The reference to V15 is also highly significant. This election was seen principally as a referendum on Netanyahu’s premiership. As Labour’s campaign slogan bluntly declared, “It’s us or him.” Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s global unpopularity is well-known in Israel, but it actually endears him to his supporters because they share his anxieties. Therefore one of the recurring themes on the Right during the election was the influx of foreign money into the campaign to unseat Netanyahu. Among these “left-wing NGOs” funded from abroad was V15. This group, it was repeatedly pointed out during the campaign, is headed by a former Obama 2012 campaign staffer, a useful fact that drew upon Obama’s unpopularity here. There is also a suggestion that V15 is financed by American groups that receive federal funding. This would be legally problematic in both Israel, where foreign funding for elections is restricted, and the US, where political use of federal money is prohibited. Israeli judicial authorities declined to investigate V15 during the election, a decision that, along with several others, confirmed for Netanyahu’s supporters the establishment’s bias against him. Netanyahu’s allies in the US Congress, however, condemned any possible involvement by the Obama administration and are investigating any illegal use of federal funds. In any case, V15’s strategy was a get-out-the-vote drive among those demographics that would be unlikely to vote for Netanyahu. The reference to V15 in Netanyahu’s election day statement thus fed into the Right’s suspicion that foreign forces were conspiring to remove him and, by doing so, were manipulating Israeli democracy.

Netanyahu’s comments were aimed partly at his own supporters, whom he was urging to go to vote. But they were primarily directed towards those considering voting for other right-wing parties. The election was not simply a referendum on Netanyahu’s premiership but on his leadership of the Right. He spent the last several days of the campaign pleading with nationalist voters to return to Likud, once a titanic faction in the Knesset that has been reduced in recent elections to a smaller, if still dominant, force (in part because conservative voters presumed Netanyahu would be prime minister so voted for the more hawkish parties they wanted to see in his coalition).

Even supposing the nationalist bloc won a majority of Knesset mandates (as it was predicted to do by the polls), if Likud were not larger than Labour (which the polls were also predicting), then Herzog could still have won the first chance to form a government. Netanyahu needed as much of the Right to return to Likud to prevent that happening. Judging by the final results — which saw a mammoth surge for Likud and a decline for Jewish Home and other hawkish parties — the voters heeded Netanyahu’s call.

That was Netanyahu’s electoral calculation, but was it correct? Was it really a last-minute plea to the Right to vote for Likud that secured victory? The pollsters are divided. John McLaughlin, a Republican strategist who worked on Netanyahu’s campaign, says Likud knew it was ahead in the polls in the days leading up to the election — but that makes Netanyahu’s statement about Arab voters all the more perplexing. Others take a different view. Mina Tzemach, one of the country’s leading pollsters, contends that Likud was down in the polls on the morning of the election, and that Netanyahu’s noontime statement about foreign funding and Arab voters turned the tide. The problem with this side of the argument, though, is that Israeli pollsters historically have been wide of the mark — even the exit polls grossly underestimated the final gap between Likud and Labour. There are a number of reasons for this: under-polling of settlers and religious communities who vote conservatively, distrust of the mainstream media by conservative voters who therefore refuse to disclose their preferences, manipulation of polls by pollsters and the media to impact the race rather than report it, and, more innocuously, the reality that a vast proportion of the Israeli electorate remains undecided until entering the voting booth. So those pollsters who believe Netanyahu’s comments made all the difference have been wrong before. Either way, it should further be noted that already in the 2013 election Netanyahu also made desperate overtures on election day to supporters to go to the polls and vote Likud. Whatever Likud’s position in the polls, this is a tried and tested tactic.