In a few hours, roughly two-thirds of Israel's 5+ million eligible voters will choose the parliament - and by extension, the next government. By lunchtime on Tuesday on the West Coast we will know the general outline of the results.
There have been diaries on the subject - some brimming with justified anger.
In this diary I want to keep the anger aside and add an insider's perspective, being one who has begun his interest in politics as a seven-year-old following Israel's 1973 elections. Like most Israelis, I had been an election junkie for a long while - I even campaigned for the short-lived electoral reform of the 1990's - and like many Israelis, I have become partially weaned of this election-dependence in the present decade. In Israel-Palestine, the big stories mostly happen between elections. But elections still might matter, as we all know.
This diary is mostly not opinion (though my personal perspective is well-known), but information and some analysis.
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The Procedure
In Israel, there is no need to register for voting. Every citizen is automatically registered, and since a national ID system keeps tab on current addresses you will get mailed a notice of your precinct location. Also, felons and even prisoners in jail vote. These aspects make Israel far more progressive on elections than the US, which apparently still follows its "landed-white-men-only" traditions in its voting mindset. The Israeli approach tracks closely to European ones, as far as I know.
People vote to the Knesset national parliament in a single national zone. Any party receiving 2% or more of the total vote will get a proportional share of Knesset seats - summing up to 120. Within each party, seats are assigned according to a predetermined and publicly posted list. Voting is done manually, by inserting a note with the party's designated letter combination into an envelope (below: voting note with Labor's letters).
Vote-counting is also done manually by precinct workers and observers - all appointed by the parties to watch over each other. Nationwide counting is usually over by morning. Even before that, once polls close at 10 PM, the general outline is known via exit polls - so Tuesday lunchtime Pacific, we should know more or less where the wind blows.
Then, a few days later some seats may shift around, as the absentee ballots are counted. These are not the American type - there is no absentee system, and expats like me (10% or more of the electorate) cannot vote unless they are emissaries of state. Rather, absentees are these emissaries, hospitalized patients, but most of all IDF soldiers - which all together amount to 3-4% of the votes.
[One notable exception to the "no expats" rule: Israelis living outside Israel's legal borders in the West Bank - a.k.a. settlers, currently over 250,000 - are of course allowed to vote, since Israel has extended its municipal-government system, though not its legal boundaries, to include settlements. Conversely, East Jerusalem's 250,000+ Palestinians limited-rights residents rather than citizens, and cannot vote. Voting-eligible Israeli Palestinians are around 13%-14% of the electorate.]
Next thing, each party that made it into the Knesset comes to meet the president - the titular head of state - and tell him whom they'd like to see as prime minister. The leader of the party recommended by a majority of elected seats (i.e., 61 or more) will then be assigned by the president the task of setting up a government. Then the real horse-trading begins, to build a governing coalition of 61 or more Knesset members (MK's). The current coalition, for example, is centered around the two largest Knesset factions: Kadima (29 MK's) and Labor (19 MK's). Obviously this is not enough so there are a couple more parties in there.
If the coalition topples over, the prime minister (or anyone else appointed by the president) can build a new one. If they fail, a new election is called. Both events - a coalition-rebuild and an early election - have become very common over the past two decades. A government's typical lifespan nowadays is less than 2 years, and elections happen about once every 2.5-3 years instead of 4. the current elections were called when PM Olmert of Kadima had "one corruption scandal too many" and resigned; his successor at the party's lead, foreign minister Livni, failed to rebuild the coalition.
Turnout was traditionally near 80% - which is practically everyone (except those abroad or too sick to vote, and disaffected constituencies such as Israeli Palestinians). But it has fallen dramatically since the Second Intifada began in 2000. In 2006, it was a dismal 63.5% - very low considering that Israelis get the day off as a national holiday. And according to most reports the apathy continues this year, except for limited sectors of the population.
The Headlines
Here is a rundown of things to notice about this elections - and things to watch for tomorrow.
Right-Wing Nation -
This election will likely result in the most right-wing Knesset ever elected. How right-wing? Well, currently the bloc of "solid Right" parties that formally reject any Palestinian national rights, including of course Palestinian independence, is forecast to win 65+ seats (they currently hold 50).
