BIBI FOREVER

I’m waiting for the dust to settle, in order to better understand how it happened, and what could possibly happen now.

Yes, I am referring to the recent Knesset elections. In the meantime, the winners (Bibi & Co) are celebrating and the losers (mainly Meretz and Labour) are playing the blame-game accusing Lapid for their misfortune and crying Gevalt/Gevald in anguish.

Foreign newsoutlets were late in reacting to Israel’s unforeseen election results. Anshel Pfeffer a British-born Israeli journalist is senior correspondent and columnist for Haaretz and Israel correspondent for The Economist. He wrote the following post-election appraisal published in The Spectator-

“If the centre-left and Arabs hadn’t split into eight separate squabbling lists of candidates, then the outcome would probably have been yet another tie, leaving incumbent prime minister Yair Lapid in office, at least until election number six.  

Netanyahu on the other hand, kept his bloc tight, exerting maximum pressure on the various religious and far-right parties to merge their lists. The Netanyahu camp was a four-fingered fist that overcame their differences to coordinate campaigning and ferret out every last stay-at-home voter. The election rallies were sparsely attended, but when it mattered on Tuesday, they came out and voted. In fact, the turnout was the highest in this five-election cycle.  

But Netanyahu’s majority comes with a major headache. To ensure no votes were left beneath the threshold, he cajoled all the fringe players, including the extremist Jewish Power (Otzma Yehudit) and homophobic Noam parties, into one joint list of candidates. It has turned out to be a brilliant tactic without which he probably would not have won. It also had an unintended consequence. He needs Ben-Gvir for a majority. He would also like support for changes to the legal system, perhaps removing the attorney-general in the hope of ending his corruption trial which has been trudging on for two years now.  

Netanyahu doesn’t have many options. He may try and entice some of his former opponents from the centre-left into a more balanced coalition, but they are unlikely to want to help him out. The expectation now is that Netanyahu will go ahead and form a coalition with the far-right and religious parties, but once he has passed a few legal reforms, he is likely to find a reason to break up the partnership and go for yet another election. He will be back in office and will hold his ground as interim prime minister. It won’t hold him back.  

Netanyahu is 73. This was the eleventh time he led Likud in an election. Once again, he has come back from political death to bury his opponents and he has more elections in him. This isn’t over.

A piece in The Guardian mentioned other problems Netanyahu will have to face, “The elevation of supremacists in Israeli politics will put a strain on the country’s global relationships. Most strikingly, the ascendance of the Religious Zionism party and Ben-Gvir will discomfort the Biden White House and test the US-Israel alliance. In September, Bob Menendez, the chairman of the Senate’s foreign relations committee, warned Netanyahu against working with them. As such, Ben-Gvir may earn the status of persona non grata, shunned by the US administration.

The latest election may also test the durability of the Abraham Accords, the agreements normalising relations between Israel, and the Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan. They have generated a boom in investment and trade. Israelis now freely travel to Dubai and Marrakesh. But Tel Aviv is not, and may never become, an Arab tourist destination, much the same way there are few travellers from Egypt and Jordan. In other words, the deal is more transactional than organic. Think government to government, not people to people.

In the run-up to the election, Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed, the UAE’s foreign minister, conveyed his concerns to Netanyahu about Religious Zionism and Ben-Gvir. The Palestinians may not be the top priority of the Gulf states, but they can elicit lip service.

I found an additional opinion piece in Honest Reporting “One of the reasons Israelis voted for Netanyahu was the frequency of Israel’s recent elections. So-called ‘stability voters’ made ending the political stalemate their top priority and voted for Netanyahu — even if they disliked him — because he had the best chance of forming a stable government.

The end of the political chaos in Israel and the potential formation of a government that could last more than a year takes away an argument for the critics of Israeli democracy, who used that point to mock the Jewish state even during its honeymoon with the media that is now over.” Their reporting albeit honest, is mostly guesswork, so take it  with a large pinch of salt.   

While the political analysts are busy burying Meretz. I’ll pause to reflect on the party’s fluctuating political fortunes. Let’s begin with its antecedent- Mapam. The party was formed in 1948 by a merger of the kibbutz-based Hashomer Hatzair Workers Party, the non-kibbutz-based Socialist League, and the left-Labour Zionist Ahdut HaAvoda Poale Zion Movement. The party was originally Marxist-Zionist in its outlook, and represented the left-wing Kibbutz Artzi movement.

In the elections for the first Knesset, Mapam won 19 seats   making it the second largest party after the mainstream Labour Zionist Mapai. In the 1951 elections Mapam dropped to 15 seats. Although it had been reduced to seven seats by the end of the second Knesset due to defections, the party gained  nine seats in the 1955 elections. In the 1959 elections the party retained its nine seats, and despite previous differences, Mapam was included in Ben-Gurion's coalition government.

In the 1965 elections Mapam lost a seat, dropping to eight mandates, but it managed to join the coalition government. In January 1969 the party formed an alliance with the Israeli Labour Party, which was named the Alignment. The Alignment went on to win the highest-ever number of seats in the 1969 elections (56 out of 120). Mapam briefly broke away from the Alignment during the eighth Knesset, but returned shortly after. The party then remained part of the Alignment until after the 1984 elections, when it broke away because of a dispute over Shimon Peres's decision to form a national unity government with Likud,

By that time the decline was clearly evident. In the 1988 elections Mapam won only three seats.

As a result of declining support, Mapam amalgamated with Ratz and Shinui to form Meretz, a new left-wing, social-democratic and pro-peace alliance, which became the third largest party in the Knesset in the 1992 elections. In 1997 the merger began to disintegrate resulting in a more ideologically homogenous, but smaller Meretz party. Had Meretz and Labour contested the elections with a joint list in the recent elections it would have survived, but don’t write it off. Like Lazarus it could still rise from the dead.

At this juncture I want to relate a personal encounter with Meretz. I joined Kibbutz Nirim, one of the Gaza periphery communities in 1961 shortly before the Knesset elections were held in August of that year. Along with many members of the kibbutz I canvassed in neighbouring communities for Mapam. Four years later I left Nirim and joined Kibbutz Ein Harod Ihud ( my wife’s kibbutz). In November 1965 Knesset elections were held again.  I hadn’t managed to register my change of address, so in order to vote I would have to go back to Nirim. Daunted by the thought of the long bus journey to Nirim, I opted to vote in spirit but not in body. I posted my ID card to my brother Harvey who was a member of Nirim at that time and asked him to vote for me.

Before I continue, I want to explain that Harvey and I were separated from our parents for several years during WW2 due to the Blitz and later bombings. The family was reunited at  the end of the war a few years before we emigrated to New Zealand.  The war years were an enduring bonding experience for the both of us.  Harvey died 28 years ago, he is still sorely missed by family and friends.  

The photo in my ID card was a bit blurry, my brother and I looked alike, so I was confident that the ruse would succeed.

It’s important to add that at that time all the members of Nirim voted for Mapam.

Knowing that, other parties didn’t bother to send observers to sit on the all-Mapam members elections committee. On election day my brother equipped with my ID card went to vote for me. At the polling booth, flashing a broad smile and winking at the same time he said “I’ve come to vote for Beni.” “You needn’t have bothered.” The election committee chairman said. ‘We have already voted for him.”

In a country where the prime minister-elect is facing an indictment on charges of bribery, corruption and breach of trust, my minor infraction has long since been nullified by the statute of limitations.

 

Have a good weekend.

 

Beni,                           4^th of November, 2022.