Going out on a Limb: Projecting the Israeli Election

It is a sad truism that about 95% of what is written about Israel is lazy and uninformed. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to Israeli politics where the foreign press see things through one lens and one lens only: “The Conflict.”

In actuality, Israeli politics are much more interesting and diverse than Western politics which has the luxury of focusing on social issues to the exclusion of much else. Very few are the Western democracies that are as ethnically and religiously diverse as Israel. Going to the polls today are large communities of Jews (of all stripes), Muslims (Sunni, Sufi, Shiites), Christians (Catholic and Orthodox), Druze, Circassians, Bedouins, Bahais and even the recently recognized Arameans. Add to this the fact that few countries face the kind of existential threats that Israeli deal with on a day to day basis and you have a uniquely complicated patchwork of political parties.

Israeli elections regularly feature parties from the hard right (Jewish Strength and Jewish Home) to the Centrist (Yesh Atid), and the hard left (Meretz and Hadash); from the avowedly secular (Labor) to the devoutly religious (United Torah Judaism and the Islamic Movement); from the ethnically-based parties (Shas and Jewish Home) to the joint Arab and Israeli list (Hadash). To confuse things further there are even single-issue based parties such as the Pirate Party that wants complete net neutrality to the Green Leaf party that wants to legalize marijuana.

Yet, if you have been following the foreign media over the past few years, the prevailing narrative has either been about how the extreme right has irrevocably hijacked the country or that the Israeli public is on an inexorable death march towards apartheid and fascism. Even worse, Israelis have been assailed as uniquely evil for simply going about their daily affairs rather than wringing their hands and renting their garments over the lack of progress in the peace negotiations while, at the same time, the Palestinians have been given a free pass.

As such, it will be interesting to see how the foreign press will spin the election results tonight. It has been pretty clear for about six weeks now that the public is moving to the Left and that Netanyahu and the Likud party will be in the opposition after this election. Of course, since Israel functions under a parliamentary system, it is still possible that Netanyahu can pull this one out of a hat and forge some kind of a coalition, but it seems quite unlikely. The Zionist Camp at the head of Isaac Herzog will more than likely win the most votes and Herzog will serve as the next Prime Minister of Israel.

So what is going on here?  A bunch of things.  First of all, the Israeli public has Netanyahu fatigue. He has not only been the Prime Minister for the past few years, but he is the longest-serving Prime Minster in the history of Israel.  Secondly, there is a massive housing crisis in Israel that has only gotten worse over the past six years. Most young couples cannot even dream of buying a house because it will ruin them financially. Third, the cost of living in Israel is extremely high and there have been mass protests in the past few years about the growing disparity between the rich and the poor. Rather than tackle these social issues head on, Netanyahu played the consummate politician and set up advisory panels only to shelve all of their recommendations. Even with all of Netanyahu’s Sturm and Drang about the security situation, I suspect that he will soon learn that you cannot afford to ignore bread and butter issues that impact people’s everyday lives.

I predict that Netanyahu’s political machinations at the expense of other political parties and his coalition partners will now come back to haunt him. There is a lot of bad blood between him and all of the other parties and I sincerely doubt that the religious parties or the Lapid’s centrist party will be quick to rush into a coalition with him.  He has left himself with very little room to maneuver.

In addition, there is a strong sense that Netanyahu botched this past summer’s war by not either ending it much sooner or going much farther towards toppling Hamas. 70 dead soldiers for a bunch of tunnels seems to most like a high price to pay for what will invariably be just a few months of quiet.

From an economic perspective, Netanyahu is in some ways a victim of his own success. With his MBA background, he has been a steady proponent of neoliberal economic ideas. Over the past decade Israel’s GDP growth has been impressive and per capita we know rival Japan. People can see all around them that the economy has expanded, but the increasing income disparities and abysmally low minimum wage is especially jarring in a society that was deeply inspired by socialism not that long ago.

Last but not least, it is said that hubris and pride cometh before the fall. Netanyahu allowed his coalition partner Avigdor Lieberman of the Jewish Home party to pass legislation raising the electoral threshold from 2% to 3.25% in order to destroy the chances of the Arab parties from sending representatives to the Knesset. This has seriously backfired as, against all expectations, ALL of the Arab parties (from Communist to Islamist) joined together in a united list.  If Arab Israelis come out and vote in large numbers today, the Arab parties will almost certainly end up being the kingmakers.

