The venerable centrist Labour party, which founded Israel, teamed up with the small rightwing Gesher party in an attempt to draw away from Gantz's Blue and White party rightwing voters belonging to the Mizrahi population (Jews of non-European, mainly Arab, origin).
And Meretz, usually identified as on the left, allied with Ehud Barak, both a former military chief of staff and a former hawkish Labour party leader, to create Democratic Union.
Remember, it was Barak's intransigence in 2000 and his insistence that the Palestinians were "no partners for peace" that led to the collapse of the Oslo process, the implosion of the remnants of the Israeli left, and ultimately to the rise of Netanyahu, who has been continuously in power for the past decade. Despite all that, Barak was seen as a fitting bedfellow for Israel's only self-described leftwing party.
Gauging ideologyThe election result offers us a simple but effective way to gauge how well the center-left did and understand the wider ideological composition of Israeli Jewish society as it exists today. It provides a yardstick for measuring the strength of these various idelogical camps.
There are 107 seats in the Israeli parliament, or Knesset, that went to Jewish parties. The other 13 seats were won by the Joint List, an umbrella comprising four Palestinian-dominated parties.
So how did Israeli Jewish society vote last week?
Between them, Labour-Gesher and Democratic Union won 11 seats, out of those 107. In other words, those parties that might describe themselves as on the center-left comprise on the most charitable view only about 10 per cent of Jewish voters.
(This may even be an overestimate. A small proportion of those votes, as well as some for more rightwing parties, came from Palestinian citizens of Israel, especially the Druze, who serve in the Israeli army and profess loyalty to a Jewish state. Nonetheless, the results do offer an approximate guide to the respective strengths of the various ideological camps in Israeli Jewish society.)
Gains for militaristic rightThe secular right, meanwhile, was represented by Gantz and his Blue and White party, led by three former generals and TV personality Yair Lapid. As one Israeli analyst recently explained to me, Gantz's party is really the Likud party of 30 years ago, before Netanyahu started decisively driving it into the arms of the religious and settler camps.
Many commentators have lumped Gantz's party in with the center-left. But this is clearly not how the party views itself, and makes no objective sense either given the known politics of its leaders.
Blue and White has three prominent generals at the helm. One, Moshe Yaalon, was formerly in the Likud party and sat as a particularly hawkish defence minister in a previous Netanyahu government.
Yaalon has compared the Palestinians to cancer, has long supported giving legal status even to those settlements that are outlawed under Israeli law, and has equalled Netanyahu in his warmongering against Iran.
Gantz, meanwhile, oversaw the army's attack on Gaza in 2014, which destroyed tens of thousands of homes and killed more than 500 Palestinian children. That's not an embarrassing episode in his backstory, it has been at the center of Blue and White's election advertising campaign.
The militaristic right represented by Blue and White narrowly won the largest number of seats, at 33. That suggests their secular, nationalist worldview is shared by about 31 per cent of Israeli Jews.
Far-right triumphsNext are the fundamentalist, ultra-Orthodox religious parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism. The ultra-Orthodox were once seen as anti-Zionist, or at least ambivalent in their attitude towards Zionism. That view is now outdated.
As more and more ultra-Orthodox have been encouraged into the settlements by the copious, cheap housing built on stolen Palestinian land over the past few decades, the two parties' voters have moved relentlessly to the nationalist right. Between them these two parties won 17 seats, or about 16 per cent of the Jewish vote.
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