New Knesset elected, coalition talks underway
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Politics
The results are in. The election is finally over. Even though the Bibi Netanyahu-led Likud party was well ahead in the polls a few weeks ago, Tzipi Livni’s Kadima garnered one more seat than Likud in a stunning photo finish, explained by Haaretz thusly:
Livni forced Netanyahu to treat her as an equal, despite his negative ads claiming the job is “too big for her.” From that point, he lost the advantage of experience. Livni proved to be an expert campaigner who saved enough energy for the final and decisive round.
Several fascinating statistical and graphical breakdowns of the results can be seen here, while a breakdown of the number of seats per party, along with plenty of analysis and victory speech soundbytes, can be seen here.
Perhaps because the left has splintered into several newer and smaller parties, many of which did not garner enough votes for even one Knesset seat, the mainstream left-wing Labor, led by Ehud Barak, will only hold 14 seats, leaving its leadership disillusioned and vowing to sit out of coalition talks.
Avigdor Lieberman’s hardcore right-wing Israel Beiteinu managed to crystallize Israel’s right-of-center undecided, which, in essence, ended up detracting from Likud’s support among hard-liners, which, in turn, gave the relatively centrist (but Ariel Sharon-founded) Kadima a proportionate edge (causing the world to wonder where this leaves us in terms of options for diplomacy with the Palestinians).
However, it’s Israel Beiteinu that’s going to make or break any coalition which Livni has already hit the ground running trying to form, so Lieberman’s agenda hasn’t backfired completely. Let’s not forget that this is Livni’s second chance to try and form a coalition, with the first time around, this past fall, not yielding any results at all.
So yes, it does seem that public opinion here has moved towards the right, and it’s parties which sit decidedly on the right which have the power to make or break a government. But at the same time, the Likud’s failure to seal the deal says quite a bit about the strength of the middle ground (whatever that may or may not mean).
Image courtesy tzipilivni2009 from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
A very Druze Knesset
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Politics, Religion, coexistence
The Israeli Druze are a mysterious and interesting people. They are known to eat raw meatballs. They find their spouses on the internet (okay, we do that too). Although it can be argued that they know no borders, they are historically extremely loyal to Israel, fighting as part of our military since the War of Independence and even teaching in our universities.
About a year ago, some alarming news reached the public when Israel’s National Resilience Survey results claimed that Israeli patriotism among the Druze was dropping rapidly. Balad party Member of Knesset Said Naffaa had harsh words to say to YNet on the matter at the time:
“Israel had always viewed the Druze as some type of domesticated beast, but now this previously docile animal is fighting back,” said Naffaa.
Moreover, Israel has taken quite a bit of heat recently when the government decided last month to ban two Arab parties from the upcoming election (Yes, Balad is one of them), given their track records for anti-Israel sentiment, rhetoric and actions.
With polls opening in a number of hours and election fever in full swing, one aspect to the situation that has unfortunately not been emphasized is the potential for this upcoming Knesset to be the most disproportionately Druze-represented than any ever before. How’s that for tolerance and diversity? Even extremist Yisrael Beitenu party has a Druze on their candidate list.
Haaretz did the math for us recently, revealing that a total of five Druze candidates were likely to garner seats:
According to the government’s statistical yearbook for 2008, Israel has about 120,000 Druze citizens, constituting 1.6 percent of the population. Five Druze lawmakers would be 4 percent of the Knesset’s 120 members, 2.5 times more than the proportion of the community within the national population.
And the best part is, the candidates hardly seem interested in only representing their small ethnicity:
Deputy Foreign Minister Majali Wahabi (Kadima), a Druze, said yesterday that his community cannot be expected to vote en bloc: “The large parties have to understand the importance of our community. I personally plan to represent my people faithfully, but also anyone who voted for my party, no matter what sector they come from. I believe in our involvement in Israeli society, not in separate parties.”
Tomorrow, Israel has much to decide and crystallize. At least there’s a good chance that our legislative body will be far more diverse and far less “special interest”-focused than we’re led to believe.
Image of a Druze man in the Golan courtesy tierecke from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
Shas trying a bit of feminism
Filed under: A New Reality, General, History and Culture, Israeliness, Politics
The Shas party has had the upper hand on Tzipi Livni ever since the Kadima leader’s aspirations to take over from Olmert as prime minister were dashed by Shas’s coalition holdout tactics.
As a result, Livini and Kadima were forced to keep Olmert at the country’s helm, and the general elections scheduled for next week became a necessity. With Kadima trailing in the polls, one can’t resist wondering if Livni has been secretly regretting her decision to not kowtow to Shas back in the fall.