Add to this the right-of-center Kadima - a party formed in 2005 by then-Likud leader Sharon ditching his own party, taking many of its MK's with him, and adding a few Labor figureheads. Even though Kadima accepts the "two-state solution", it is roughly the Bush version of this "solution" it has in mind, and on the ground it has pursued right-wing policies of military adventurism and settlement expansion. In any case, Kadima is at best right-of-center. Since they are approaching 25 seats in the polls right now, this means nearly 90 right and right-of-center seats out of 120.
What a fall. And a demonstration how out of whack with the rest of the world Israeli opinion has become. In the recent past we were roughly in line with global right-left trends. Now we are heading in the opposite direction to everyone else.
The War's Effects -
This election is unique in that Israel has started a major military operation in the middle of the campaign. Before the war, Netanyahu's Likud seemed to sail safely towards a cakewalk victory, polling in the mid-30's (seats). One would be naive to think that electoral gains were not part of Barak and Livni's considerations when launching the war.
And indeed, initially Labor, whose leader Barak is the politician most closely associated with the war, and which was already polling in the single digits, surged back (and to a lesser extent Kadima). But over the past couple of weeks, several interesting developments have taken place:
- The war has almost completely erased the actual differences between Labor, Kadima and Likud. This made the race between the three almost purely a personal vote - and here Livni, a fresher face with less personal "baggage", has an edge.
- Barak - already the Israeli politician most responsible for Israel's rightward slide, a slide that can be traced to his inciteful "Israel has no partner [for peace]" summary of the failed 2000 Camp David summit - has now amazingly caused a second major jump to the right with this war and the "shock and awe" manner in which it was carried out. The Gaza war has pushed the electorate's center of mass even further away from Labor, which despite its obviously right-of-center leader is still considered "Left" in Israel.
- Israeli voters are looking for contrast, are generally disgusted with the way things are - and, as said above, are trending more and more Rightward. So Rightward they looked for some contrast vs. the status quo, and found Yvet-Avigdor Lieberman and his fascist "Israel our home" (as in "our home, not theirs") party. Lieberman (currently holding 11 seats) has been surging towards 20 in the polls, already leaving Labor far behind and closing in on the top two.
- Since much of Lieberman's gains came at Likud's expense, Kadima is now polling within the sampling error from Likud. This opportunity, coupled with Lieberman's frightening rise, draws left-of-center voters - and possibly also people who planned to sit this election out - to Kadima and away from Labor as the only chance to get a right-of-center or centrist government instead of a far-right one.
The Law of Unintended Consequences in action. And once again Barak, a classic IDF general in being a great tactician and lousy strategist, has perhaps won a battle, i.e., gained a couple of seats via the war - but is losing the larger campaign, dooming Labor to a marginal existence in the next few years' parliamentary power array.
the Lieberman Factor -
The image above is a screenshot from the end a Lieberman TV ad, saying "Only Lieberman understands Arabic." Of course the intention is not literal; Lieberman – a West Bank settler who immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union in 1978 when he was 20 years old – has probably not cared much for studying Arabic. Rather, the message is deliberate, blatant racist incitement, alluding to the well-known Israeli mantra "the Arabs understand only force" and designed to set him apart from the universe of Israeli right and center-right politicians. And it works.
Lieberman’s entire campaign revolves around anti-Arab incitement, focusing on Israel’s own Arab citizens and personally attacking their leaders. Here’s another slogan below: "Without loyalty – no citizenship". Lieberman wants to make citizenship rights conditional upon an oath of allegiance. This is Kahane talk.
But even though Lieberman was indeed a Kahane activist during his first years in Israel, unfortunately – in terms of social acceptance – he is no Kahane. Lieberman is mainstream, a Likud man. In 1996-1997 he was PM Netanyahu’s chief of staff. He left in the 1999 elections to set up his own party – driven by marketing and personal ambition rather than ideology: this enabled him to cater directly to the Russian voters (in seven years he cornered the Russian market, going from 4 to 11 seats). Now, in a friendly effort to stem the Lieberman tide, Netanyahu already proclaimed he will grant him a senior cabinet position. If you think Kadima or Labor will repudiate Lieberman, I’ve got news for you: he actually sat in the current Kadima-Labor government for a while, until he got fed up and left. He left them, not vice versa. And his bargaining power will be endlessly stronger now. Both parties' leaders have neglected to rule out sitting with him in government again.
