Between peace, Washington and Israel’s elections
When is Trump going to roll out his peace plan and what will it do to Israeli politics?
It was nearly impossible to walk in the hallways outside the House Foreign Affairs Committee this Wednesday without being asked about the upcoming elections in Israel. Members of Congress, staffers, journalists and think-tankers alike are trying to speculate on who’s going to win. Israel is a small country with a population of nearly nine million, but for the last few weeks you could see people on the Hill interested in the small parties which are fighting to pass the threshold or in reading the latest analysis about the chances that Yair Lapid will give up the rotation with Benny Gantz.
The elections in Israel are highly anticipated – not only because of the natural curiosity and the charged atmosphere, but also because of the long-awaited peace plan. The plan was expected to be made public a few months ago, but in December, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for early elections, a move that stirred things up. Since then, US President Donald Trump recently signed a proclamation that recognizes Israeli sovereignty over the
Golan Heights, a decision that caused countless speculations regarding the administration’s next step.
It’s hard to see a scenario in which the administration rolls out the peace plan before a new government will be in place. First, because it could be seen as interference in the formation of a new government. Second, because of the busy holiday schedule: Jews will celebrate Passover right after the elections, between April 19 and 27 – and Ramadan, which is sacred to Muslims, will take place between May 5 and June 4. Revealing the plan before or in between the two holidays could make the plan lose momentum on day one.
Dan Shapiro, former US ambassador to Israel and a senior fellow at INSS, told The Jerusalem Post that formal announcement of the peace plan during the formation of a new government is less likely. “I think that’s a very difficult thing to do and be successful,” he said. “The attention of Israeli politicians immediately after the election will be on forming the coalition – and even if it’s a clear victory for Netanyahu, that’s a very complicated period of time in Israel politically, with many demands being made by different parties. Having an American peace plan injected into that time frame only adds to the complications.
“I expect that after the election, the administration will probably decide to wait until the coalition is formed,” Shapiro continued. “And then, if they’re going to present their peace plan, they will know the political backdrop before presenting it, rather than use the period of coalition formation to present it.”
Ilan Goldenberg, Senior Fellow and Director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, told the Post that to the best of his knowledge, the option of presenting the plan during the formation of the new government is still on the table. He added: “The elections are going to absolutely drive where the peace plan goes, whether the Kushner team even puts down a peace plan or not.”
Natan Sachs, director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institute, also won’t rule out a scenario that
Then, there was a shift in the talk about cybersecurity when Channel 12 reported that Blue and White Party leader and former IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz’s phone had been hacked by Iranian intelligence.
It quickly became clear that nothing that would pose a danger to national security was on the phone, but that didn’t stop Netanyahu and the Likud from focusing on the security breach.
NETANYAHU CALLED a press conference questioning how Gantz could protect the country if he can’t even protect his own phone. The prime minister said there could be sensitive materials on the phone – playing on lurid Internet rumors about embarrassing personal exchanges or a possible extramarital affair – and that Gantz should come forward with all the information, lest he find himself vulnerable to blackmail.
Blue and White dismissed it all, saying the phone had “no security information, no embarrassing videos and he was never a target of blackmail.” Gantz himself called the story “political, gossipy and totally delusional,” but the story hurt his party’s momentum. And now, weeks later, it still has not died, with reports that Gantz wants the Mossad to investigate how news of the hack leaked.
This week, fake social media accounts became the center of attention once again. Acclaimed journalist Ronen Bergman reported about a network of hundreds of fake social media accounts advocating for Netanyahu in an exposé in Yediot Aharonot and The New York Times – but most of the examples cited in the story are real people, who spoke up soon afterward saying that they are not bots, haven’t coordinated messages with others and are not officially affiliated with the Likud or the prime minister in any way, except that they are supporters.
Netanyahu called a press conference with one of the not-bots and denied that the Likud ran a network of that kind.
It would be a highly inefficient allocation of the party’s resources if the network – which doesn’t even seem to exist – was funded by the Likud. Other than targeting media figures and politicians, Twitter is not a very effective way to get to Israeli voters since, as a survey by the Israeli Internet Society found last year, only 17% of smartphone owners use the network, which is likely less than a quarter-million of over 6 million eligible Israeli voters.
