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Israel

Netanyahu sacks Lapid, Livni, seeks snap 2015 elections

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After weeks of tension, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu sacked justice minister Tzipi Livni and finance minister Yair Lapid on Tuesday, accusing them of trying to lead a ‘putsch’ against him, and the Knesset (הכנסת), Israel’s unicameral parliament, has now voted to dissolve itself in advance of snap elections in early 2015.ISrel Flag Icon

Just two years and two months after Israel’s last parliamentary election, Israel is set to go to the polls on March 17, two years sooner than the current parliamentary term ends. Despite Netanyahu’s bravado in triggering early elections, neither he nor Lapid nor Livni are assured of increasing their share of the vote.

While Netanyahu remains the favorite to return as prime minister as the head of his center-right Likud (הַלִּכּוּד‎), he will be vying to win a fourth term leading government after two of the toughest years of his political career. Though the election is likely to focus, increasingly, on domestic issues, it follows this summer’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’ against Hamas in the occupied Gaza strip that lessened global support for Israel. It also follows Arab-Jewish violence in Jerusalem in recent weeks, and after Sweden formally recognized Palestine’s sovereignty in October (as the French parliament voted on the issue earlier this week).

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RELATED: Twelve lessons to draw from Netanyahu’s new Israeli cabinet government [March 2013]

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Nevertheless, unless terrorism or religious violence increases, the Palestinian question will invariably fade from the agenda of the country’s leading politicians — for at least the next four months.

Accordingly, the election will be a referendum on Netanyahu’s leadership over the past two years, including the management of his coalition, the struggle of Israel’s middle class, and global matters like his handling of the Gaza war and testy relations with the United States and the Obama administration. Critics from both the left and right will target Netanyahu during the 2015 campaign. Moreover, if Netanyahu falls short next March, his position within Likud is even more tenuous after he wasted precious political capital attempting (and failing) to block former Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin’s presidential candidacy.

With allies like these, who needs enemies?

The unwieldy coalition Netanyahu formed in 2013 has been increasingly unstable since the end of the military action in Gaza earlier this year. The causes lie not only among moderate critics to Netanyahu’s left like Livni and Lapid, but among conservative critics to his right, including his one-time chief of staff, economy minister Naftali Bennett and his nationalist foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman. During the Gaza conflict, Netanyahu nearly fired Bennett after his strident criticism that Israel’s military action wasn’t going far enough. Continue reading Netanyahu sacks Lapid, Livni, seeks snap 2015 elections →

Israel

Winners and losers in today’s Israeli election

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Official results will start trickling in shortly from Israel, where it’s well past midnight, but we have some fairly strong exit poll data at this point.ISrel Flag Icon

From the looks of things, the center-right and the ultraorthodox haredim parties have taken just slightly more seats than the center-left and the Arab parties in Israeli’s Knesset (הכנסת).  Israeli voters went to the polls on Tuesday to elect all 120 members of the Knesset, Israeli’s unicameral parliament.  Seats are awarded by proportional representation, with a threshold of at least 2% in voter support to win seats.

Here’s the breakdown of an average of the exit polls, as reported by Haaretz:

exitpollsisrael

So on the basis of these results, who are the winners of today’s election? Continue reading Winners and losers in today’s Israeli election →

Israel

Israel’s untouchable parties: Israeli Arab politics in a Jewish state

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Residents of the Palestinian Territories cannot participate in today’s Israeli election, but over 1.5 Israeli citizens, nearly 20% of the Israeli population, are Arabs — although largely Palestinian by nationality, they are Israeli by citizenship.  They comprise nearly 70% of the large northern Israeli city of Nazareth, and they’re a growing demographic within Israel. ISrel Flag Icon

The three main Arab parties currently hold 11 seats, just under 10% of the Knesset (הכנסת), Israeli’s unicameral parliament, and they are expected — just narrowly, perhaps, to each win more than 2% of the vote in today’s election, thereby enabling them to win seats in the Knesset under the proportional representation electoral rules.

