The Last Days of King Bibi

DISPATCH

From the Galilee to the Negev and Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Israel awaits the results of today's election with bated breath. Likud strongholds are swaying, Arabs are uniting, and the campaign is getting ugly.

L AVIV, Israel – It felt a bit like a festive street fair, except for the giant “death to terrorists” banner looming overhead. Tens of thousands of Israelis gathered in Rabin Square on Sunday night to show their support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing allies. Naftali Bennett, the leader of the Jewish Home party, pulled out a guitar. Someone was handing out glow sticks.

This was the Israeli right-wing’s final show of force ahead of Tuesday’s election — their answer to an anti-Netanyahu rally held in the same square eight days earlier. The mood was confident, brash, aggressive. “Leftist! Come down here and face us,” one man yelled up to a balcony, where a woman was unfurling a banner for the liberal Meretz party.

No one seemed worried about the outcome of Tuesday’s election, even though Netanyahu himself warned the crowd there was “real danger” of a left-wing government taking power. “Don’t believe the media, don’t believe the polls, this is the real Israel, the real national camp,” said a supporter of the far-right Yachad party. “The leftists will never have a majority.”

Such sentiments seem hard to reconcile with the prevailing mood in the country. The final batch of pre-election polls all showed Netanyahu’s Likud Party trailing three or four seats behind its main challenger, the Zionist Union, a coalition led by Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog and former Justice Minister Tzipi Livni. The final survey released by Channel 10 gave Likud just 20 seats, its poorest showing yet, and the party’s internal polling suggests it could slip further—down to 17 or 18. Commentators are talking openly about a post-Netanyahu Israel, something hard to imagine even a few months ago. Retired generals and security officials are in open revolt against the prime minister. A well-funded activist group has run a savvy media campaign against him, and their aggressive get-out-the-vote effort amounts to the left’s most effective ground game in years.

The prime minister seems like a man possessed. On Friday night he posted a long screed against Noni Mozes, the wealthy publisher of Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest paid daily, accusing him of “leading a timed and orchestrated campaign against the Likud, and against me.” Hours earlier, during a public question-and-answer session, he warned darkly that “the governments of Western Europe, especially in Scandinavia, are funding the campaign that is designed to oust me from power,” a plot also aided by millions of dollars in foreign funding.

It didn’t have to be this way. If it hadn’t been for Netanyahu’s decision to call early elections, he would be comfortably ensconced in the prime minister’s office for another two years. But in November, Netanyahu announced that he would bring a controversial Basic Law, the equivalent of a constitutional amendment, labeling Israel the “nation-state of the Jewish people” to a Cabinet vote.

The decision to push forward the law prompted resistance from Livni and Finance Minister Yair Lapid, who voted against the law after a theatrical four-hour debate: Ministers pounded tables and screamed at each other for the benefit of the reporters gathered outside. Netanyahu fired them. The polls showed Likud with a strong plurality, so the prime minister gambled that he could return to power with a more amenable coalition.

The man once hailed as “King Bibi,” Israel’s second longest-serving prime minister, seems in real danger of losing his throne in a ballot that has become largely a personal referendum.

The man once hailed as “King Bibi,” Israel’s second longest-serving prime minister, seems in real danger of losing his throne in a ballot that has become largely a personal referendum. His face is everywhere, on billboards, bumper stickers, social media, often next to the slogan “nine years of nothing.”

The prime minister is a towering figure, but also a small one, a deeply reactive politician prone to zigs and zags. He sits firmly on the right, of course, but his true ideology seems to be self-preservation. Despite the illusion of stability, voters are deeply unsettled — about the unsustainable cost of living, their increasingly fractious society, a deepening strain of nationalism and racism, and Israel’s growing international isolation. Netanyahu’s tenure looks like something of a lost decade, a period of prolonged drift. And yet his challengers are mostly unable to articulate an alternative, offering few solutions during what has been a deeply personalized, ugly campaign.

One campaign ad asked, “Who did Bibi hurt for nine years?” A succession of ordinary Israelis — students, soldiers, pensioners — answer the question: “Me,” they tell the camera, playing off the prime minister’s nickname. “Bibi hurt each one of us,” the ad concludes.

* * *

Seen from afar, this may seem an odd claim. When Netanyahu started his second term in early 2009, the world economy was deep in recession, and Israel had just ended its first war against Hamas in Gaza. Soon, Egypt would be plunged into revolution and years of political chaos. Meanwhile, a catastrophic civil war broke out across the northern border in Syria.

Israel weathered all of this fairly well. The economy kept growing, by 5 percent in 2010, and 4.6 percent in 2011, despite stagnation in its largest trading partners. Unemployment hovered around 6.5 percent, lower than many other advanced economies.

On the security front, the army fought two more wars in Gaza, “lone wolves” carried out a spate of attacks in Jerusalem, and there were occasional flare-ups of violence in the north. It may not have been quiet, but in relative terms it was peaceful, given the ominous constellation of forces gathering all around: the Islamic State, al Qaeda, jihadists on the Sinai Peninsula, a strengthened Hezbollah.