One of the most popular of the second-tier parties, the ultra-Orthodox Sephardi Shas party doesn’t stand a chance to elect a prime minister, but it always finds a way to obtain big cabinet appointments and budgets for its programs as coalition bargaining chips.
But until now, Livni has had one clear advantage over all of the other parties: the feminist card. No other major contending party in this race has a woman at the top of its list, which, as we know, can be a major draw.
And Shas can always use some good PR for believing in the leadership potential for women – especially given that the party’s spiritual figurehead, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, makes a habit of saying politically incorrect things. Shas has been “trying a bit of feminism” (as our friend Ali G puts it) ever since it launched a “Strengthening Women” platform in December.
This week, the party upped the feminist ante by allowing Rabbi Ovadia Yosef’s daughter-in-law (and flat-mate), Yehudit Yosef, to take on a more public role, Haaretz reports. Apparently, Yehudit Yosef has for years been a major playing behind the scenes with Shas, but this week, she began campaigning on behalf of the party, rallying supporters with an inspiring speech in Jerusalem on Monday:
“I know how concerned [Rabbi Ovadia Yosef] is about women’s issues, how he educated his children to take care of their womenfolk so that they would not lack for anything,” she said. “When he gives his class on Saturday night and comes to the issue of women, he gives them a lecture on how to treat a woman, what to do for her, how to behave, what to buy her, and so forth. It’s such a lovely thing.”
Will lip service like this woo away some potential Kadima voters? We’ll know next week.
Image courtesy tzipilivni2009 from Flickr under a Creative Commons license.
The Quiet Within the Storm
Filed under: A New Reality, General, Israeliness, Life, Politics, War
You have to give Israelis credit; when the chips are down, even the ones who aren’t necessarily suspected of idealism come shining through.
As Israel went to war against Hamas over the weekend, the leaders of the major political parties all decided to suspend their political campaigns for the duration of the operation – which, both Prime Minister Olmert and Defense Minister Barak said could be lengthy. Barak, who leades the Labor Party, said that he had to concentrate on the operation and had no time for politics.
The Likud, too, suspended its campaign, and has put on hold a radio campaign featuring ads attacking Kadima chief and Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni. Posters that bear the campaign’s tagline – “Tsipi, the job is too big for you” – that have already been put up will be taken down. In a statement Saturday night, Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu said that “there is a time for debate and a time for unity, and today is a time for unity,” he said. “If our enemies thought we would not be united under rocket fire, they were wrong. The cannons roar, but we are united.”
With the elections coming just about a month from now – and the gap between the Likud and Kadima narrowing, according to the latest polls – the suspension of campaigning is really extraordinary. It wouldn’t be surprising for opposition politicians, for example, to accuse the government of timing its operation to cynically improve its standing in the polls, giving it a “January surprise” type of bounce that could sustain it until the elections. But no – politicians on the left and the right spontaneously announced (without any coordination, as far as I could tell) that they were holding off on the negative noise we are set to be subject to. Not that any Israeli, given the choice, wouldn’t opt for the noise if it meant that the south was secure. But it does show that our political leaders and would-be leaders are a better caliber than we usually give them credit for being.
(Photo courtesy One Family Fund)
Yes we can? Really?
It all started when Likud leader Bibi Netanyahu completely ripped off Barack Obama’s website. And when I say completely, I mean completely. Not just the idea of integrating social media – but layout, graphics and color scheme as well. Purely shameless. That was just the beginning. Bibi, Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni and even Shas (also using Obama’s “Yes we can” mantra) have twitter accounts. Some really have the campaigns behind them, others do not. We’ve also seen, for better or worse, the introduction of “Livni Boy” a blatant rip off of the enormously popular (and hot) Obama Girl as well as “Asulin Girl,” an even more blatant rip off of the original which promotes Sagiv Asulin, a young leader of Likud who used the video to garner support in the primaries and consequently will most likely make it to the Knesset. 
Apparently when it comes to political campaigning, originality is not a strength in the Holy land, though silliness is. At least Channel 2 is doing something that can potentially involve Israel Israeli (like Joe Sixpack but Israeli) in the political process. They’ve teamed up with YouTube and are asking for Israelis to submit questions that will actually be answered live on the air by all three party leaders who are vying for prime minister. CNN did something similar during the primaries and proved to be really, really bizarre and surreal at times. I am of course referring to an actual snowman asking a question about global warming. Not sure how any Israeli can top that or if Channel 2 would even be courageous to broadcast a camel asking about the receding Dead Sea.
Them’s the (Data Line) Breaks
Filed under: Business, General, Politics, Technology
Israel, being the high-tech powerhouse that it is, should be able to handle something as simple as a computerized primary election. But for two weeks in a row, in two different primary contests, the computers seemingly caused more problems than they solved.
