented conflict with the US president, jeopardizing the relationship with Israel's most important ally. He launched an intimidation campaign which focused on a wide spectrum of threats, from Iran and the Islamic State to Israel's Arabs, when on Election Day he reported that the Arabs were moving in droves to the polling stations in order to bring down the right-wing government.
The Likud voters who were not going to vote this time, and the Religious Zionism members who only an hour earlier were planning to vote for the Bayit Yehudi party, grabbed their weapons. They saw it as a war over their home, believing that if they won't go out in droves, a catastrophe would happen: Buji Herzog would become prime minister.
War, closed factories, a difficulty to make ends meet, disappointments and insults – at the end of the day, none of this affected Israel's southern residents on Election Day. People who swore that they would never vote for the Likud again, who tore their Likud membership cards in front of the cameras, launched a war against the left, against the media, against the elites, the white tribe, Yair Garbuz and whatnot.