Despair is not an option


March 18, 2015
Sarah Benton

This posting has these items:
1) Ynet: Bibi is a magician after all, Nahum Barnea asks whether Netanyahu will take shelter in a narrow right-wing coalition (and gives us our headline);
2) Haaretz: Netanyahu is today’s winner – but Herzog also exceeded expectations, Anshel Pfeffer has a more optimistic reading for the Left than Haviv Rettig Gur below;
3) JPost: Likud’s win: The ‘second Israel’ has spoken, populist appeal against elite Ashkenazi intellectuals wins the lower-class vote;
4) Netanyahu resorts to race-baiting to win elections Ilene Prusher is one of several to attribute Netanyahu victory to increase in racist rhetoric;
5) Reuters: Netanyahu wins Israel election after sharp shift to the right, how the right won;
6) Times of Israel: After electoral trouncing, what future for the Israeli left?, Haviv Rettig Gur on misjudgments by left and foreign commentators;


Bibi is a magician after all

Analysis: Netanyahu succeeded in reviving Begin’s Likud, making voters who didn’t want to hear about him cast a ballot in his favour; now he has to make good on his pledge to be a PM for all.

By Nahum Barnea, Opinion, Ynet
March 18, 2015

The people have spoken: That’s the nice thing about democratic elections. You can love or hate the results, dance or cry, but you can’t dismiss them.

Benjamin Netanyahu will be Israel’s next prime minister. His intention, at least at this stage, is to try and build a narrow government, based on the right-wing and ultra-Orthodox parties.

He doesn’t have a majority in the meantime, but he does have a momentum. The only person standing between him and such a government is Kulanu Chairman Moshe Kahlon. Kahlon has no reason to rush into anything. On Tuesday evening, he was planning to spend the night in consultations, and he may very well continue the consultations over the next few mornings.

Kahlon will be subject to heavy pressure. The pressure will come first of all from his voters, who mostly come from the right. It will also come from his friends in the Likud.

Kahlon knows that he will find it very difficult to succeed as a finance minister in a narrow government: The haredim will come to the government hungrier than ever; he will be harassed by a strong social opposition on the outside, and by Bayit Yehudi Chairman Naftali Bennett on the inside; and the most important thing perhaps is that the tensions in Israel’s foreign relations will cast a shadow on the economy.

This is not the government Kahlon hoped for. This might not be the prime minister he hoped for either. But the situation that has been created greatly reduces his ability to maneuver. He can allegedly join forces with Zionist Union Chairman Isaac Herzog and the left-wing parties, but the numbers don’t support this option.

Kahlon will likely focus on his list of demands from Netanyahu, from housing to the banks. In practice, he can demand that all the economic and social decisions will be subject to his authority. Every promise he gets will be fixed in the basic guidelines and signed in legal documents. He knows that whatever he gets now he won’t get a minute after the government is sworn in and the ministers sit on their buckskin chairs.

He believed Netanyahu’s verbal promise once. It is unlikely to happen to him again. The establishment of a government is not a matter of a day or two. In addition to Kahlon, the other partners have their own demands – and neither Yisrael Beytenu Chairman Avigdor Lieberman nor the haredim will be shy.

A narrow government has significant advantages: It is more efficient, more effective and doesn’t suffer as much from internal constraints. It also has its shortcomings: The haredi component of such a government keeps a major part of the public opinion away. That’s why the haredim prefer to join national unity governments.

Moreover, the capitals of the countries whose friendship Israel depends on are suspicious of such a government. Prime ministers from the right, including Netanyahu, needed a flak jacket from the center-left in the past – Shimon Peres, for example, or Tzipi Livni. The flak jacket protected them twice: Once on the outside, vis-à-vis foreign governments, and once on the inside, as a good excuse in light of the settler lobby’s pressures.

Netanyahu is now talking like someone who has waived the left’s flak jacket. He is convinced that he will be able to manage on his own. It’s a fact that within several days, in a frantic campaign, he succeeded in reviving Menachem Begin’s Likud and making voters who didn’t want to hear about him and about the Likud a week ago head to the polling station and cast his party’s ballot. He is the comeback kid.