So long, at least, as Arab apathy doesn’t diminish their share of the vote.

Regardless of the outcome, none of the Arab parties will be entering any governing coalition anytime soon.

In the earliest days of Israeli statehood, David Ben-Gurion and the more socialist Israeli leaders of the 1950s and 1960s routinely included the small Arab parties of the time in coalitions headed first by the Mapai movement and, thereafter, the Alignment that eventually morphed into the Labor Party (מפלגת העבודה הישראלית).

Fast-forward a half-century later, however, and Israel’s small Arab parties have not only become marginalized, but nearly toxic coalition partners for anyone — Zionist, religious or secular; right, center or left.

All three parties support an end and evacuation of Israel’s settlements, the right of return for Palestinian refugees and the establishment of a Palestinian state. They include:

  • Hadash (الجبهة or חד”ש, ‘New’), technically a socialist joint Jewish-Arab party formed in 1977, with its roots in the Israeli Communist Party is the oldest of the three main parties with significant Arab representation, and it has run jointly with the other two parties in previous elections.  Its leader is Mohammad Barakeh, an MK since 1999 who gained some admiration among Jewish voters for a visit to Auschwitz in 2010.  Although most of its support comes from Arab voters, among its most prominent leaders is Dov Khenin, an MK since 2006 and a prominent Jewish radical leftist intellectual.
  • Balad (التجمع الوطني الديمقراطي‎, ‘Country or Nation,’ or ברית לאומית דמוקרטית, ‘National Democratic Assembly’), formed in 1995 by Azmi Bishara, is both more secular and more centrist than Hadash.  Bishara, who was elected as an MK in 1996, fled Israel in 2007 after Israeli police questioned him for aiding Hezbollah during the 2006 Israeli war in Lebanon (the Knesset passed a law in 2011 — the ‘Bishara bill’ — that stripped him of his parliamentary pension).  Balad is anti-Zionist in that it opposes the idea of Israel as a Jewish state, preferring a multinational state.  Its leader, Jamal Zahalka, an MK since 2003, has been overshadowed in the campaign by Haneen Zoabi (pictured above, bottom), herself an MK since 2009.
  • United Arab List (لقائمة العربية الموحدة‎ or רשימה ערבית מאוחדת) and Ta’al (لحركة العربية للتغيير‎ or תנועה ערבית להתחדשות, ‘Arab Movement for Renewal’) comprise a coalition since 2006 of two Arab parties, the former created in 1996 by the Islamist movement in Israel and the latter a more secular party also formed in 1996.  The group attracts much of the support of the nomadic Bedoin community, which represents nearly 30% of all Israeli Arabs.  It’s led by Ahmad Tibi (pictured above, top — the man not wearing a keffiyeh), an MK since 1999, but also previously a former advisor to Yasser Arafat, former president of the Palestinian Authority, who represented the Palestinians during the 1998 Wye River negotiations with Israel.

Israeli law guarantees equal rights to all of its citizens regardless of religion, though most Israeli Arabs are exempt from the national compulsory service in the Israeli Defense Forces.  But many Israeli Arabs nonetheless report feeling like second-class citizens in a country that defines itself first and foremost as a Jewish state, and Arab-based parties have struggled in the past just to make the ballot.

Notwithstanding a large amount of sympathy for and solidarity with the residents of the Palestinian territories, many Israeli voters are more concerned with their own opportunities as Israeli citizens within Israel’s borders.

It’s not an overstatement to say that the status of Israel’s growing Arab population and their political, civil and economic rights in an officially Jewish state remains one of the trickiest existential issues for Israel as a nation — and that would be the case even in a world with a fully sovereign and friendly Palestinian state. Continue reading Israel’s untouchable parties: Israeli Arab politics in a Jewish state →

Israel

A guide to the five likeliest Netanyahu-led governing coalitions for Israel

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Polling in advance of tomorrow’s elections has been fairly steady for a month now in respect of the composition of the next Knesset (הכנסת), Israel’s unicameral parliament.ISrel Flag Icon

Expectations, from day one of the campaign, have been nearly unanimous that prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu will remain as prime minister, but we still don’t know what the ultimate government will look like because there are so many options for Netanyahu in crafting a coalition.

