A most uninspiring campaign
Israel’s political system seems headed for even more fragmentation, Gil Troy says.
Two videos frame the March 17 Israeli elections. The first, released by the incumbent Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, sets up Netanyahu as a kindergarten teacher, casting his rivals as squabbling preschoolers. The second, released by Eretz Nehedaret (It’s a Wonderful Land), Israeli television’s leading satirical show, casts the various opposition candidates as characters in Star Wars. All seek to unseat the evil Caesar from Caesarea (an ancient Roman city where Netanyahu has a vacation home).
The elections, with multiple parties and overheated rhetoric, will reveal whether Israeli voters believe Netanyahu is the only grown-up in the room or the devil incarnate.
In truth, while pundits and spinmeisters the day after will probably use such black-and-white rhetoric to proclaim misleadingly clear conclusions, the results seem destined to be more muddled.
For starters, Israel’s hyper-democratic political system is famously fragmented, and, it seems, only getting more so. The electoral fight is for a 61-vote majority in the 120-member Knesset. No party has ever won a majority on its own in Israel’s 67-year history. Still, whereas the leading parties used to get 40 or even 50 seats, the polls show the two leading parties averaging between 21 and 26 seats, which makes the parties and the eventual prime minister hostages to the whims of minor parties.
Moreover, so far, this has been a most uninspiring campaign, a campaign of big egos, not sweeping ideas; of postures, not principles.
So far, the hottest campaign issue has been Netanyahu’s March 3 address to the U.S. Congress, and the resulting blowback from President Barack Obama and some Democrats. Characteristically, despite the prime minister’s stated intention to jump-start a conversation about Iran, the focus in Israel has been on how much damage insulting Obama might cause and how much of Netanyahu’s motivation stems from the elections.
Netanyahu, known by friends and foes alike as “Bibi,” has been prime minister since March 31, 2009, and also served for three years a decade earlier, from 1996 through 1999. Having also served as ambassador to the United Nations, foreign minister, finance minister and opposition leader, he has far more governmental experience than any of his rivals. Netanyahu has been the defining leader of this decade, and of Israel’s third generation — not the David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir founders, not the Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan fighters, but the post-1948 heirs, born in a free, democratic Jewish State — and tasked with shaping Israel in the 21st century as a sophisticated high-tech centre still committed to its Jewish mission of preserving tradition and inspiring the world.
In many ways, Netanyahu represents Israel’s two sides. Especially as finance minister, he modernized the economy and helped Israel become the Start-Up Nation, inventing modern-day miracles and attracting nearly $1 billion in venture capital in 2014 alone. But in his suspicion of the world, in his sensitivity to anti-Semitism, in his fears of the future, he also represents the scarred Jew, the persecuted Jew, the Jew who has not just seen the worst humanity can offer, but has experienced it.
Steeped in Jewish history and Jewish suffering by his historian father, reinforced in that anguish when his charismatic older brother, Yoni, was murdered while heroically freeing dozens of Israelis from the hands of terrorists in the famous 1976 Entebbe Raid, Bibi Netanyahu has good reason to worry. Outsiders may mock his constant warnings about Iran going nuclear, but the 20th century has taught that totalitarian dictators calling for a people’s destruction and seeking weapons of mass destruction must be taken seriously.
And while outsiders may only see Israel’s strengths, he and his people are well aware of Israel’s vulnerabilities, with an Arab Spring that quickly turned gloomy, with a Palestinian national movement still more committed to destroying a Jewish state than building a Palestinian one, with ISIS spreading terror throughout the Middle East, Syria enmeshed in civil war, Lebanon dominated by Hezbollah, Jordan often worried about Islamist upheaval and Egypt still traumatized by its bout of Muslim Brotherhood leadership.
Most Israelis understandably feel burned by previous concessions made to the Palestinians. Until someone explains — or better yet, Palestinians show — why a new round will produce the peaceful results Oslo, the Southern Lebanon withdrawal and the Gaza disengagement failed to achieve, most Israelis will share Netanyahu’s peace process pessimism.
In such an environment, it takes an extra effort to hope, and the headline remains that, faced with such foes, Israel remains democratic, optimistic, dynamic.
Still, election campaigns often pick at national scabs, with various parties offering differing Band-Aids. According to the latest polls, the opposition leader, Yitzhak Herzog, has convinced a majority of Israelis that Netanyahu is tired, that his ideas are stale, that it’s time for new blood. Netanyahu’s party is averaging about 22 seats in the polls, which means less than a quarter of the electorate wants him back.
Since Netanyahu called the election, Herzog has been doing well. He struck a deal with Tzipi Livni to have his Labour Party and her HaTnua Party run together as the Zionist Union. Voters approve of the marriage, and the two parties together have polled far more seats than they each had individually. However, Livni’s political dowry — a rotation agreement if they win whereby she would serve two years after Herzog’s two years — has also reinforced many fears that Herzog is too nice and too weak for Israel’s tough domestic politics and tougher neighbourhood. In the Star Wars spoof, Herzog as Luke Skywalker waves around his light sabre — only to see it go limp when he joins with Livni.
Other players represent other tribes of Israel. Ha Bayit Ha Yehudi
No party has ever won a majority on its own in Israel’s 67-year history.
(The Jewish Home), led by Naftali Bennett, is the party of the national religious and the settlers. He is to Bibi’s right, but also is Bibi’s closest ideological ally. Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Is Our Home), represents the million-plus Russian Jews who moved to Israel, once freed from Soviet totalitarianism. The great hope of the last election, Yair Lapid, of Yesh Atid, (There Is a Future), is looking stale, and the once-heralded newcomer of this election, Moshe Kachlon of Kulanoo (All of Us), has not attracted the same critical mass of voters Lapid attracted last time. Two other groups are also represented — Israeli Arabs and ultra-Orthodox Jews. Together, all these parties reflect Israel in all its complexity. Trying to put a coalition together to reach 61 seats may require the kind of miracles Moses relied on when crossing the Red Sea.
The true miracle, of course, will be on election day itself. If all 19 previous elections are any indication, the day will be peaceful. The participation will be extensive — still averaging two-thirds. And Israeli democracy will continue not only to survive, but to thrive.
"So far, the hottest campaign issue has been Netanyahu’s March 3 address to the U.S. Congress, and the resulting blowback from President Barack Obama and some Democrats. Gil Troy