His achievement this time is much bigger than his achievements two years ago and six years ago, when he barely succeeded in building a government, and paid a heavy price. And this achievement is his, and only his. He didn’t steal the elections, he won them.

Will a right-wing government succeed in curbing the Iranian nuclear program and preventing Israel’s isolation in the West? I seriously doubt it, but the wisdom of the masses says it will, and for now at least, vox populi vox dei (the voice of the people is the voice of God).

President Reuven Rivlin will likely suggest when he meets with the factions’ representatives that they should try to join forces and create a wide government. At the moment, that seems unrealistic, both from Netanyahu’s point of view and the Zionist Union’s point of view. If the negotiations encounter difficulties, the idea may pop up again, in one format or another. Time will tell.

The election results do include some good news that should be told. It’s good that a list containing the Kahanists failed to pass the election threshold. It’s good that the parties that were once big have resumed their growth. It’s good that the voter turnout increased. It’s good that so many young people became active on the eve of the elections. Even those who were disappointed by the outcome of Tuesday night should not despair. Despair is not an option.

A former Likudnik who voted for Kahlon reminded me on Tuesday evening of a comment by English football legend Gary Lineker, which pretty much sums up the election results: “Football is played for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win.”

Netanyahu will remain in the leaking, des res on Balfour Street in Jerusalem for another term. It’s a sweet victory. He should be reminded, however, of the lesson that winners have personally experienced throughout the generations: The hubris, the winner’s arrogance, is waiting around the corner, followed by the punishment. In the past two years he has accumulated too many hard feelings, too many personal scores. This baggage burdens him more than anyone else.

“I am everyone’s prime minister,” he said Sunday at Rabin Square. Well, let him be.



Zionist Union list leaders Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni talk to potential voters ahead of the election, at the party headquarters in Tel Aviv, on March 15, 2015. Photo by Ben Kelmer/Flash90

Netanyahu is today’s winner – but Herzog also exceeded expectations

Elections are all about expectation management, and both Bibi and Bougie can claim a victory.

By Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz
March 17, 2015

Benjamin Netanyahu and Isaac Herzog are both winners in Israel’s election on Tuesday. However, they should savour their victory – it won’t last very long.

Neither have a clear path to forming a coalition over the next few weeks. Both are at the mercy of their potential partners, particularly Netanyahu, who has to find a way of rebuilding his disastrous relationship with Moshe Kahlon. But elections are all about expectation management, and both Bibi and Bougie can justifiably claim to have exceeded expectations.

Netanyahu, however, is the biggest winner of the night. After weeks in which his campaign seemed to be sinking, with even the speech at the U.S. Congress failing to boost him in the polls, he has completed an incredible comeback.

In the last six days, while the Zionist Union and Netanyahu’s legions of detractors had the smell of victory in their nostrils, with polls indicating a growing gap in Herzog’s favor, he ran a near-perfect end game.

He cannibalized his right-wing allies, particularly Naftali Bennett’s Habayit Hayehudi. It was a “Gevalt!” campaign in which he appealed to the fundamental instincts of his base, warning of a defeatist radical-left government supported by the Arab Joint List party and financed by dark international forces (from Scandinavia!).

Netanyahu shamelessly exploited every fear and prejudice to close the crucial gap and if the exit polls are anything to go by, it worked perfectly.

Israeli society will pay a price for Netanyahu’s abusive and destructive short-term tactics. That is clear even before we begin to assess the international diplomatic pressure that the next Netanyahu government – if he succeeds in forming it – is likely to face.

But as he repeatedly broadcast to his supporters over the last week, everyone is against us. And that was pretty accurate: The entire international community, with the exception of part of the Republican Party, Egypt’s General al-Sisi and Chuck Norris, was rooting for Netanyahu’s downfall.

He responded with everything he could throw at the threat to his fourth term. But now that he appears to have decisively closed the gap – he even opened a lead of his own over Herzog in one exit poll – how easy will it be to build a coalition?

President Reuven Rivlin has already called for a national unity government in which both Likud and Zionist Union will serve. Netanyahu repeatedly ruled out such a coalition throughout the campaign, but that was before the election. He knows what awaits him in Washington and Brussels and at the United Nations – Herzog and Tzipi Livni as ministers in his government could serve as useful flak-jackets.