So what options will Netanyahu have when he wakes up on January 23?

Let’s start with the final poll from Haaretz, Israel’s oldest newspaper, printed on Friday, which is relatively consistent with most polling in the final two weeks of the campaign:

haaretz

‘Likud Beiteinu’ — the merger of Netanyahu’s Likud (הַלִּכּוּד‎, ‘The Consolidation’) and the more nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu (ישראל ביתנו‎, ‘Israel is Our Home’) of former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman — is expected to win the largest bloc of seats by far.  The proliferation of other right-wing parties and the remaining fragmentation among various center-left, leftist, ultraorthodox haredim, and Israeli Arab parties means that there’s virtually no way that any party other than Netanyahu’s bloc can form a viable governing coalition.

As in the last Knesset, it is expected that the two major ultraorthodox parties, Shas (ש״ס) and United Torah Judaism (יהדות התורה המאוחדת), will join the Netanyahu coalition, giving him about 15 more seats for a total baseline of around 50 seats, according to current projections.

Kadima (קדימה, ‘Forward’) seems assured to fall from the largest single party in the current Knesset (28 seats to just 27 for Likud) to merely two seats, if that.  There are certainly many reasons for Kadima’s implosion — its years in the opposition wilderness, the refusal of former prime minister Ehud Olmert to run for office, the uncertain leadership of Shaul Mofaz (who joined, and then left, Netanyahu’s prior coalition), and the proliferation of no less than five center-left parties vying for the same pool of centrist voters.

If Kadima does win just two seats, though (and it may not win the 2% share of votes that represents the current threshold for representation in the Knesset), those two seats will go to Mofaz and Yisrael Hasson.  Mofaz, a former defense minister in Ariel Sharon’s government a decade ago, has a Likud background; Hasson left Yisrael Beiteinu only in 2008 to join Kadima. So both likely MKs hail from Kadima’s right wing, and it seems likelier than not that they too would join Netanyahu’s coalition.

So that brings the baseline a little higher, perhaps even into the 50s.  Given that there are 120 members of the Knesset, this requires Netanyahu to find anywhere from around seven to 12 additional seats in order to form a bare majority (although for many reasons, he may well want a wider coalition).

The three Israeli Arab parties (Hadash, Balad and United Arab List Ta’al) are projected to win a total of 12 seats, but are certain not to join any Netanyahu-led coalition, nor would the Zionist leftist party Meretz (מרצ, ‘Energy’), which is projected to increase its representation from three seats to six.

So that leaves us with a relatively narrow handful of coalition options.

Here are the five likeliest: Continue reading A guide to the five likeliest Netanyahu-led governing coalitions for Israel →

Israel, Lebanon

The Lebanonization of Israeli politics and next week’s Knesset elections

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Daniel Levy, director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, has written in Foreign Policy what’s perhaps the best piece I’ve read in the U.S. media — or the Israeli media, for that matter — on next Tuesday’s upcoming Israeli elections, where he makes the point that Israeli politics has become both incredibly fragmented and ossified: ISrel Flag IconLebanon

Alongside [Naftali] Bennett’s rapid rise, Jan. 22 is best understood as a “Tribes of Israel” election — taking identity politics to a new level. Floating votes may exist within the tribes of Israel, but movement between tribes, or political blocs, is almost unheard of. Israelis seem to relate their political choices almost exclusively to embedded social codes rather than contesting policies.

By Levy’s estimation, although voters may swing from party to party within a larger bloc, most Israeli voters remain within one of four essential ‘tribes’:

[Prime minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s Zionist right (including the far right and national religious right), [former foreign minister Tzipi] Livni’s Zionist center (only Meretz still defines itself as Zionist left), the ultra-Orthodox bloc, and the bloc overwhelmingly representing Palestinian Arab citizens.

