Polls open in Israeli election seen as referendum on Netanyahu

Oliver, so far, so good. We have not heard any reports of any disturbances or any intimidations against voters, something that may well happen as the day develops. There have been a lot of threats by security personnel in Israel or warnings that plans were underway to disrupt the elections. I'm here in a very quiet Jerusalem neighborhood where the polls opened an hour ago. this is as close as I could get at this point to the polling place with the officials who didn't want me to come so close as to be able to take pictures of individuals coming in to vote those are the privacy laws but so far it appears a quiet day the prime minister has yet to vote some party leaders have voted I should add that in the state of Israel election day is always a national holiday. Parking is free. Public transportation is free. So all kinds of systems are put into place to enable people to vote. Here is a gentleman on his way to vote who just waved. But so far, it seems to be proceeding quietly and apace, both in Jewish and in Arab communities. Now, what possible scenarios might we see play out in this election today? Well, as you indicated, the polls, most of the polls, the public polls in Israeli media have indicated what appears to be basically a tie between the two main blocs, the blocs led by Prime Minister Netanyahu and the bloc currently led by his chief rival, Gadi Eisenkot. But I should issue a warning that these depictions of the polls are a bit misleading because what they do is follow Prime Minister Netanyahu's view, which is that almost disenfranchises 20% of the voters in Israel, the Arab voters and Arab majority parties in particular. So that, in fact, Israel has three blocs, three voting blocs, the Netanyahu bloc that at most polls stood at about 50, hovering around 50, the Eisenkot-led bloc, which is a very varied group of parties from right to more close to the left, but that oppose Prime Minister Netanyahu's attempt to overhaul what were called the coup d'etat laws in Israel. excuse me and then we have the smaller but significant block of Arab majority parties that also have Jewish candidates that also have Jews voting for them so the depictions of them should be a bit more nuanced and if we add these Arab majority parties to the opposition bloc what we're seeing is around 70 Knesset seats projected to belong to the opposition and around 50 to Netanyahu's bloc and if that holds the name of the game after election day will be whether this fractious opposition can form a government.