All three major parties – Labor, Likud and Kadima – had decided to dispense with traditional paper balloting in their primaries this year. A paper ballot election run by party insiders almost guarantees allegations of corruption – and past scandals have proven that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. In order to remove from party functionaries the temptation to, say, “lose” some ballot boxes (as has happened several times in the past) and to head off accusations of corruption, even if they were untrue, the parties decided to computerize the process.
Last week, the computer system crashed on Labor primary day, forcing the party to cancel the whole thing and reschedule for two days later. In Monday’s Likud primary, the system more or less worked, but it was slow – so slow that voting hours had to be extended for three hours, while party members spent hours waiting on line for their chance to choose. As a result of their rivals’ experiences, Kadima, which has its primary next week, has begged off using computers, and will instead go back to paper ballots, despite the problems.
Network experts still haven’t figured out what caused the Labor system crash, but in the case of the Likud slowdown, at least part of the problem was attributed to – a tractor. While digging the foundation for a structure outside Jerusalem, a tractor apparently damaged a fiber-optic communications cable, shutting down communications in the Jerusalem area (and beyond) for several hours, a delay from which the Jerusalem area Likud polls apparently never recovered.
Could a similar communications line cut have been responsible for Labor’s computer problems too? It’s very possible – because it happens far more often than people realize. Erez Ronen in Yediot Achronot tells the story of his trip to the mall to buy a computer – and how he couldn’t check how well it surfed the internet, because a tractor doing construction in the area had broken the data line. Clearly, it happens more often than we realize. It’s the digital age’s equivalent of a water main break (those still happen a lot, too).
It’s not just tractors that can break data cables – ships at sea do their share of damage. Earlier this year, in fact, most of the Middle East – except Israel – was off the net for several days, and in some cases for weeks, because a ship’s anchor had spliced through one of the main underwater communication cables running from Egypt to Europe. Most of the Arab countries, Iran, and India, used the line for their internet and e-mail connections to the rest of the world. Israel, which uses a separate cable (the MedNautilus cable, pictured), wasn’t affected – leading to accusations that somehow Israel had engineered the shutdown of the internet, in preparation for a war against Iran! Eventually the break was discovered, but countries affected, including Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and India said they lost billions of dollars. Losing our net connection is annoying, whether you’re running an election or just surfing. But for communication companies – like the ones that ran the Labor and Likud primaries – there’s a bright spot: You can always find someone to blame for the fashla!
My Buddy, the Mayor
You’d think that in a dinky little town, there wouldn’t be much reason anyone would want to run for mayor – it’s certainly not likely to be a stepping stone to anything, except maybe another term as mayor. The mayor does get a salary, but I don’t think it’s as high as the salaries of mayors in big cities (NIS 33,000 a month plus expenses). 
The municipal elections were nearly a week ago already, but they just finished counting the votes in our town – not that the race was particularly close, but they only got through with the soldiers’ votes Friday. Applying the term “municipal” to the town where I live is a bit of a stretch; it’ more like a “village” around these parts. And in small town Israel, the race for mayor gets personal. There were three candidates – call them Herzl (also the current mayor), Yigal, and Yossi. There are three distinct neighborhoods in this town, with Herzl and Yossi being from the richer one, and Yigal from the working class neighborhood.
All three candidates were very active in pursuing votes – to the extent that they probably called or visited almost every one of the households in this town of about 8,000. I actually wrote a story about this town for the Jerusalem Post a few years ago, quoting Herzl liberally; since then he’s always gone out of his way to say hello to me at town events. Herzl spoke to me personally numerous times about how important it was to vote for him. He also had a web site, a jingle, and “robocalls” – trying to appeal to the high-tech vote, I guess.
Besides mayor, the parties represented by these three fellows were also running for spots on the town council. Two of the people on Yigal’s list live on my street, so of course I got numerous phone calls from them. After expressing an opinion to one of them, he kept me talking about how wonderful his guy was for nearly an hour! You’d think there wouldn’t be that much to talk about in a such a small town, but there you go. Not only that; on the night before the election, this neighbor brought Yigal over to my house (not the most convenient time, either) to chat about the issues – for 20 minutes! You’d think a candidate would have other things to do that try to convince two voters individually.
Yossi I never met, but he, too, had his agents out and about, calling up everyone they knew (including me). Same story: Vote for my guy because he’s the best (that’s why these people joined those lists, I guess).
In the end, Herzl won, Yigal came in second, and Yossi was a distant third. Monday morning quarterbacking, I could say that all the candidates used strategies from the high school political playbook – getting people to talk their friends into voting for them. Herzl did use more sophisticated methods (although I doubt that’s why he won). And Yossi’s commitment to the job was clearly not as strong as that of the other two, because he clearly didn’t press the flesh as much as the other two. Perhaps I should forward my findings to potential candidates for national office?
