The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Israeli Elections, Pt. 2

Welcome once again.

Since we last spoke there have been weekend polls. Remember that 2-3 seat lead challenger Zionist Camp was enjoying over incumbent Likud? Gone. Polls show the two either tied at 26 or Likud leading 27-26. It’s way early, but we report the heartbeat of the campaign as it happens. The slim sliver of light in the polls for the left side lies not in Meretz’s court, as the Jewish left-wing party now seems closer to 5 seats than to 6. However, Zionist Camp has not lost any strength, and is rather solidifying at 26 across all three weekend polls.

Likud’s gains come mostly at the expense of its own flanker, right-wing Bayit Yehudi (“Jewish Home”), and at the expense of the two secular right-wing parties, former Likudnik Moshe Kahlon’s “Kulanu” (“All of us”) and former TV pretty-boy Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid (“There is a future”). BY is down to 15, 14, and 12 – bad news for what was supposed to be the juggernaut of this election cycle. (See more below.)

Both Likud and Bayit Yehudi are attacking “the left” (this btw seems to be the gist of both their campaigns in general – we hate the left! We hate ’em more! etc,) this time for the existence of a nefarious group of donors (mostly American) and receivers (in Israel) named “V15”, plotting to effect democratic regime change against Bibi. (“Foreign money to sway the elections!!!” is the charge).

This is particularly rich coming from Bibi, whose donor list is massively tilted outside the country he’s fighting to stay in charge of. His sugar daddy is US multi-billionaire Sheldon Adelson, who burns $3 mil a month to run a free daily mass-circulation newspaper dedicated to support of one single politician. Bayit Yehudi also get tons of their money from rich American and French Jews.

Used to be the right would claim the problem was that, unlike the right’s private (mostly Jewish, with the odd antisemitic “Pro-Israel” evangelist) donors, the left’s civil society foundations took money to influence Israel’s business from foreign governments (such as arms of [or mainly supported by] the European Union that exist to support causes outside Europe).

This time that dog won’t hunt, so they’re trying to cry that some of the political machinery that works for President Obama’s campaigns is suddenly helping the dastardly dread Left here in Israel. This would fly a tad better if the Prime Minister crying foul hadn’t just recently been seen in the process of letting the Republican Speaker of the House use his magen-david-tattooed dick to piss on said Democratic President…

Welcome to Jamaica, have a nice day...  

Besides, ain’t nothing new about the political help either. Clinton’s team of Stanley Greenberg and Jimmy Carville (I love Jimmy) worked for Ehud Barak against Bibi in 1999. Republican super-adviser Arthur Finkelstein worked for Bibi since 1996.

Another scandal currently rocking the so-called start-up nation is known as BOTTLEGATE. Bibi’s wife, Sarah Netanyahu, has a long history of allegations of unstable and abusive behavior. With this scandal, for the first time, the claim is surfacing that the problem is alcoholism (rather than, as was suspected before, a mental-health condition she was refusing to take medication for).

Now this is gonna sound bizarre, but it’s true: Apparently the Prime Minister’s house buys a shitload of alcohol (in addition to large amounts of soft drinks of course). That’s not the point, although the numbers (spent mostly on one type of $22/bottle red wine) are kinda staggering ($25K over two years, but a peak of $12.5K over a 3-month period with no unusual entertaining patterns). Now the vino was bought on the taxpayer’s dime and in principle that’s fine. Point though is she’d have the staff collect the bottles, take them to the recycling plant like a good citizen – and pocket the cash.

I mean, the bottle deposit refund should go back to the actual payer, right? Not like the public coffer, but the Official Residence budget. At least that’s the way I (and the law, apparently) figure.

I’m sure it’s nice, but that comes out to quite a bit of wine.

Bibi and Sarah are rich. Their declared net worth is slightly over $10 million.  That’s more here than it is in the US. He’s not the richest politician, but he’s done well for himself for someone who for most of the past 30 years has been earning a government salary and enjoys the high life. The idea of his wife scheming to cheat on bottle refunds seems outlandish – but we know that she “voluntarily” returned about $1,000 (4,000 shekels) worth of back deposit money. A guy who used to work at the residence (and is currently suing her for treating him like crap) claims that the real figure is probably closer to six time that amount over a 4-year period. Some would call it petty cash but, you know, WTF?

The other big story was Bennett’s scoring into the wrong goal. Twice. Bayit Yehudi were getting rave reviews (professionally-speaking) from knowledgeable observers for their campaign until last week, and Chairman Naftali Bennett apparently decided he could pull stuff from his backside and people would call it a rose. He decided to wink to the low-class, low-income, low-brow electorate by using one of his reserved seats in his party’s list to guarantee a Knesset seat at the 11^th spot for former local soccer god and shampoo model Eli Ohana. Ohana was one of Israel’s greatest on the field, but absolutely mediocre both as a coach (where he got jobs either through politics or because it was his old team Beitar Jerusalem) and as a TV analyst.

 Eli Ohana 

When it was first announced some would-be-shrewd observers praised the move, saying it would sway some of Likud’s die-hard electorate. We’ll never know cause the BY base was not having it. The base threw a shitfit, replete with gems like Knesset Member Ayelet Shaked trying to placate hundreds of irate activists over whatsapp with: “look, we needed someone who’s Mizrachi and grew up poor”. In US-speak, that’s “we needed a token ghetto candidate”. One prospective MK actually quit over it and another turned down an additional reserved seat (over a slightly different political blunder by Bennett).

Despite accepting and recording a campaign video (“I grew up poor, but I was proud of my country, when I wore its colors on the field and now…”) Ohana withdrew after a couple of days, saying “Hey, I didn’t know y’all would have such a conniption…” The party came out of the whole affair looking both inept politically and kinda racist (towards Mizrachi Jews and not just Arabs), as evidenced by the polls.

Lastly, there was some shooting up north as you may have heard, and that may have helped Likud in the polls in a “rally ’round the leader” kind of way. Israel had recently killed a senior Iranian officer scouting the border on the Syrian side with some Hizballah people. This week Hizballah killed two Israeli soldiers with an anti-tank missile at a patrol jeep. Bibi huffed and puffed but quickly reached a tense “neither of us wants blood right now” understanding with Hizballah. Zionist Camp Leaders Herzog and Livni didn’t cover themselves with any glory in the response, but rather went to pose near the border in leather jackets and shades along with their shadow-Minister of Defense. Meretz tried to mend fences with its hardcore base by taking a clear stand against any escalation, but got hit by a TV expose on its connections with the corrupt National Jewish Fund (controls 13% of the country’s land).

Speaking of the polls, we’ll wrap up with a quick breakdown of what they (average of last 3) mean in the big picture:

Right-wing bloc: 40

Left-wing bloc: 31

Center secular: 21

Ultra-religious: 15

Joint Arabs: 12

While both blocs could conceivably persuade all  of the secular center and both the religious parties to form a coalition with them, the 12 seats of the Joint Arab List will only be used against Bibi. They don’t want to sit in the coalition (that’s too much complicity in Israel’s actions for all of them and in its very existence as Israel for some), but they will join a blocking formation against the right and generally support a left-wing government against a vote of no-confidence. So in some ways it’s Left bloc 43, Right bloc 40, 37 in play for both sides. The whole Arab vote issue deserves a post of its own, which I know I promised. Coming up real soon. Until then, thanks for hitching and hitch me up with a comment so I know you made it this far. Most obliged.

* Polling data courtesy of the excellent polling collation and analysis “Project 61“, by my right-wing, religious* twitter buddy Nehemia (The Wunderkind) Gershuni.

* Abhorrent views, but hell of a nice guy other than that…