Can Herzog even contemplate sitting in a Netanyahu government? He will demand a “rotation” and half the prime ministerial term. But since it is very difficult to see how he can build his own coalition, with the ultra-Orthodox parties refusing to sit with Yesh Atid, he will find himself faced with a take-it-or-leave-it proposal. Herzog wants to prove himself in a senior ministerial position, but at least half his parliamentary faction prefers to sit in opposition rather than prop Netanyahu up as they did in 2009.

This is where Moshe Kahlon, whose new Kulanu party will have around 10 seats, will be proven. Kahlon would have been happier seeing Netanyahu lose. That would have allowed this “man of the nationalist camp” to join a centre-left government. Now he has little choice but to rejoin the prime minister he so distrusts. He will be Rivlin’s main ally in trying to convince Herzog to balance Netanyahu and Likud in a national-unity coalition.

As of now, we only have the exit polls to go on, with a smattering of actual results: The picture will not dramatically change. Netanyahu has turned the tide and Herzog has transformed himself into a national leader, with at least a claim to premiership, even if probably he won’t be sleeping in Balfour 3 any time soon.

The scepticism with which we should treat these first results should be reserved mainly for the fate of the three small parties hovering around the brink of the electoral threshold: Meretz, Yisrael Beitenu and particularly Yahad.

Even the best exit poll cannot predict how a few thousand voters, who may make the difference between political extinction and parliamentary life, voted Tuesday. New parties like Yahad, with a radical and unpredictable electorate, are particularly difficult to sample.

Many heaved a sigh of relief with the news that Kahanist Baruch Marzel won’t be a Knesset member: That may be a bit premature. The final results, especially with the right-leaning soldiers vote counted, could put Yahad through. Such an outcome would seal Herzog’s fate and be a true Gevalt.



Likud’s win: The ‘second Israel’ has spoken

Netanyuhu’s appeal to an historically under-served part of Israeli society helped propel him to victory.

By Gil Hoffman, JPost
March 18, 2015

Prime Minister Bejamin Netanyahu’s impressive victory in Tuesday’s elections can be explained by going back to the early days of the state.

The Ashkenazi immigrants from Eastern Europe were seen as having an unfair advantage over their Sephardic counterparts from North Africa and the Middle East. The people who are called “the second Israel” have complained since then that the “elites” in the Israeli Left, the media and academia have discriminated against them.

The “second Israel” did not like the the way the media seemed to be deposing of Netanyahu and bringing to power the Left under the leadership of Zionist Union leaders Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, who were raised not far from each other in North Tel Aviv and are both the children of former Knesset members.

The Zionist Union inadvertently played into Netanyahu’s hands with a campaign of “anyone but Bibi.”

Zionist Union campaign strategist Reuven Adler, who joined the campaign late, said Wednesday morning that he was against that strategy from the start. By contrast Likud strategist Aron Shaviv got the Israeli Right correct. He sent Netanyahu to give countless interviews – it made him look like he was panicking (and he was), but the public got the message.

Many who considered staying home, or voting for one of the Likud’s satellite parties, hurried to the polling stations to cast ballots for Likud. People who have not voted in years – or at least not for Likud – felt the need to save Israel from the Left, Iran and from a hostile international community.

On Monday, Shaviv revealed a poll that for the first time, less than 50 percent of the public thought Netanyahu would form the next government. Shaviv said at the time that if it gets closer to 40 percent the Likud will win the election.

In Netanyahu’s appeal to the “second Israel’ he succeeded, and because of that, he won a fourth term.



Netanyahu resorts to race-baiting to win elections

Benjamin Netanyahu brought Israel so many great things from America. This time, he would have done well to have remembered a few tenets of American political culture.

By Ilene Prusher, Haaretz blog
March 17, 2015

In the last 48 hours we’ve seen Benjamin Netanyahu’s true face.

We learned that he has no intention of ever agreeing to a Palestinian state.

We learned what he thinks of the Arab minority in Israel, which he said should not feel threatened by his attempts to pass a nation-state bill, because this is still a democracy where citizens have equal rights.