At the same time, in what can only be called karmic retribution, it looks increasingly likely that the Jewish Home will fall victim to the new electoral threshold they spearheaded. Over the past two months, the party has been seriously battered by corruption scandals and the completely unhinged comments by Lieberman (he called to behead “disloyal” Arabs). Today, in one final irony, Lieberman was basically reduced to endorsing his archenemies in the Jewish Meretz party in an attempt to pull away voters from the joint Arab list.

Of course, all of the above analysis may prove wrong if the voter turnout is low, if the Arab Sector decides to forego voting, if the Centrist parties get fewer votes than expected, or if Netanyahu's fear-mongering has borne fruit. In the past 24 hours alone there have been major developments in the elections that will not make sense to outsiders even if the reporters here understood enough to report about them. For example, Livni’s announcement that she will not serve as Prime Minister in a rotation with Herzog may convince many people to vote for the Zionist Camp. While she is liked in the West, most Israelis despise Livni and it was widely felt that this was dragging Herzog down a bit. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that this election-eve stunt may have been too little too late.

Unlike American elections, which are usually decided on election night, everything here is likely be in flux for a few more weeks. President Rivlin has the responsibility of choosing a party to form a government and he has already expressed his desire to push for a Unity Government between Netanyahu and Herzog. To put this into perspective, it would be as if Obama and Romney were tasked by the head of the Speaker of the House with joining forces to run the government. ROf course, Rivlin cannot force the matter, but he is not without influence and it will be interesting to see how he tries to press the issue.  In any case, I will leave that discussion for another day. 

Voting in Israel: Easier and more Democratic than in the US

Ayman Odeh, the head of the joint Arab listing voting on Tuesday, March 17, 2015

Today, for the first time in over twenty years, I had the privilege of voting in an Israeli election. Though in many ways Israel still suffers from the bureaucracy of decades of socialist government, I have to say that voting here was SO MUCH EASIER and MORE DEMOCRATIC than voting in the US.

Heres why:

1) You don't have to register to vote. Instead you get a small note sent to you in the mail that tells you where your polling place is located.

2) If you lose the note, you just have to go to your polling place and show a picture ID (e.g. Identity Card and Passport).

3) There is a festive atmosphere at the polling stations. Lots of kids come with their parents. People are outside campaigning. You can take photographs and it is all very laid back.

4) There are no computers or hanging chads. Instead there are little notes with the names of the different political parties. You pick a note, put it in an envelope and then place that in the ballot box. There is no room for error here.

5) Most polling places are within a 10 minute walk of your home. There are 11,000 polling places in this tiny country. Pretty much every school and government preschool is a polling place.

6) ITS A NATIONAL HOLIDAY - You have no excuse not to vote.

7) If you happen to be registered at your parents and are a student in another city, you can ride the buses and trains FOR FREE on election day so that you have no excuse not to vote.

8) Instead of only two political parties to choose from, you have a plethora of parties from the far-right to the far-left, parties that are community based (Arab, Religious) and parties that are issue based (e.g. the Pirate Party). There is even a party that is running on a platform of free marijuana available for anyone who votes for them.

Now that's change that I can believe in!

The Song and Poetry of Lea Goldberg

The word "Shir" in Hebrew does not distinguish between "song" and "poem." As such, it is not surprising that many of Israel's greatest poets have had their poems put to music. To put this into perspective, it would be akin to taking the poems of T.S. Lawrence, e e cummings, Robert Frost and Sylvia Plath to music.

Few poets have influenced Israeli culture as much as Lea Goldberg. Though she grew up in Kaunas, Lithuania in the interwar years speaking Yiddish, Russian and Lithuanian, she was determined from an early age to be a Hebrew author and poet. Her poetry is riveting, colorful, expressive, and dazzlingly beautiful and it is a double pleasure to be able to hear the lyricism of her songs put to music.