Not so long ago, you could make the credible argument that Israeli politics was essentially a two-party democracy, with the center-right Likud (הַלִּכּוּד‎, ‘The Consolidation’) of figures like Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin and the center-left Labor (מפלגת העבודה הישראלית) — and from the 1960s through the end of the 1980s, the ‘Alignment’ (המערך) — of figures like Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.

Sure, there were third parties and ultra-orthodox and Israeli Arab parties back then, too, but Likud and Labor/Alignment would often win two-thirds or more of the seats in the Knesset (הכנסת), Israel’s unicameral parliament.  In the most recent 2009 Israeli elections, however, Likud and Labor won a cumulative 40 seats — exactly one-third of the Knesset, and given the proliferation of personality-based parties in Israeli politics, it’s clear that Israel has moved to a system with much less long-term party affiliation and discipline.

As Levy makes demonstratively clear in his piece, however, each of his four identified ‘tribes’ contain multiple parties:

  • The ‘Zionist right’ includes not only Likud and its campaign partner, the secular nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu (ישראל ביתנו‎, ‘Israel is Our Home’) that appeals especially to Russian Jewish immigrants and is led by former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, who has resigned in light of ongoing legal troubles, but also Bennett’s upstart, conservative Bayit Yehudi (הבית היהודי, ‘The Jewish Home’).
  • The ‘Zionist center-left’ is more or less hopelessly fragmented into five parties — Labor, under Shelly Yacimovich, which is pushing economic issues in this election; Livni’s new party, Hatnuah (התנועה, ‘The Movement’), which is pushing mainly Livni in this election; Livni’s old party, the now-hemorrhaging Kadima (קדימה, ‘Forward’); Yesh Atid (יש עתיד, ‘There is a Future’), another personality-based party formed in 2012 by former television news anchor Yair Lapid; and Meretz (מרצ, ‘Energy’), the only truly leftist party in Israel with any remaining strength.
  • the ultra-Orthodox, or the haredim, the most conservative (in this case, religious conservatism, not necessarily political) followers of Judaism, including both the Middle Eastern sephardim that back the largest of the haredi parties, Shas (ש״ס) and Am Shalem (עם שלם, Whole Nation), a breakaway faction from Shas, as well as the Central and Eastern European ashkenazim that back the United Torah Judaism (יהדות התורה המאוחדת) coalition.
  • the Israeli Arabs, which include three parties that are each expected to win a handful of seats in the Knesset — Balad, Hadash and the United Arab List-Ta’al.

A look at the recent polling bears out Levy’s thesis — there’s a shift away from the ‘Likud Beiteinu’ alliance and a shift toward the Jewish Home, and there’s a massive shift away from Kadima in favor of Livni’s party, Labor and Yesh Atid.  By and large, however, the ‘right/religious’ seats would go from 65 to 67, and the ‘center/left/Arab’ seats would go from 55 to 53.  That’s not a whole lot of change, and that’s why, since Netanyahu called early elections, it’s been almost certain that Netanyahu will remain prime minister (though it’s more unclear whether he’ll govern with a more rightist or centrist coalition).

Levy’s harsh conclusion is that Israel is coming to resemble apartheid-era South Africa.

But it looks to me even more like the highly choreographed confessional politics of its northern neighbor, Lebanon.

Israel’s demographic trends make it very likely that its population will become more polarized (like Lebanon’s) in the coming years — Israeli haredi and Israeli Arab populations are growing much faster than secular Jewish populations, such that the haredim and Arabs, taken together, will outnumber the rest of Israel’s population within the next 40 years.  As such, the disintegration of two-party Israeli politics into de facto confessional politics in Israel is cause for worry. Continue reading The Lebanonization of Israeli politics and next week’s Knesset elections →