Coronavirus, CEC thwart Likud campaign plans
Supporters’ events nonexistent, Netanyahu’s segment in ‘Stand-up Nation’ comedy show disallowed
The Likud was forced on Tuesday to cancel an in-person election conference, and the Central Elections Committee banned an episode of a TV comedy show featuring Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a campaign that has until now been relatively sleepy.
In lieu of in-person events, Netanyahu has given an unusually large number of interviews to the media in the weeks before the March 23 election. Since 2015, Netanyahu has generally waited until the last week before an election and before opening up with interviews. But this time, he has saturated the media early.
In contrast, much of the usual Likud campaign features – such as big conferences with Netanyahu speaking to supporters, billboards splashed around the country, aggressive social-media drives, parlor meetings with ministers, MKs and others – have not been used or are being used to a lesser degree this time.
A Likud campaign source said they had “deliberately decided to wait and have Netanyahu lead the country and not focus on campaigning, while everyone else gets tired out. Their people are exhausted, and our people are begging us to start.”
Likud was supposed to hold the “first-ever green passport political event,” referring to the certificates given to those who received two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine or recovered from coronavirus, with Netanyahu in Jerusalem on Tuesday. Likud mayors and chapter heads were invited.
However, the event was moved to Zoom less than a day after it was
announced because political events are not listed in the laws governing how the green passport may be used.
At the request of several political parties, the Knesset Law, Constitution and Justice Committee is expected to vote on regulations for political events with vaccinated attendees. The regulations would allow the attendance of 300 people in a closed space, or 75% capacity, and 500 people outdoors. No food will be allowed at the political events, and people will have to sit at a distance from one another and
wear masks.
Also Tuesday, the Central Elections Committee accepted a petition filed against Netanyahu, Likud and Channel 13 and banned the broadcast of a segment in the Standup Nation comedy show in which the prime minister was recorded earlier this week.
Reshet promoted the program on its Twitter account on Monday under the caption: “For the first time in Israel, a prime minister comes to do stand-up.”
Likud petitioned the High Court of Justice against the decision, with
the party saying: “Many politicians appear on entertainment programs like [talk show] Ofira and Berkovic and [sketch comedy show] Eretz Nehederet. The Central Elections Committee chose to specifically censor the Likud.”
The committee determined that the segment featuring Netanyahu, which was due to be aired on Tuesday night, was considered election propaganda; therefore, the nine minutes in which Netanyahu was supposed to appear should not be broadcast, The Jerusalem Post’s sister publication Maariv reported.
In the decision, the committee’s chairman, Justice Uzi Vogelman, said although the section in question was designated as entertainment, throughout it “messages are intertwined that are on the political agenda,” and they could influence voters.
In addition, Vogelman said the prime minister’s participation in the program, “close to the election date and in light of the fact that the network knew they could not bring other political candidates due to the schedule, could create the impression that it was election propaganda.”
Finally, he ruled that although the segment was banned for broadcast during the lead-up to the election, after March 23, there would be no impediment to its broadcast.
Some of the jokes planned for the program were published in the decision on Tuesday.
For example, after the program’s cohost Shalom Assayag asked the prime minister, “Are you also waiting for the opening of Ben-Gurion Airport like us?” Netanyahu responds: “Of course. Once I would stand in front of the United Nations for the state; now I need to show up on Stand-up Nation.”
At the beginning of the program, Netanyahu congratulated fellow cohost Lital Schwartz. When Assayag remarked that he is also a host of the show, Netanyahu teased Defense Minister and Alternate Prime Minister Benny Gantz and said: “I mean, you have an alternate host and a host. In my experience, it does not work so well.”
Immediately afterward, the prime minister asked to “say something serious” and addressed the people of the cultural world.
“I know you’ve had a very difficult year,” he said. “Everything is being done to bring the halls back to full occupancy for the simple reason that anything is better than me trying to make you laugh.”
The prime minister also referred to the normalization agreements with Arab countries that he signed in the past year.
“People are wondering about the concessions we made for peace with the Emirates. I must share with you, the rumors are true. The agreement had a secret clause in which we pledged to give them Omer Adam every second Saturday,” Netanyahu joked, referring to one of Israel’s most popular singers, who spent much of the last few months in Dubai.
Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s son, wrote on his Twitter account: “It is simply unbelievable that the chairman of the [Central] Election Committee, Justice Vogelman, whom no one elected, decided on his own initiative and without any authority, to ban the broadcast of Netanyahu’s stand-up program with Shalom Assayag on television, because it was ‘election propaganda.’ Of course, he does not ban brainwashing and election propaganda for the left.”
Also Tuesday, the Likud campaign announced its messaging for the final three weeks before the election: “It’s Netanyahu or Lapid.”