Lieberman is a perfect man of the times in Israel: he reaps what others have sown. Starting with Barak’s "There is no partner" speech in fall 2000, most of Israel’s politicians, generals and journalists have been telling the citizens – using somewhat bleached codewords - that Palestinians are liars and murderers and are never to be trusted; that they have been exploiting our goodwill and generosity; and that Arab lives matter little. Israelis have gotten the message and in living rooms, workplaces, viral emails and talkbacks it has been spelled out explicitly and rather rudely. Yet, the formal leadership has kept a legit-sounding and sometimes even moderate façade.
Lieberman smashes the façade deliberately to great effect, and talks the street talk out loud. Another slogan of his is "the only leader who means every word he says." He appeals to the entire right and right-of-center audience: he is a Russian’s Russian, a settler’s settler, a thug’s thug and a wingnut’s wingnut. While most parties are barely dragging themselves to the finish line, Lieberman’s volunteers are quite driven – at least according to this story (h/t heathlander). To further broaden his appeal, he placed 5 non-Russians in the 7 spots below him – including #2 Landau, a venerated Likud hawk who for many represents "pure Likud values" - and also Danny Ayalon, who may be familiar to you as Israel’s former US ambassador, implicated in the Larry Franklin espionage case. Indeed, who knew that Israel’s face in the US is a fascist?
Finally regarding the Lieberman phenomenon: here’s what my favorite Israeli columnist, B. Michael, has to say about it:
There is something blissful about the growing support for Avigdor Lieberman's party, Yisrael Beiteinu. There is something appropriate about it. Something right. Something we deserve. Because we can no longer deny that Lieberman is the State of Israel's most accurate depiction.
This is exactly what Israel looks like. These are its values, its voice, and its hopes.
My Prognosis -
From a broader perspective, Likud et al. have won a windfall. During the past two decades whenever its brand became too unstable and less and less appealing, some Likud leaders have responded by splitting off on their own like a Hydra. It has been a brilliant marketing strategy, siphoning off votes from constituencies that normally don’t associate themselves with Likud. Now Likud’s three heads – the moderate-sounding (Kadima), the fascist-sounding (Lieberman) and the distilled original – are poised to take more than 60 seats combined. This is an absolute majority of the Knesset, a feat unimaginable for one party running alone. No matter which individual party wins the horse race, more likely than not at least two of the three quasi-Likud parties will form the core of the next government. By contrast, Labor which faced the same brand problems during the same time frame, responded by freezing deer-in-headlights fashion and clinging to the governing coalition at any cost -- no matter what its policies where or how humiliating and marginal its government role was. Look where it is now.
Instability will increase. With all their success, the three independent quasi-Likud parties are still not obliged to do each other’s bidding anymore, and personal and policy clashes are in the cards. The polls right now have frontrunner Likud ("distilled branch") in the upper 20’s. Given the current trend, and the fact that Israeli pollsters notoriously overestimate the major parties' performance, it won’t be a surprise if no single party manages to exceed 25 seats. The smallest number of MK’s a ruling party had was 26 - Barak’s Labor in 1999 (this smallness was directly related to a series of strategic errors by genius Barak in that campaign, but I don’t want to digress). Lasting barely a year and a half, Barak’s tenure as PM was also the shortest-lived in the past generation. This is not a coincidence; it is very hard to govern when the majority of your coalition votes are beyond your direct control.
Whether the next government will be hard-right or center-right, it will face serious pressures from reality. Even if Obama proves unwilling to confront that government, the sweet "anything goes" Bush days are gone forever – because the rest of the world will not be as intimidated from taking action. All this will generate internal tensions between parties inside Israel’s governing coalition, and any 25-MK ruling party will have a hard time keeping the others in tow.
