With reports Netanyahu sought to attack Iran before elections, could vote be postponed?

The reports over the last few days that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pushed to open up a new round of hostilities with Iran in the days before the upcoming election have inevitably led to concerns that efforts may be afoot to delay the crucial ballot.

On Monday, CNN reported that Netanyahu has been pushing for a joint US-Israel strike on Iran before the election, citing two US officials and an Israeli security source, but that US President Donald Trump did not approve.

And on Sunday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Netanyahu and IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir clashed over an instruction by the prime minister for military action that defense officials believed could have led to a confrontation with Iran shortly before the election.

Netanyahu and his office have denied both reports, but the drumbeat of war so close to the upcoming election poses the question of if and how the vote could be postponed.

Knesset elections have been postponed once before, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. After the war broke out on October 6, the election, which had been scheduled for October 30, was pushed back to December 31. That decision was made before the issue was properly regulated under law, however.

As noted by Guy Lurie and Assaf Shapira of the Israel Democracy Institute in a recent briefing on the issue, a special provision in Basic Law: The Knesset was passed in 1996 enabling the Knesset to extend its term and therefore postpone the elections.

This can only be done by passing a law in the Knesset with a special majority of at least 80 out of 120 Knesset members, or two-thirds of all members.

Neither a cabinet resolution nor government decisions made under emergency regulations can substitute for this legislation.

Crucially, Basic Law: The Knesset stipulates that the poll can only be delayed under “special circumstances.” In practice, this means that 80 MKs would have to agree that “special circumstances” do exist in order to pass legislation extending the Knesset term and delaying the election.

The 80-MK threshold means that in most circumstances, including today, a substantial number of opposition MKs would have to approve postponing the election in addition to those in the coalition parties, making it less likely that the law could be abused by the sitting government for its own narrow political interests.

The Basic Law itself requires 80 MKs to amend it, further protecting against abuse.

In the event of war with Iran, and the likelihood of Tehran firing ballistic missiles at Israeli civilian population centers as it did in the previous rounds of conflict, the IDF would inevitably deem any large gathering of people, such as queues of voters waiting to cast their ballots in polling stations, as an unacceptable security risk, which would likely satisfy the requirements of “special circumstances” needed to pass the legislation.

The law requires that the extension of the Knesset term not exceed the period of “special circumstances,” and says that the legislation must include a new date for elections.

The High Court of Justice would be able to review the legislation, and determine if the situation does indeed meet the definition of “special circumstances” to justify the drastic step of postponing the elections.

The court could also review the extension period and determine if it is appropriate to the special circumstances.

“The special circumstances must be genuinely exceptional: a real emergency that makes it impossible to hold elections on time,” wrote Lurie and Shapira.

Because the Knesset itself has a clear conflict of interest in extending its own term, they added that judicial review by the High Court of Justice was “essential to ensure that the Knesset does not exceed its authority and effectively extend its own term for improper reasons.”