An Arab Israeli girl casts her mother’s ballot at a polling station in the northern Israeli town of Umm al-Fahm on March 17, 2015. Photo by Ahmad Gharabli / AFP

But we learned, when we see him sending out tweets, texts and a video saying “Hurry friends, the Arabs are going out in droves to vote, bused in by the left” – we see in that moment what he really thinks of the 20% of Israeli citizens who are Arab.

They are the enemy. They are a danger. They and their votes are to be feared. Their walking peacefully to their places of voting is an existential threat, just like every Palestinian organization of every political stripe. Just like Iran and ISIS and BDS. Just like the Obama administration. Just like the left, embodied by the Zionist Unions’ Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, who are about to rip out the rug from underneath him.

Bussed in, because they’re not normal Israelis who can walk to local schools and vote (they can). They need to be sent in from the periphery by busses. They are coming for us – for you. And despite all my attempts to beat back these barbarians at the gate, they’re coming. So vote for me. Quick.

There’s also the issue of the Likud campaign making a fake ad in which they pieced together quotes from Moshe Kahlon and made it sound like he would endorse Bibi. Salim Jubran, the justice for the Central Elections Commission, has forced the Likud campaign to stop circulating the ad and has fined them 20,000 shekels (about $5,000). Were control of the Likud campaign not so closely held by Netanyahu, you might be able to excuse this as the poor judgment of some young campaign manager who thinks he can remix quotes like Noy Alooshe and get away with it.

But everything we’ve read in recent days indicates that the campaign has been wholly directed by and focused on Netanyahu, which is why we’ve seen nary another face in its ads or voice in its promos. And even if Netanyahu were not directly responsible, one would have to wonder about the spirit of the campaign set by the man at the top. A fair fight does not sound like it’s in the lexicon.

Netanyahu brought Israel so many great things from America. Excellent oratorical skills and accentless English. Comfort with Congressional leaders and smooth relations with fundamentalist Christians. One, once-upon-a-time, whip-smart campaign. This time, he would have done well to have remembered a few tenets of American political culture. Race baiting is likely to come back and bite you. Fight fair. And learn to lose gracefully.



Moshe Kahlon, leader of Kulanu ‘the critical party to get on side’. Photo by Marc Israel Sellem / Jerusalem Post.


Netanyahu wins Israel election after sharp shift to the right

By Luke Baker and Jeffrey Heller, Reuters
March 18, 2015

JERUSALEM– Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won a come-from-behind victory in Israel’s election on Wednesday after tacking hard to the right in the final days of campaigning, including abandoning a commitment to negotiate a Palestinian state.

In a four-day pre-election blitz, Netanyahu made a series of promises designed to shore up his Likud base and draw voters from other right-wing and nationalist parties. He pledged to go on building settlements on occupied land and said there would be no Palestinian state if he was re-elected.

With 99.5 percent of votes counted, Likud had won 29-30 seats in the 120-member Knesset, comfortably defeating the Zionist Union opposition on 24 seats, Israel’s Central Election Committee and Israeli media said. A united list of Arab parties came in third.

It amounted to a dramatic and unexpected victory – the last opinion polls published four days before the vote showed the Zionist Union with a four-seat advantage over Likud.

In a statement, Likud said Netanyahu intended to form a new government within weeks, with negotiations already underway with the pro-settler Jewish Home party led by Naftali Bennett, the centrist Kulanu party and ultra-Orthodox groups.

The critical party to get on side will be Kulanu, led by former Likud member and communications minister Moshe Kahlon, who won 10 seats, making him a kingmaker given his ability to side with either Netanyahu or the center-left opposition.

“Reality is not waiting for us,” Netanyahu said. “The citizens of Israel expect us to quickly put together a leadership that will work for them regarding security, economy and society as we committed to do – and we will do so.”

Isaac Herzog, the leader of the Zionist Union, conceded defeat, saying he had called Netanyahu to congratulate him.

HARD ROAD AHEAD

If he manages to pull together a workable coalition, it would give Netanyahu a fourth-term in office, putting him on track to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, a label held by the country’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion.

While Likud is the largest party, the process of forming a coalition is likely to be difficult. It needs 61 seats in the Knesset and crossing that threshold will be challenging given the amount of division across Israel’s political landscape.

