Election 2022: The view from Israel
'It is a fact of political life that the right uses fear to stir and exploit voters'.
The recent Israeli election was a powerful commentary on both the bright and sorry state of Israeli affairs. Driving around Israel during the election with an Australian mission, we saw these issues come to life firsthand.
The election outcome yielded a strong right-wing bloc centred around Bibi Netanyahu and his Likud party. In the vote count, Likud and its allies to the right, (Religious Zionism, Shas and United Torah Judaism) constitute an absolute majority of 64 seats in the Knesset total of 120 seats.
While it is true that one of the four dominant parties can extort Likud to accept their demands or bring down the government, and which has often been the case in the past, most will be content to stay for the four years and find compromise. The reason is simple; when you are out of government, as the right was entirely for the last year, the public trough is no longer available to share the benefits of patronage.
It was widely reported in the international media that the Religious Zionism party (in reality two separate parties merged for the election) is headed by two extremist politicians – Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. The former is an unreconstructed follower of outright racist bully Meir Kahane. The latter is a conspiracy theorist whose first speech in the newly elected Knesset proposed that the security services caused prime minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination (denied by the assailant himself!). It seems the American disease of malign ‘deep state’ conspiracies have found their way to Israel.
Whether or not Bibi can tame these MKs in government is something that remains to be seen. Power in government can do strange things. Yet the fundamental issue, that Bibi brought the farthest reaches of the radical right into political normalisation, and succeeded in obtaining large mandates in this election, says a few things about some major shifts in Israeli society.
The first and most important issue in any non-compulsory national election is to get your base out to vote. The numbers are staggering: UTJ and Shas (representing the ultra-religious parties of the Ashkenazim and Sephardim) increased their own voter turnout by a massive 19 per cent. Contrast this with Prime Minister Yair Lapid’s centrist Yesh Atid, centrist National Unity, and the left parties of Labor and Meretz, who decreased their vote by one per cent from a year ago.
Second is local context, a euphemism for the security situation. The past few months have witnessed a surge in terrorism against Israeli civilians, perpetrated by various Palestinian factions. In the areas where these events occur, Jerusalem being the prime example, voting for right-wing parties shot up three to seven per cent on average.
It is a fact of political life that the right uses fear to stir and exploit voters; whether that fear has some legitimacy, as in Israel, or a “dagger of the mind”, as in America, Bibi being Bibi, he has shown he is willing to use any tool, make any deal, sell out any partner, even trade security for votes when it has suited him, to gain and keep power.
The third issue is plainly the inadequacy of the centrist and left-wing parties’ electoral campaigns. Lapid ran a campaign whose strategy was to raise his party to become the dominant force on the centre-left in a two-party fight to the death with Likud. As a consequence, Lapid and his team did not really care nor exert pressure on their partners in government to unite and be disciplined about getting out the base. So everyone went their own way with disastrous results, compared to the disciplined right-wing campaign.
The Israeli Labor Party (ILP) vote has been in freefall for 30 years (with one exception under then leader and now Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog). This election was unfortunately no exception in the steady decline of the party of Ben-Gurion. To even think current leader Merav Michaeli and her team could ever align with Labor greatness of old is to blind oneself to the realities of the largely irrelevant Israel Labor Party of today. In this election, the ILP team mostly included social activists that failed to capture any imagination, or indeed, many votes at all. The ILP is dysfunctional. No matter the hand-wringing and blame, the ILP has no one really to blame but itself.
When I happened to be travelling with my group to Jerusalem on election day itself, we did not see any Labor campaign posters or materials. It felt to me as though the ILP had just given up. On Jerusalem, on half of Israel, and on itself.
The Israeli electorate, clearly tired of five elections in four years, has spoken clearly of the need for stability. That opportunity was seized upon by a very clever self-serving politician. Unfortunately, this will come at a great cost for Israel internally, with the Palestinians and internationally. Let’s hope that a new Opposition arises to hold truth to power, keeps the Knesset accountable to all Israelis, not just feeds singular power bases, and rebuilds the fortunes of a once mighty Labor Party. The times demand it.
Adam Slonim is co-convenor of the Australia-Israel Labor Dialogue.
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