Netanyahu, in other words, can plausibly claim to have steered Israel through a turbulent time in relative peace and prosperity. Yet more than half of the country wants him gone.

The economy is an oft-cited reason, because years of strong macroeconomic growth did not help most Israelis. Average wages in 2013 stood at about $28,800, more than $10,000 below the median in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a bloc of advanced economies to which Israel belongs. However, it’s far more expensive to live in Israel than in other OECD countries: The price of basic consumer goods here is 12 percent higher than the average, while the average Israeli needs 191 monthly salaries to buy a five-room apartment, according to OECD data — compared to 90 in France, or just 60 in the United States. More than 40 percent of Israelis say their bank accounts are “regularly overdrawn.”

Likud offers these voters little; indeed, the party has not even bothered to publish an economic program. Reports of the Netanyahus’ personal corruption have also fueled the perception that he is indifferent to regular Israelis’ economic concerns. The state comptroller reported last month that the first couple’s expenses at the official residence were beyond “proportionality and reason”: The Netanyahus spent two-and-a-half times the amount budgeted for hairstylists and makeup, and tens of thousands of shekels to clean their private home in Caesarea, where they spend only a few days each month.

“Trust me, I know what happens next. They’ll start buying golden toilets,” an Iraqi Jew in southern Israel told me, only half-joking.

But it’s not only economics that divides the Israeli electorate today — it’s dueling images of Israel’s place in the world. On the campaign trail, center-left voters fret about Israel’s deteriorating image in Europe and the United States, and its growing religiosity. “I can’t travel abroad without feeling embarrassed,” one woman told me.

The right fears the opposite — that Israel is too deferential to world powers, and that the judiciary blocks the Knesset from imposing religious and nationalist legislation. “The State Department is breathing down our necks,” a man complained at a Jerusalem event.

Is Israel Jewish, democratic, or both? Is the Palestinian minority equal to the Jewish majority, or is it a dangerous fifth column? Should Israel patch up its relations with the West, or go it alone?

Netanyahu cannot answer these questions; indeed, he doesn’t even try. He has barely even run a campaign, appearing only with pre-selected audiences of sympathetic Likud activists. He speaks only about Iran and security matters.

“The debate has gained a new feature, which I would say is universal values, the way Israel is connected to the world,” said Tamar Hermann, the polling director at the Israel Democracy Institute. “Is it important for Israel to be part of the democratic, liberal world? Or should it look for its identity in Jewish morality? It’s not about specific issues, but about which kind of society we want to see.”

* * *

It was an unseasonably warm spring evening in Tel Aviv, an hour after Shabbat, when the anti-Netanyahu protesters began streaming into Rabin Square. The cafes and restaurants along the fashionable Rothschild Boulevard were overflowing. Further down the road, in stark contrast, a few dozen Israelis camped in the median, trying to recreate the tent city that became the nucleus of the 2011 protests over the high cost of living.

The March 7 rally would be the city’s largest political demonstration in four years. The keynote speaker was Meir Dagan, a former Mossad chief turnedsavage critic of the prime minister. He seemed out of place amidst a sea of flags for the dovish Meretz Party; former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, after all, once said that the spy chief’s specialty was “separating an Arab from his head.”

Today, however, Dagan sounded like a man of the left. He warned the crowd that Israel will become an apartheid state if it does not reach an agreement with the Palestinians, choking back tears as he spoke.

“Israel is surrounded by enemies,” he said. “Our enemies do not scare me; I’m worried about our leadership. The crisis we are experiencing today is the worst I can remember since the founding of the state.”

In the diaspora, and what remains of Israel’s old left, there is a sense that Tuesday’s vote offers Israel a last chance to salvage the two-state solution. That might be true: Hermann has long conducted a monthly survey called the “Peace Index,” which found in late December that 56 percent of Israeli Jews “strongly” or “moderately” in favor of negotiations with the Palestinians. Ten years earlier, it was 75 percent. Meanwhile, only 30 percent of the Jewish public believes that negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians will lead to peace in the coming years – a figure that has dropped from 46 percent a decade ago.

However, it’s by no means clear that Herzog’s Zionist Union can offer an alternate vision for how Israel should grapple with the Palestinian issue, its Arab neighbors, or Iran. While the Zionist Union has promised to renew negotiations with the Palestinians — a contrast with Netanyahu, whorecently disavowed his own 2009 speech endorsing the two-state solution — it’s not as if Herzog has offered a clear path to reach a two-state solution. His nebulous peace plan envisions at least five years of talks, he vowed that Jerusalem “must remain united as Israel’s capital,” and promised not to concede the Jordan Valley. The differences, as journalist Barak Ravid wrote in a recent column for Ha’aretz, are more style than substance.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-29