Netanyahu’s victory is also likely to prolong the country’s testy relationship with U.S. President Barack Obama, especially after his strident words on settlements and his backing away from the long-stated international goal of arriving at a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

During much of the campaign, Netanyahu had focused on security issues and the threat from Iran’s nuclear program, a message that appeared to gain little traction with voters.

The Zionist Union’s focus on socio-economic issues, including the lack of housing and the high cost of living in Israel, appeared to be generating much more momentum.

But Netanyahu’s move to the right, playing up fears of the spread of Islamist groups, promising no concessions to the Palestinians and raising alarm about growing support for Arab-Israeli parties, looks to have spurred his base into action.

From the Palestinian point-of-view, the results are a deep concern, raising the prospect of more settlement expansion on land they want for their own state in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, as well as in Gaza.

If Netanyahu follows through on his pledges it would put him on a collision course with the Obama administration and the European Union, which has been weighing steps including trade measures to sanction Israel for its settlements policy.

It also raises questions about what happens on Iran, with Obama determined to pursue negotiations towards a deal on its nuclear program and Netanyahu determined to scupper any deal.

The Palestinians may quickly create problems for Netanyahu as they will formally become members of the International Criminal Court on April 1 and have said they will pursue war crimes charges against Israel over its 48-year occupation of the West Bank and last year’s war in Gaza.

Pre-empting those steps, Israel has suspended the transfer of tax revenue it collects on the Palestinians’ behalf, holding back around $120 million a month. That has crippled the Palestinian budget and led to deep pay cuts for state workers.

Saeb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator in peace talks with Israel that collapsed in April, told Reuters on Tuesday: “Mr. Netanyahu has done nothing in his political life but to destroy the two-state solution.”

Additional reporting by Dan Williams and Ari Rabinovitch



Disappointed supporters of the Zionist Union react to exit poll figures, March 17, 2015, Tel Aviv. Photo by Thomas Coex / AFP


After electoral trouncing, what future for the Israeli left?

A lot of lessons can be gleaned from Tuesday’s results. Some of them might be uncomfortable

By Haviv Rettig Gur, Times of Israel
March 18, 2015

A lot of groups are licking their wounds after Likud’s trouncing of the Labor-led Zionist Union on Tuesday.

The Israeli left, to be sure, did better than it has done in almost a generation. It rallied around the Labour party, energized the base, sent thousands of volunteers to “get out the vote.”

And it lost. Spectacularly.

In the process, politicians, pundits, pollsters and analysts learned some important lessons – not just in humility, but also in the changing face of the Israeli electorate.

The right learned that Likud is its great indispensable party, the big tent to which it rallies in times of danger. That ethos of underlying unity among the usually bickering factions of the right headed off on Tuesday the left’s most potent challenge in almost two decades. It won’t be forgotten anytime soon.

We all learned that the right knows how to get out the vote. Or, at least, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does. His method was simple: talk incessantly about the turnout of the enemy – the left, the Arabs, the shadowy foreign funding behind it all. It wasn’t exactly a noble or honest final few days in Likud’s campaign, but it worked.

Overall turnout spiked in this election, and the smart money held that this rise would favor the left. It was leftists, after all, who have been missing from previous elections. But in the wake of Likud’s stunning surge in the final count, a surge predicted by no poll and no pollster, the simple fact is inescapable: right-wingers came out to vote, right-wingers who haven’t bothered to vote in recent elections, right-wingers who did not like or support Netanyahu — all felt compelled to save Israel from the prospect of a left-wing victory. In last two hours of voting, a two-point turnout jump over 2013 swelled to a five-point spike. That rush, it’s now fair to say, was of right-wing voters delivering the first “election surprise” of the right.

Each election in recent memory has had an Election Day surprise. The Pensioners Party soared to 7 on Election Day in 2006 after polling two. Yesh Atid hit 19 on Election Day after polling at perhaps 14. But these surprises have only ever happened on the center and left. No longer. Likud pulled off its own surprise, and it did so by winning the turnout race.

Why did turnout rise so dramatically? Simple: the majority of the Israeli electorate continues to distrust the left’s judgment. It is a trust deficit rooted in a more general distrust of Palestinian intentions, of the Obama White House and other touchstones of left-wing policy. In hindsight, it may be one of the bitter ironies of this campaign that Labor’s own slogan, “It’s us or him,” may have done as much to guarantee Netanyahu victory as anything Netanyahu may have done.

