I wanted to provide some commentary on the Israeli election. I think it’s needed-especially when you read the trash that passes for informed commentary in American outlets. Right wing outlets are crowing about the election as a “rebuke” for President Obama and they are calling it a “landslide” election for Likud. None of these things are true.
It does prove yet again one of my key beliefs, however-when it comes to Israel, most Americans are completely clueless as to what the country is really like.
Let’s dispel a few things right now, shall we?
First, it was not a “landslide”-the term has no meaning in Israeli politics. No party ever wins an out right majority of 61 seats, ever. Their system is not set up that way. It is designed to ensure proportional representation and to that extent, it succeeds, albeit at a tremendous cost.
To really understand the facts of the election, one needs to look very closely at three things: the distribution of seats in the Knesset, the make up of the smaller parties, and the demographics of each of the major Israeli cities.
With all the votes tallied here are the final results of the election (click to see correctly):
(Picture courtesy of Haaretz).
A definitive victory-but hardly a “landslide.” Americans can be such idiots sometimes.
How did Netanyahu win and were the pre-election polls wrong?
The answer to the first question is that he won stealing votes from the other right-wing parties and by indulging in what can only be described as crass race baiting.
Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed everyone’s worst fears about him when he launched a last-minute fear campaign on Tuesday, warning that “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls” — and proving that he is perfectly happy to win an election using racism. Depressingly, predictably, Bibi’s “the-Arabs-are-coming” bugaboo worked like a dream on the Israeli public, shoring up his base by swinging the right-wing vote toward him.
The answer to the
second question is, no the polls were not wrong. ( despite what the commentary may believe-they weren’t).
Go back and look at the graphic again. Bibi was very successful in convincing people that a vote for any other right-wing party was a vote for the Left. And it worked. The Zionist Union, which is just the Labor party by a new name, was not able to do the same thing on its side of the aisle. In part because of the back story of many of the smaller center-left parties, but also in part because the Zionist Union misplayed that strategy-they assumed that the voters on the right would do the same. They didn’t.
And that is where the race-baiting comes in at the last minute. It’s important to remember that Netanyahu veered sharply to the right in the previous week, renouncing a stated Israeli position on peace and catering to the worst fears of many Israelis.
This reminds me of a chilling comparison to the United States during World War II. At the end of its prolonged fighting with Japan, the United States saw no way of ending the war other than by using its doomsday weapon, and proceeded to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which decided the outcome of the war. Can such a comparison be made? Then it was a weapon of mass destruction and here it was a surprising electoral victory by the incumbent prime minister. Though Netanyahu did not threaten Israelis with a bomb, he did not hesitate to use his own “doomsday weapon.”
First Netanyahu removed the safety pin from the doomsday weapon by disturbing the fragile equilibrium of Israeli society while inciting against half the population. In Netanyahu’s eyes, Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni belong to the extreme left, working with Arabs to topple the Likud government. Voters for Zionist Union, Yesh Atid and especially Meretz were painted as potential conspirators with Arabs, the enemies of the state’s existence. We were supposed to believe that anyone voting for them would strengthen the link between the terrible left and the Arabs seeking Israel’s destruction.
On Election Day the weapon itself was trotted out. It wasn’t politicians to the right of Likud, like Lieberman or Baruch Marzel, but Netanyahu himself who began warning voters of massive Arab participation. His assistants talked of a three-fold increase in the number of Arab voters in comparison to previous elections. Twenty percent of Israel’s citizens were depicted by the prime minister as illegitimate, as a force from whom the right needs to be saved. Herzog, a Zionist with moderate positions, was portrayed as an extreme leftist who is collaborating with the Arabs to disrupt the Jewish-Zionist character of this country.
This weapon vanquished the enemy, but left the country bleeding and riven.
You have to remember that four smaller Arab parties banded together to form The Joint List. This was in direct response to an initiative of Avigdor Lieberman’s, which raised the threshold for getting into the Knesset from 2 to 3.25% of the vote. It backfired on Lieberman – but it forced the Arab parties to make a choice: unite or be crushed individually. It worked for them – they are now the third largest party in the Knesset, but it also allowed Likud to target them as a group.
By taking to Facebook and the airwaves and stating that “the Arabs are coming out in droves-driven by NGO’s,” it swayed about 200,000 undecided voters. ( left unsaid was the implication that those NGO’s were filthy leftists or worse).
It worked spectacularly.
Not everything is about you Americans.
American commentators, especially our buffoons on the conservative side of the aisle, are jumping up and down about how it “shows up Obama.” It does not. The opinion of the United States had nothing; let me repeat that, NOTHING to do with the results of the election. Conservative buffoons tend to overestimate their influence anyway, but more importantly, the results of the election are not related to an invitation the Speaker of the House had no right to issue.
Americans would do well to remember, that when it comes to Israel-it is all about Israel. When you have been shot at, it tends to shape your perspective:
Despite the extensive media attention to Israel’s economic woes and social gaps, the security situation — mainly its implications for Israelis’ safety —remains the primary consideration on Election Day.
It has been this way since the first intifada and the Oslo Accords. Here Netanyahu leads by a wide margin — the same Netanyahu responsible for the housing crisis and whose problematic personal conduct became a media mainstay in recent months.
It seems that the occupation’s moral and political implications, despite the myriad of articles published in Haaretz, aren’t the Israeli voter’s main concern. Security risks concern him much more, and this angst is well founded.
The cumulative impression is that most voters adopt the right’s conclusions on the security front — the responsibility for the negotiations freeze lies with the Palestinians too, not just with Israel — and the chances of resolving the conflict are slim at the moment. Plus the Palestinians are no longer the most burning issue in the Middle East. Even if a divine miracle quickly resolved the conflict, it wouldn’t erase the other threats.
