This is Dr.Manfred Gerstenfeld’s latest article on the election campaign in Israel. It is the last one before the elections.

ONE MORE WEEK TO GO: THE CAMPAIGN HEATS UP

Manfred Gerstenfeld

Throughout the previous weeks of the election campaign, Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Likud have been on the receiving end of much criticism, most recently with “Bottlegate”, the State Comptroller Office’s report on it, and far more importantly, the State Comptroller Office’s report on the housing crisis. These issues dominated much of the anti-Netanyahu agenda. Over the past week, Netanyahu succeeded in taking back part of the election agenda through his speeches at AIPAC and the US Congress.

Netanyahu’s speech to Congress made a sizeable impact in the United States. It placed more scrutiny on the Obama administration’s handling of the Iran nuclear issue. Whether or not all of this has made a significant impact on Israeli voters remains unclear.

The election messages have now become more focused and concise, due in part to the television campaigns. The Likud central message is “It is either us, or them”. This slogan emphasizes that the choice of prime minister is between Netanyahu and Herzog/Livni. Some Likud advertisements show a picture of Herzog morphing into one of Livni. It assumes that most people see Herzog as more popular than Livni, who has frequently shifted party allegiance. It stresses the fact that Livni will replace Herzog as prime minister after two years, if the Zionist Union wins the elections. The Zionist Union’s central message is that Netanyahu has failed and thus should go home.

A crucial issue is which candidate for prime minister the party leaders will support when they are called in after the elections by President Rivlin. Shas leader Aryeh Deri stated that his party will support Netanyahu, though it has not excluded the possibility of entering a coalition led by Herzog.¹ Shas has also repeated that it will not enter a coalition with Lapid’s Yesh Atid.

Lapid has stated that he will not join a government if the law requiring mandatory army service of the ultra-Orthodox population will be repealed. This makes the creation of a Zionist Union-led coalition even more difficult. This is the more so as the Joint Arab List has stated that it will not join any government whatsoever. Their spokesperson Raja Zaatry declared that, “We cannot be part of a government that still occupies our people.” He added that if, from the outside, the Joint Arab list can prevent Netanyahu from forming a government, they may do so.²

Another important issue is the agreements between various parties concerning surplus votes. Once all Knesset seats, for which there are the required number of votes, have been allotted, there remain a certain number of votes which are insufficient to have parties qualify for an additional seat. These surplus votes are then pooled with those of the party’s partner in the surplus votes agreement. This may give one of the two parties concerned enough votes for an additional seat.

Earlier in the campaign, the Zionist Union and Meretz had concluded such a pooling agreement. Annulling this agreement would allow Meretz to enter into a similar agreement with the Joint Arab List. It would then enable the Zionist Union to conclude such an agreement with Yesh Atid, which doesn’t have a pooling partner. However, the Arab List refused this proposal.³ One result of this bargaining was that Yesh Atid, which claims to be centrist, is now increasingly seen as belonging to the left.

Even more than in previous weeks, the key issue of the campaign seems to be Netanyahu remaining the prime minister. Yet that is not totally clear, because Herzog and Livni have refused to explicitly exclude the possibility of the Zionist Union being part of a Netanyahu-led government. Moshe Kahlon, leader of Koolanu, has consistently refused to say whom his party will endorse as Prime Minister.⁴ That leaves the Joint Arab List and Meretz as the two parties that have declared that they will not support Netanyahu in any case.

Yediot Achronot, Israel’s second-largest daily, and its website, Ynet, have sharply attacked Netanyahu throughout the campaign. They now published a document, dated August 2013, which states that Netanyahu had agreed to make substantial territorial concessions to the Palestinians.⁵ The Likud had a confusing variety of rebuttals, one of them, coming from the Prime Minister’s Office, stating that, “Prime Minister Netanyahu has made clear for years that given the current conditions in the Middle East, any territory that is given will be seized by the radical Islam just like what happened Gaza and in southern Lebanon.”⁶

A mass rally against the re-election of Netanyahu as prime minister was held on the evening of March 7^th in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, with some 35,000 people in attendance. The main speaker was former Mossad chief Meir Dagan, who has been criticizing Netanyahu for years. Dagan said that Israel faces its worst crisis ever under Netanyahu’s leadership.⁷

An effort was also made to revive the social protests of 2011. Tents were pitched once again on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, but only drew limited attention.⁸ After some days the Tel Aviv municipality had the tents removed.⁹

In the meantime, polls keep indicating that the Likud is slightly behind the Zionist Union, yet none of them show the Zionist Union gaining more than 24 seats. The division between the blocs remains more or less the same. Likud, Bayit Yehudi and Israel Beitenu have close to 40 seats, to which one can add at least 3 more seats if Yishai’s Yahad list passes the threshold. Yesh Atid’s 19 seats in the 19^th Knesset are seemingly divided between that party and Kahlon’s Koolanu, which together have about 20 seats in the polls. The Zionist Union and Meretz together may reach 30 seats, a gain of about 3. The two ultra-Orthodox parties currently have 18 seats, which in the polls are now divided between the three ultra-Orthodox parties. The Joint Arab List has 12 seats in most polls, giving them a gain of 1 seat.

All of this makes one wonder what these elections are about, if there is such little movement between the blocs. As there are still many voters who remain undecided, this lack of movement may change substantially when the election results are in.