Israeli Elections 2009

...A reflection

and a prediction at the end

So, another elections campaign is over, the 18^th in 61 years, which will determine the 32^nd Government of Israel. Sounds wired to Western ears, doesn’t it? Maybe not if you are an Italian. But in most other democratic countries, it is pretty odd, that there would be so frequent political changes. (Is Israel a democratic country?... well, that’s a whole separate topic, I don’t know if I want to go there right now. But in short, my answer is Yes, partially).

Yeah, especially when you are an American, it must be extremely strange to hear that the elections in Israel do not take place on a regular basis. I mean, in the US, elections happen on the first Tuesday of November, exactly every 4 years. In 233 years, four presidents have died while in office, another four have been assassinated, and one resigned. Nonetheless, all were succeeded by their vice presidents, but elections were never pulled in.

But maybe the hardest thing to comprehend, for a non-Israeli, is the fact that the winning party, Kadima, which won the most number of votes and parliament seats once again, will not form the next government.

Strange, ha?

Well, this is the way the Israeli system works. The Prime Minister has to win the support of the Parliament on every major item on the agenda, such as the Budget; so He (or, if Kadima really won, it would be She) must form a Coalition of parties which would constitute an absolute majority among the 120 seats in the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament. Kadima, with its 28 seats, just can’t do that, while all the rest of the “Left” parties combined have only 27 seats. When counting the 27 seats, I even included Shas, which is a sectarian, ultra-orthodox, kind of Right-Center party, and which will be in any coalition, Right or Left. However I did not include the Arab parties, because nobody takes them into account for a government – not even the Arab-Jewish party Hadash.

Following the elections, everybody loves to hate Evet (Avigdor) Lieberman. Well, maybe except for the 13% who voted for his party, “Israel is Our Home”⁽¹⁾. The Left is mad at him – because Lieberman, whom they see as a Right-wing, hard-liner racist, is the big winner of the elections in which everybody else lost, especially the Leftist flagship, Meretz ⁽²⁾. The Likud ⁽³⁾ feels uncomfortable with him, because the last thing that the Likud wants is to establish a conservative narrow coalition, which will have to carry out its ambitious lunatic ideology, with nobody else to “soften” its agenda.

Personally, I think that there is more than a bit of hypocrisy here. After all, as brutal and frightening Mr. Lieberman might seem, all he wants to do is what the Likud, Kadima and the Labor parties have actually been carrying out all along – to alienate and oppress the Palestinian inhabitants of this land, both citizens and occupied, to the point where they would just want to leave or give up their Israeli citizenship. The difference is that those more “moderate” parties never declared it as their policy. But that’s where the hypocrisy is.

Lieberman, formerly Netanyahu’s cabinet general manager, formerly a member of the “Transfer Party” ⁽⁴⁾, and further formerly, a Kahana ⁽⁵⁾ member, this time ran on a ticket that calls for revoking the citizenship of Palestinians who wont adhere to the notion that Israel is the State of the Jews; and for “exchanging land” with the future Palestinian state, in such a way that thousands of Palestinians would have to give up their Israeli citizenship.

Let’s take a look at the actual policy of former governments, regarding the Palestinians.

The Oslo Accord was signed in 1993, by the Yitzhak Rabin government. It was an attempt to establish a permanent solution to the conflict. But alas, since then, under the governments of Netanyahu (Likud), Barak (Labor) Sharon and Olmert (Kadima), the population of the settlers in the Occupied Territories has more than doubled (from 110,000 – to 219,000 in 2001, that’s even before the Sharon government!). In 2003, the Or Inquiry Commission, an official government-appointed commission that followed the violent incidents of October 2000, stated that the Arab citizens of Israel have been discriminated against constantly by all governments.

Therefore, I think that for most people in Israel, Lieberman serves as a scapegoat, or a Kaparot rooster; just like the custom in Yom Kippur (“Day of Atonement”), which is being practiced to this day: to take a live chicken and fly it over the head, and then send it for slaughter. This way, just like with the rooster, we project all of our sins upon Lieberman, and then we can feel clean and purified.

So, what happens next? Let me put my reputation at stake, and make a prediction: Netanyahu is the next Prime Minister of Israel. His party (27 seats) will form a coalition with Lieberman, Shas, “Judaism of Torah”, “the Jewish Home” and maybe “the National Unity”. That’s a total of 65 seats, enough to have a majority of votes in the Knesset. But past experience shows, that any government which is based on less than 70 Parliament members tends to by unstable. This is because at times of crises, sometimes small parties will quit, hoping to get better deals from the other major party, after the following elections. In addition, as I said before, a narrow right-wing coalition is Netanyahu’s nightmare. So, he is eager to have either Kadima or Labor join as well, to form what is known as a Unity Government (and usually turns out to be a Paralyzing Government). Well, the current Labor people have no ideological problem sitting with any of the Right-wingers, even the most extremists. But it seems that this time, they are afraid to completely loose face in the eyes of their voters.

Kadima, on the other hand, is not a real party. It was formed by former Prime Minister Sharon, for one purpose only – to carry out his “Disengagement” plan (= the pulling out of Gaza strip). Most of its members are just opportunists who will join whoever gives them a position in government. To be perfectly honest, I thought that Kadima would cease to exist after the Disengagement was over (in 2005), but Kadima, headed by Olmert, won the 2006 elections on a similar ticket – the “Convergence” plan, which was the plan Olmert devised to pull out of parts of the West Bank as well (needless to say, that never happened). As such, Kadima cannot stay in Opposition to the government; this takes some ideological tradition, and some partisan backbone, which even the Likud has, but not Kadima. True, Kadima has some dignified people (that’s in Politics standards), such as its leader, Tzipi Livni. But it consists of too many Likud and Labor deserters who have no problem crossing the lines again in any directions (whatever “lines” there are left between those three parties). Therefore, my wild prediction is that this party will break apart. Those of Kadima who must be in the government, headed by the party’s no. 2, General (Ret.) Mofaz, who took a quick “time out” from politics after losing the leadership to Livni (but he never meant to take the full, 1-minute time out, but rather the shorter 20-second one), will join the Netanyahu coalition. The former Prime Minister will thus get back in office for a while. In that short period (one to two years maybe), he will surrender to growing pressure from the Obama administration to make “concessions”, after which ideologues such as Benny Begin ⁽⁶⁾ will quit, for the second time. But Dr. Begin has nothing to worry about, as the next government wont lead the country towards any real peace solution. As weak as Netanyahu is personally, he will pretend to make compromises, just to stay in power for a few months more; however he will not go as far as needed to establish a real peace agreement. So he will just expose the simple fact, that the Right really does not have a real option to both keep the state of Israel democratic, and to maintain the occupation. So there is some good in all that evil after all.

And after that what? A total war? A nuclear war? A civil war? That I don’t know. What am I, a prophet?...

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(1) A secular, radically Right-wing party, mainly based on immigrants from former Soviet Union; got 13% of the votes, up from 9%.

(2) Won 3 seats, down from 5 in previous elections, and down from 12 in the past.

(3) The Right-wing leading party, headed by former Prime Minister Netanyahu.

(4) “National Unity”, a radical Right-wing party which at that time included Moledet, which advocated the Transfer of Palestinians to Jordan.

(5) “Kach”, the party of Rav Meir Kahana, a party so extremely to the Right that it was banned from participating in the elections.

(6) Dr. Benny Begin, an honest man (a species almost extinct from politics), the son of the late Menachem Bagin who was the first Prime Minister from the Likud.