After four years of turmoil in the Arab world, with collapsing states and deranged terror groups spitting distance of Israel’s borders, voters are concerned. Most of them, despite Netanyahu’s drawbacks, thinks he knows better how to deal with those threats.
“Twas always thus, and Twas always ever shall be.” Which leads into the second major point of the election: The Zionist Union may have had a good and logical message, it can’t sell it outside of Tel Aviv and Haifa:
Zionist Union got the highest number of votes in 28 of the country’s 33 wealthiest towns, while Likud enjoyed a decisive majority among Jewish local authorities in the middle- to lower-middle-class range; in 64 of these 77 towns, Likud came in first.
The Central Bureau of Statistics divides Israeli communities into 10 deciles based on variables like per capita income, the number of new cars, the percentage of students, the ratio of residents to unemployment, and more.
Segmenting the voting by socioeconomic levels reveals a major and probably decisive difference between Likud and Zionist Union; the former got lots of votes in wealthier communities, but the latter did very well almost solely in those richer areas.
There is probably some truth that secular center-left oriented Israelis are deluding themselves that their message is getting equal time when you have a country that is split into progressive Zionists and the living, ruling heirs of Meir Kahane. For the long term that is probably the most disturbing thing about the election, is the implications of what it means for the democratic Zionist vision of Israel’s founders.
The threats to Israeli democracy are not crude or obvious: the media is free, voting is clean, there is vibrant debate. But there are more subtle issues that should cause real concern. Four problems, in particular, need watching. First, the continued settlement of occupied Palestinian land. Second, proposed laws to enshrine Israel as a Jewish state. Third, Israel’s increasing estrangement from western democracies. Finally, the intolerance and intimidation of those who question the national consensus on security and terrorism.
One of the main arguments for embracing a two-state solution to the Palestinian question has always been that formal annexation of Palestinian lands on the West Bank, as well as being illegal, would threaten Israel’s Jewish identity. The demographics of a “one-state solution” would mean Jews would make up only a narrow majority in such an expanded “Greater Israel”.
Despite this, an increasing number of voices on the Israeli right are open about their desire formally to annex parts of the West Bank. Faced with a choice between land and democracy, they seem inclined to choose land.
You can see this in the rhetoric that is present in some Israeli news outlets. Sheldon Adelson’s abomination of a newspaper, Israel Hayom ( Israel today) is pretty blatant about its right-wing sympathies and support for people like Naftali Bennett who combine expansionist aspirations with religious rhetoric (“There is no room in our small but wonderful God-given tract for another state,” Bennett said in a speech that stressed Israel’s Jewish religious heritage as a cornerstone of its society. “It won’t happen. Friends, before every discussion on the territories, we need to declare: ‘The land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel.’ Only then can we start the debate.”)
Israelis hate comparisons to apartheid South Africa, but more and more the similarities are hard to ignore-at least concerning the rights of Arabs inside the occupied territories. The rhetoric of Israelis and Afrikaners is starting to be a mirror image of each other. That in the long term threatens the egalitarian ideal envisioned by Ben Gurion and others.
So very well then, what should the US do about the results of the election?
First of all, it has to accept it. And then make an honest assessment of what fights are worth picking. This is where I have to sadly conclude that the President is sorely led astray by whoever is advising him to “pressure” Israel at this particular juncture. Its a mistake and will blow up in his face.
I am an Obama supporter, but this is stupid. The President is poorly advised here. When the results were announced he should have sucked it up, called Netanyahu and congratulated him, then made a public statement that whatever our private disagreements, support for Israel is going to continue. It would help with politics at home-and recognize that like it or not; this is the government of Israel. Obama is blowing it.
No one has to tell me what a pain in the ass the Israelis are to deal with-I live that dream every month. And truth be told a big part of that comes from the fact that we have enablers, like the misguided freaks of the evangelical community who give the Israelis a free pass on activities they shouldn’t. And we have enablers in Congress who can’t tell any Israeli “no”-even when that is the correct answer.
But that’s precisely the problem Obama faces. To openly pick a fight with Netanyahu now, is to poison his efforts at winning whatever domestic victories he can with this current Congress full of nut cases. And in the end – it won’t accomplish anything for the Palestinians, for not the least of reasons their problems are back burner now compared to those of Syria and Iraq and the mess our foolish invasion of Iraq created.
A lower public profile and more subtle methods would do both sides a big favor. Not to mention that picking a fight on behalf of the Palestinians puts rhetoric in the minds of the mouth breathers who still think Obama is a secret Muslim. The last thing the US needs is more teabaggers on the front page in the election year next year.
Not to mention the Palestinians themselves have made some boneheaded mistakes. Especially the radicalized loons living in Gaza with their rockets. This is not time to be climbing up on the moral high ground now.
In summary, I will remind you what I think most Americans and conservative Americans in particular forget-Israel is not like the United States. It is a land of an eastern tradition, more similar to its Arab neighbors than it realizes-and in the aggregate, is not really as nice a place as they would have you believe it is. Imagine the United States where Mennonites constituted a powerful political block. They use language differently than we Americans do-and they don’t view the world in a rational sense at all. And that is what got Bibi re-elected.
The biggest losers in all of this, besides all the Israelis who did not vote for Netanyahu, are American Jews and non-Jews who support Israel. What Bibi did to win this election was move the Likud Party from a center-right party to a far-right one. The additional votes he got were all grabbed from the other far-right parties — not from the center. When the official government of Israel is a far-right party that rejects a two-state solution and employs anti-Arab dog whistles to get elected, it will split the basic unity of the American Jewish community on Israel. How many American Jews want to defend a one-state solution in Washington or on their college campuses? Is Aipac, the Israel lobby, now going to push for a one-state solution on Capitol Hill? How many Democrats and Republicans would endorse that?