In Israeli city split 50/50, a joint call for unity government
ROSH HAAYIN, Israel — On one side of town, it’s falafel and observing Shabbat. On the other, it’s sushi and the yearning for a Saturday morning coffee at a local cafe. Both sides can be guilty of insularity and snobbery.
The identity and culture wars that were fought in the two recent Israeli elections — both of which ended in indecisive deadlocks — have long been playing out in a split city of about 50,000 people that sits in the middle of the country.
Rosh Haayin almost perfectly reflects the political divide that has paralyzed Israel after the two elections, one in September, the other in April. In last month’s vote, 34.7 percent of the city’s residents voted for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his conservative Likud party; 34.6 percent voted for the main opposition, the centrist Blue and White alliance.
Rosh Haayin, east of Tel Aviv on the border of the West Bank, is a hung city in a hung country where a postelection political crisis is dragging on.
The old town of Rosh Haayin grew out of a muddy tent camp for mostly poor Jews airlifted from Yemen soon after Israel was founded in 1948. Its lowrise commercial center, with its spice store and barber shops, has barely changed since the 1950s. A traditional, blue-collar stronghold of largely religious immigrants and their descendants, it leans heavily to the right.
On the higher ground to the east, neighborhoods of singlefamily and semidetached homes that sprung up in the early 1990s as housing projects for army officers are bastions of a more ethnically mixed, middle-class, liberal and secular Israel that votes center-left.
Blue and White’s leader, Benny Gantz, a former military chief of staff and Netanyahu’s main rival to lead the country, lives on a quiet road near a small, modern mall in this part of the city. And the eastern districts are now rapidly expanding with even newer developments of shiny apartment blocks popular with upwardly mobile young families from the Tel Aviv area.
“It’s as if they were two separate towns,” said Masha Sherman,
36, a software engineer who works for a company that collects election data. She calls them “Israel” and “Yemen.”
After the two inconclusive elections, Sherman, like many voters on both sides of the lines in Rosh Haayin, and in the rest of the country, said the only way out of the morass was for the two major parties to join forces in a national unity government.
“I want a moderate government, without extremists, without incitement and, if possible, without corruption,” said Sherman, a resident of new Rosh Haayin. “I’m always for unity, and not only in politics.”
Both Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister, and Gantz, a relative political neophyte, say they, too, want a unity government. But after years of increasingly right-wing and religious governments led by Netanyahu, who is also facing a looming indictment for graft, efforts to form a grand coalition remain stuck as the two sides have not overcome their initial disagreements, including over who should serve first as prime minister under any rotation agreement.