The slogan pits Netanyahu against Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid. In a video released by the campaign, Netanyahu said: “Lapid is hiding behind other politicians who are in turn hiding the fact that Lapid will be prime minister in a government with them. But there is one thing that can’t be hidden: If you vote for other parties, Lapid will be prime minister.”
With the March 23 elections now less than three weeks away, all the talk about the pro-Bibi and anti-Bibi camps – meaning parties that will, or will not join in a government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu – is obscuring a seismic change that has altered Israel’s political landscape: the dominance of the Right.
If, when looking at the polls, one divides the map into proand anti-Bibi coalitions, the race appears to be excruciatingly close – with the anti-Bibi camp garnering in most recent polls about 61 seats, the pro-Bibi camp some 48, and Yamina – which can go either way, winning 11.
But if you look at the polls through the traditional Right-Left lens that was applicable before the April 2019 election when Avigdor Liberman kept his hard-right Yisrael Beytenu party out of Netanyahu’s coalition, sending the country spiraling into a seemingly endless cycle of elections, the right-wing parties today are winning some 80 of the 120 Knesset seats.
The parties, or the offshoots of the parties that composed Netanyahu’s 67-member coalition in 2015 are set to win, according to Friday’s Maariv/ Jerusalem Post poll, 80 seats this time around.
The decline of the Left is even more pronounced when comparing the situation today facing the two Zionist left-wing parties – Labor and Meretz – with how they fared in the 1992 election when Yitzhak Rabin defeated Yitzhak Shamir. In that election, Labor and Meretz won 56 seats; in the last election those two parties, running together, won six, and the polls are showing that if Meretz does manage to pass the electoral threshold, this time, the two parties running separately may win nine seats.
Many reasons have been given for this precipitous decline of fortune for the Left.
One reason is demographics – the country’s demographics have shifted dramatically, with the country’s population doubling from 4.6 million in 1990 to some 9.3 million today. The greatest increase was in the 1990s, which saw massive immigration from the former Soviet Union. In that decade alone the country’s population ballooned by some 37%, surging to 6.3 million at the start of the new century.
The vast majority of those Russian-speaking new immigrants did not vote for the Left. Likewise, the ultra-Orthodox and religious Zionist population in the country has also risen as a result of higher birth rates in those communities, and here, too, that change in demographic favors the parties on the Right.
But it is not only demographics that have altered the political map – reality has also intervened. The aftermath of the withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza in 2005, as well as the Second Intifada from 2000 to 2005, disabused many Israelis of the notion that – as the Left had been arguing for decades – Israel could trade land for peace. Reality proved otherwise.
But there is yet another reason why so many Israelis have turned their back on the Left: the Left, instead of succeeding to convince
Israelis of its positions, is trying to convince the world.
And while the Left might have succeeded in convincing progressives in the US and liberals in Europe of the critical imperative of a two-state solution along the 1967 lines, a Palestinian capital in east Jerusalem and the evils of Jewish settlement in Judea and Samaria, they have not convinced the vast majority of Israelis. How do we know: look at those polls showing 80 seats for Right-wing parties.
Moreover, by turning to the world and soliciting pressure from foreign capitals on the Israeli government, the Left is alienating even those Israelis who might have sympathy for their positions, but don’t want the world to dictate to Israel what steps it should take to ensure its own security.
Wonder why so many Israelis are not interested in the Left? Take a look at a letter that a group of 442 parliamentarians from 22 European countries sent this week to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell and the EU’s 27 foreign ministers.
“The recent regional normalization agreements with Israel have led to the suspension of
plans to formally annex West Bank territory,” the letter read. “However, developments on the ground clearly point to a reality of rapidly progressing de facto annexation, especially through accelerated settlement expansion and demolition of Palestinian structures.”
The letter called on the EU and European countries to work to stop this trend and to make use of the “diplomatic policy tools” at their disposal to do so, a euphemism for placing various forms of pressure on Jerusalem.
And who initiated the letter? Social Democrat parliamentarians
from Ireland or Sweden? Green party legislators from Germany or the Netherlands? No, four leading lights of the Israeli left: former Knesset speaker and Jewish Agency chairman Avraham Burg, former Meretz MK and New Israel Fund president Naomi Chazan, former Meretz party head Zahava GalOn, and Michael Ben-Yair, who was the attorney-general under Rabin.
While those four are perfectly entitled to their efforts, they might want to consider what kind of effect this type of activity has on the average Israeli who may have problems with
certain aspects of Israeli diplomatic policy, but definitely does not want to be dictated to by the foreign ministers of Belgium, France, Spain and Luxembourg.
If the Israeli Left wants to increase its political power in Israel, the best way would be to try to convince Israelis themselves, not try to get European parliamentarians – who are already convinced – to get their governments to twist Israel’s arm. That tactic is not going to win many Israeli adherents or help the Israeli Left regain any semblance of the political power it once wielded.