The first poem I want to share is called "At Telkhi BaSade" (You Will Walk in the Field) and it is sung by Hava Albershtein - Israel's answer to Barbara Streisand. The poem was originally written in 1943, at the height of World War II and was called "Haomnam?" (Is it true). Goldberg wrote it to prove that even in terrible times it was possible and desirable to write lyrical poetry so that, "We not lose sight of the meaning and worth of life." There is a lesson here for all of us in these increasingly dark days.

Here is a translation of the poem into English:

"Is it true – will there ever come days of forgiveness and mercy?
And you’ll walk in the field, and it will be an innocent’s walk.
And your feet on the medick’s small leaves will be gently caressing,
And sweet will be stings, when you’re stung by the rye’s broken stalks!

And the drizzle will catch you in pounding raindrops’ folly
On your shoulders, your breast and your neck, while your mind will be clean,
You will walk the wet field, and the silence will fill you –
As does light in a dark cloud’s rim

And you’ll breathe in the furrow in breaths calm and even,
And the pond’s golden mirror will show you the Sun up above,
And once more all the things will be simple, and present, and living,
And once more you will love – yes, you will, yes, once more you will love!

You will walk. All alone. Never hurt by the blazing inferno
Of the fires on the roads fed by horrors too awful to stand,
And in your heart of hearts you’ll be able to humbly surrender,
In the way of the weeds, in the way of free men.

Cropoganda

On February 24, Israeli troops entered Dheisheh refugee camp near Bethlehem to arrest a Palestinian terrorist. During the ensuing street clashes, Jihad al-Jafari was shot and killed. If you accept the Israeli version of the story, al-Jafari was the "leader of the rioters" and was fired upon only after a soldier was physically injured and the others felt endangered by incendiary devices and cinder blocks which were being thrown down at them from the rooftops.

Al Jazeera, which provided the above photograph, does not deny that Jihad was on the roof when he was shot, but claims that he was asleep at the time of the raid and only went up to the roof when he heard a commotion in the street below. The only evidence for this assertion appears to be from an interview given by Jibreen al-Bakari, the Palestinian Authority Governor for the area to the Voice of Palestine.  According to a local resident, al-Jafari "was a very nice person. The soldiers had no reason to kill him. He was innocent. A simple, lovely kid."

While I find it hard to believe that al-Jaafari was so naive as to be unaware that the rooftops of the refugee camps are the meurtrières of the modern age, he does, indeed, look like just a kid in the article's accompanying photograph.

Or does he? Here is the uncropped photo:

Obviously, the above photo plays havoc with the narrative that the journalists at Al Jazeera present. The editorial decision to crop the photo should seriously call into question their "reporting."

Yet, perhaps the worst offender was the New York Times. While the Times article briefly presents the Israeli version of events early on in the article, the rest is dedicated to the unverified Palestinian claims that al-Jafari sleeepwalked his way onto the roof. Even worse, the Times gives voice to the unsubstantiated claim that, "Israeli snipers immediately opened fire and shot him in cold blood."

In almost the same breath, the Times reporter Isabel Kershner, proceeds to tie this incident to the withholding of tax revenues and reductions in the electricity supply to the Palestinian Authority. How these events are interconnected remains unclear, but the reporting definitely smacks of an attempt at what social scientists call "contextualization" - a "big picture" approach that attempts to situate events into a broader context.

In those cases where causal links can be demonstrated, contextualization can be an important corrective to simplistic or reductionist explanations. On the other hand, where causality cannot be demonstrated or is assumed, it can be misused to dispense with agency (i.e. free will) by citing supposed underlying causes. In this case, Kershner elicits sympathy for the predicament that Palestinians find themselves in while tacitly absolving them of any responsibility for their actions.

At the same time, Israeli actions are simply presented as a given. They exist in a contextual vacuum and the article makes no attempt to uncover or disclose why the Israeli army chose to "raid" the camp in the first place.

Worst of all, even though the Times undoubtedly had acccess to the above photo, it's editors chose to crop it out all together. In his writings, Foucault called this the "administration of silence" or the other side of discourse that serves to delimit it. It certainly seems like the editors at the Times chose to completely crop out the photo lest its readers try to form their own opinions about Jihad.