Game On!
Intense, heated arguments, where opponents vociferously defend their preferred choice; hats, t-shirts, stickers, and buttons announcing to the world whose side you’re on; anthems, loyalty oaths, and in-depth analyses in the paper, on TV, the web, and “talking heads” who get paid to blather on incessantly, trying to figure out who’s going to win. And, finally, the big showdown, the final battle in which one contender tastes the thrill of victory – or the agony of the feet (I m
ean defeat!).
It could be only one of two things: Sports – or politics. Both inspire feelings of glory, contempt, anger, and, of course, hope. The correlation between the two is an interesting example of how opposites meet. Politics are in the front of the newspaper and sports in the back, so you could essentially read the paper from right to left and get the same information – which is good for us Hebrew readers. But that’s another subject.
Here’s another example of the correlation between sports and politics – with a Hebrew (Israeli) connection, no less. On election night, a hologram of CNN political correspondent Jessica Yellin was beamed into the network’s New York newsroom, making it seem as if she were standing there giving her report. But she wasn’t in New York – she was in Chicago covering the celebration of Barack Obama’s election by residents of his hometown. And the technology that made this possible was developed by a company based in Kfar Saba, called SportVU – which designed the technology for broadcasters of sporting events!
According to CNN, network officials saw the system in action at soccer games in Europe, and decided it would work for them on election night. SportVu has been used extensively in Germany, Spain and Italy, company marketing director Shimon Katzubes told me in a recent interview. It’s easy to run, too, Katzubes says. “All we need are three stationary cameras – no panning is necessary – to take in the live action, and the SportVU applications do the rest.” The fact that a system developed for sporting events could be deployed so easily to broadcast an election may just be coincidental – technology is supposed to be multitaskable. But what does the correlation between sports and politics mean for voters? That we should be looking at elections as spectator sports? Something to think about for 2012, I guess.
The Game is On: The U.S. Presidential Election…What’s Your Vote?
With the U.S. Presidential Election just a couple of days away, do ex-pats in Israel, Israelis and foreigners know which candidate will be better for Israel? For me the best candidate would be the one that said, “Israel we’re just going to stay out of this. No more three-ways, scrappy peace documents, or lame promises–if you vote me for President, I’ll stay the hell out of it and focus on my own country.”
But since that probably is not going to happen, just like a kosher Mexican restaurant popping up in Jerusalem’s city center or a real gym built on EmeK Refaim ain’t gonna happen, my group of kids went to the heart of Jerusalem to find out what other people, besides bitter me have to say.
Check out what these folks had to say about the better candidate for Israel: McCain or Obama?
Originally post on The Big Felafel.
Jerusalem Elections 2008: The Most Crucial in Years
Several weeks ago I gave an Israeli take on the upcoming U.S. elections. But there’s another vote in November that may prove to be just as momentous for this country. I’m talking about the Jerusalem mayoral elections.
Five years ago, the status quo was broken when the ultra-Orthodox (haredi) community fielded a candidate for mayor for the first time…and won. Before that, haredi Jerusalemites were careful not to promote one of their own for fear that an Orthodox mayor would be forced to sanction “non-kosher” activities (such as the annual Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade). Accordingly, the last two Jerusalem mayors, Ehud Olmert and Teddy Kolleck, were both secular.
But in 2003, Uri Lupolianski ran and narrowly defeated millionaire businessman and philanthropist Nir Barkat. Lupolianski captivated both secular and religious voters with his background as the founder of the Yad Sarah organization which is dedicated to helping the elderly and disabled. He received numerous awards for his work there: the President’s Volunteer Prize; the Knesset Speaker’s Award; the Kaplan Prize for Efficiency; and in 2004, the Israel Prize.
Lupolianski wasn’t a bad mayor – he kept a decent balance between the different groups in the city and even allowed his dreaded Gay Parade to proceed (earning him considerable scorn from his constituency). More non-kosher bars and clubs opened during Lupolianski’s term than ever before.
The biggest criticism many residents had of Lupolianski was that he was dull– he showed little vision other than canceling the Safdie plan to build 20,000 homes on prime forest land that was decried by local environmentalists.
But he’s not running this year. Lupolianski is a member of the ultra-Orthodox Degel HaTorah party. In order for the entire haredi community to throw its support behind a single candidate, Degel hooked up 5 years ago with rival Agudat Yisrael, with the provision that when the next elections rolled around, an Aguda candidate would run.
The Aguda candidate is Member of Knesset Meir Porush. And that’s where the trouble starts.
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