FACEBOOK, ON the other hand, is where it’s at. There were 5.8 million Israeli accounts on Facebook as of the end of 2017, giving it 67.6% market penetration. And Likud has used Netanyahu’s page – the most “liked” of any politician in Israel – in novel ways for the local political field, including a live propaganda webcast called Likud TV, which can also be watched on demand, and a “chat-bot” where users can talk to the prime minister’s account and receive campaign videos in return.
But Facebook is also where the Likud has gotten into trouble. Central Elections Committee chairman and Supreme Court Justice Hanan Melcer recommended this week that the police investigate the party for criminal activity, after it admitted to bankrolling “Moving Right,” a get-out-the-vote campaign, without putting the party’s name on it. “Moving Right” includes both social media activity and knocking on doors in towns that had low voter turnout in the last election. The campaign was represented as a joint effort of right-wing parties – but it was a Likud initiative, and Likud never managed to get any other parties to help pay for it.
Two days after the bot report came out, Likud spokesman Jonathan Urich was questioned by Blue and White lawyers and Melcer, and he once again emphasized that he had not heard of the social media accounts before reading the article and that the party is not operating a secret network, but only official campaign pages.
In his line of questioning to Urich, Melcer proved that he doesn’t quite understand the issue. He seemed to not understand the concept of people not using their real names or photos on the Internet, in order to express their opinions freely without fear of consequences socially or from work.
“If a person takes on a different name or photo on the Internet, is that anonymous activity?” he wondered. Melcer also suggested that, in future elections, there be “radio silence” for political parties’ messages on social media in the last week before an election.
Urich had to spell out how social media works: that just like in the real world, many people will talk about the same topic at the same time if it’s in the news. “At certain times, there was a rise in the number of mentions… They say [in the reports suggesting a secret pro-Likud network, that] it was coordinated… Unfortunately, that reflects ignorance [and] a misunderstanding of the Internet. At certain times, there is a jump in Internet use and there are peaks without coordination, because a topic is trendy: it’s on the agenda, it’s burning in people... This doesn’t show coordination. You need much more than that to show coordination between users.”
MEANWHILE, a Twitter account parodying Melcer went up, mocking the way he talks about social media.
“Dear all Twitter users, according to my decision, please avoid any political tweets until the election. Tweets about cats and nudes are still permissible until the petition is ruled on. Thank you, the Honorable Judge Melcer.”
At 12:39 a.m. Thursday, the fake account tweeted: “Twitter users, good night. I am announcing lights out. Please do not tweet until 6 a.m. Sincerely, the Honorable Judge Melcer.”
Melcer can only rule according to existing laws, and that leaves him without a lot of tools. When it comes to Internet use and social media in elections, Israel’s laws are far behind the political parties. The Ways of Propaganda Law regulating campaign advertisements was passed in 1959, and while there have been updates since then – for example, to prohibit threatening to curse people if they don’t vote for a party, as Shas did in the 1980s – it does not mention the Internet at all. Parties have total freedom online.
Melcer tried to get a handle on things at the beginning of this election campaign, suggesting that the Knesset amend election campaign laws or that parties sign a pledge to increase transparency in online political ads. Likud was the only party in the Knesset that refused.
Blue and White – really it’s Yesh Atid part at the time – argued that this proves they’re using fake social media accounts. Likud said that the Internet has been around for a while and things were fine in the last election, so there’s no reason to change. Anyway, as they encountered earlier this week, the requirement that campaign ads be labeled with the party sponsoring them arguably applies to all materials, even if the text of the law doesn’t mention the Internet.
But the Central Elections Committee seems to be behind the times. The committee’s director-general Orly Ades had little to say after Argaman’s warning of foreign interference, putting out a statement that could be summed up as: “don’t worry, we can handle it,” without any concrete steps.
We don’t know at this point if the hundreds of accounts shut down by Facebook and Twitter are the extent of foreign intervention, and we don’t know if there are more fake accounts secretly run by parties or by anyone else.
But cybersecurity had a massive presence in this election – and it’s likely here to stay as a player in Israeli politics, whether our institutions are prepared for it or not. •