And that brings us to what the left can learn from this race. The despair emanating from left-wing voters and pundits is misplaced. The left did better in this election than it has done in a long time. But the left has spent almost two decades essentially writing off the electorate as too benighted, too trapped in fear or hate to be worth seriously campaigning for. That, at least, has been the explanation of left-wing media outlets such as Haaretz over the years for Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued triumphs at the ballot box. The path to reclaiming an electorate one has ridiculed and despised for so long is a hard one. But, alas, the left will not actually lead Israel without the support of a majority of Israelis. Isaac Herzog is the first leader of the left in quite a few years who seems to understand that.

Luckily for the left, the sun will rise on Thursday morning, and again on Friday, and every day next week too. And eventually, probably sooner rather than later given Israel’s recent history, this new government will fall. Politics do not end in any single defeat.

One of the more long-term questions that arise from this race is whether the left will be able to use this loss as a catalyst for future victory. If, as has been its wont, the left falls back on its traditional rhetoric depicting Netanyahu’s Israel as racked by famine, poverty and war, and facing imminent collapse, then it will be setting itself up for continued failure. Such talk is hard to take seriously when battling an election; it would be truly dangerous to take it seriously after losing one. The left now needs to build on its success, find new constituencies, develop a “ground game” not just in the two months before an election but in the three years that separate them. Despair will not get it from where it is now to where it needs to be to win.

Finally, the world’s professional Israel watchers, journalists, pundits, think tank analysts, should (but probably won’t) learn an important lesson from this race about Israelis. A recurring theme on the Twitter accounts of foreign correspondents – at least of the overwhelming majority whose opinion of Netanyahu is not favourable – is that Netanyahu won the election through “fear-mongering.”

It is true that Netanyahu explicitly “fear-mongered,” and that this won him his steep lead on Tuesday. But Netanyahu’s international critics fundamentally misunderstand his audience, his electorate, and so deeply misconstrue what exactly he was “fear-mongering” about.

Netanyahu’s critics insist that he fear-mongered about Iran and the Palestinians. He did not – because he doesn’t have to. The Israeli electorate has long ago written off Palestinian politicians as untrustworthy and unable to deliver peace. And it is Iran, not Netanyahu, that has convinced nearly all Israelis from all parts of the political spectrum that Iran is a very real danger to Israel.

An Arab Israeli girl casts her mother’s ballot at a polling station in the northern Israeli town of Umm al-Fahm on March 17, 2015. (photo credit: AFP / AHMAD GHARABLI)
An Arab Israeli girl casts her mother’s ballot at a polling station in the northern Israeli town of Umm al-Fahm on March 17, 2015. (photo credit: AFP / AHMAD GHARABLI)

All Netanyahu had to do was to warn, at times in blatantly racist terms, that the left and Arab voters were “turning out in droves.” His fear-mongering was not on the substance of the disagreement with the left – the electorate already mistrusts the left’s judgment on these issues – but simply to warn that the left might win. That alone spiked the Likud vote, even in the cold late-evening hours of Election Day.

The assumption behind the “fear-mongering” accusation is that Netanyahu is the reason Israelis are distrustful of peace initiatives or Iran deals. It is a convenient conceit, suggesting that if one could get rid of Netanyahu the problem would be solved, but it is entirely wrong. The White House’s or European Union’s policy feuds with Netanyahu are not actually with Netanyahu himself, but with the mainstream Israeli electorate that responded so forcefully on Tuesday when they were finally convinced that their country might soon be forced into dangerous new concessions or compromises in a precarious Middle East.

The election turned from a near-rout of the right predicted in poll after poll by the entire panoply of Israeli pollsters into one of the right’s most dramatic victories in decades. The lessons abound: shifting turnout meant that geography didn’t quite play its expected role, settlers switched en masse to Likud even as they disappeared as a pressure group in Likud’s primaries, and the V15 campaign probably ended up mobilizing more rightists than leftists on Election Day.

But the main lesson is also the most obvious one. The left did better on Tuesday than it has in a long time. Yet it only really took its first step on the long road to rehabilitation and victory.

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