The Horse Race itself: What seemed until a few weeks ago like another election yawn with a predetermined outcome has suddenly become the closest race Israel has had since 1996. Due to his shocking underdog victory that year, Netanyahu has been sprinkled with a winner's fairy dust. In retrospect, given that his 1996 rival, Shimon Peres, has the electoral talent of a dead cat, this was not such an achievement. In his subsequent two campaigns – 1999 and 2006 – Netanyahu was revealed as an out-of-touch campaign leader who has no ground game, inspires no enthusiasm, and is a lousy closer.
All this, and the fact that most Israelis who have sat out of recent elections do not seem to be of the hard-right type, and that some of them may spring into action at the last moment driven by Lieberman-panic, gives Livni – now polling only 2-3 seats behind Likud – a long but realistic shot at pulling an upset. Since Israeli polling is nowhere near American polling in its accuracy, and since the electorate is so volatile, no one has an idea right now which party will emerge victorious tomorrow.
If a Kadima victory is coupled with a far-right "electoral avalanche" - whereby one of the two wingnut parties whose voters are flocking to Lieberman will narrowly miss the 2% threshold – the hard-right bloc may be stopped at 60 seats or less, severely limiting Netanyahu’s bargaining power and perhaps enabling Livni to leave both him and Lieberman out of her coalition. But just as likely, Israelis may wake up Wednesday morning to see Lieberman and Netanyahu leading the two largest parties (in either order), and chumming together as Israel’s new movers and shakers. The two still have a good relationship as far as I know. I will also not be surprised to see Likud and Kadima governing together, in spite of the much-hyped personal enmity between their leaders. After all, until 3 years ago these were two halves of the same party.
Anything else? On the left, one of the Arab parties is actually binational, and may for the first time in a long while win a seat or two thanks to Jewish votes. This is Hadash, which many anti-Occupation Israelis see as better representing their views and as more committed to the struggle than the Zionist left party of Meretz (for example: Meretz supported the Gaza war, but then called for an early ceasefire and opposed the ground invasion – while Hadash was against it from the start). But unless Hadash breaks beyond five seats (they currently have three and poll around 3-5), this will be very small news.
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A Final Word
In the intro I said Israeli elections don’t "do it for me" as much as they used to. Nowadays, Israel’s breathless and chaotic electoral-parliamentary scene seems to me – more often than not – like a distraction to drag attention away from the true centers of power (h/t Douglas Adams, The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). With all the election’s hullabaloo, the government itself ultimately wields only a fraction of decision-making leverage, especially on issues of life and death.
This claim will be made more tangible using an American analogy: over here, the unelected "dark mass" forces are corporate power and special-interest lobbies. On many key issues, they have called the shots for decades, regardless of who was elected by the people. This is a major reason why Obama’s election was so sweet and hopeful: his victory was grassroots-powered, over the heads of special interests that control politicians via campaign money.
Alas, in Israel the "dark mass" forces that outmuscle the Israeli government on life-and-death issues don’t depend upon elections in any way. By my analysis, these are:
- The settler lobby;
- The tight-knit circle of IDF generals in and out of active duty (some of them sitting inside the government);
- And the universe of secret services - Mossad, Shin Bet and lesser-known bodies.
Even less fortunate, these three’s interests overlap – especially when it comes to prolonging Occupation and escalating conflict. I reached this conclusion about Israeli decision-making back in 2001. The analysis helped me understand the seemingly-erratic flow of Israel’s recent history; it has also been corroborated repeatedly by events since then.
Though few Israelis would like to agree with my analysis, they do share my sentiment that elections have mattered less and less. Over the past three decades Israeli voters have been going through the same motions at practically every election cycle: kicking out the Left and bringing in the Right, getting disgusted, kicking out the Right and bringing in the Left again, getting fed up, and so forth – without seeing our wishes met.
Maddeningly, blame is still assigned (beside to "the Arabs", of course) to party labels rather than to policy and mindset. In 2009 the Left is supposedly at fault because Kadima-Labor are in power. This, even though the outgoing government broke all records by launching two wars, both of them voluntary, in one short 2.5-year term, and pursued right-wing policies on practically any major issue.
With such widespread frustration and such cluelessness, it is no wonder that so many Israelis have now given up on voting – and that so many others see salvation in a "strong man" like Lieberman.
An election post-mortem will be posted, as they say in Israel, "after they finish counting the soldiers’ votes".