The Elections in Israel 2015
eBook - ePub

The Elections in Israel 2015

Michal Shamir, Gideon Rahat, Michal Shamir, Gideon Rahat

Share book
  1. 280 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Elections in Israel 2015

Michal Shamir, Gideon Rahat, Michal Shamir, Gideon Rahat

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

The newest volume in the Elections in Israel series focuses on the twentieth Knesset elections held in March 2015 following the collapse of the third Netanyahu government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's main opposition party, the Zionist Camp, ran a negative personalized election campaign, assuming that Israelis had grown tired of him. Netanyahu, however, achieved a surprising and dramatic victory by enhancing and radicalizing the same identity politics strategies that helped him win in 1996.

The Elections in Israel 2015 dissects these and other campaigns, from the perspective of the voters, the media and opinion polls, the political parties, and electoral competition. Several contributors delve into the Left and Arab fear mongering Likud campaign, which produced strategic identity voting. Other contributions analyze in-depth the Israeli party and electoral systems, highlighting the exceptional decline of the mainstream parties and the adoption of a higher electoral threshold. Providing a close analysis of electoral competition, legitimacy struggles, stability and change in the voting behavior of various groups, partisanship, personalization and political polarization, this volume is a crucial record of Israeli political history.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is The Elections in Israel 2015 an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access The Elections in Israel 2015 by Michal Shamir, Gideon Rahat, Michal Shamir, Gideon Rahat in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Política y relaciones internacionales & Políticas de Oriente Medio. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

1
Introduction

Michal Shamir and Gideon Rahat
The elections for the twentieth Knesset were held on March 17, 2015, just over two years since the nineteenth Knesset was elected and about two years and eight months before its term was up. The collapse of the third Netanyahu government (Israel’s thirty-third government) was rapid and hard to decipher. One of the most experienced and astute pundits of Israeli politics, Nahum Barnea, wrote a column on the government’s downfall entitled: “They committed suicide” (Barnea 2014). The election campaign began with a lack of clarity about why the elections had been moved up. During the campaign, many of the politicians, journalists, commentators, and activists thought of the elections in terms of the 1999 elections, when Ehud Barak defeated Benjamin Netanyahu after his first term as prime minister. Indeed, the Zionist Camp ran a negative election campaign focused on “Bibi,” assuming that, like then, many in the political community and general public had grown sick and tired of him.1 However, the 2015 elections were ultimately most similar to the 1996 elections. Benjamin Netanyahu, an incumbent prime minister fighting for reelection in 2015, achieved victory by enhancing and radicalizing the same approach of identity politics that helped him challenge Prime Minister Peres and win in 1996.
The political cleavage of collective identity, on which Israeli politics has centered since the 1977 realignment,2 has absorbed other identities and dimensions, and its expressions in the Likud’s campaign became blatant and inciting. The left and the leftists were connected again and again with the Arabs, including both the Arabs “on the outside” (the Palestinians and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria [ISIS], in particular) and the Arabs “on the inside” (citizens of Israel, especially their political representatives), projecting a threat from them. They were juxtaposed with a Jewish identity group and political identification with the right. Unlike Chabad’s campaign slogan “Netanyahu is good for the Jews” in 1996, or the whispers in Rabbi Kaduri’s ear in 1997 by Netanyahu (then prime minister) that “the leftists have forgotten what it means to be Jews,” the statements in 2015 were public and circulated rapidly on the Internet, came from Netanyahu’s own mouth, and explicitly connected the left and the Arabs with an emphasis on “otherness” and the threat from “the other.”3 A participant in the 2015 Israel National Election Study (INES) clearly expressed this attitude in his response to an open question on the meaning of the terms right and left: “Right is Right, and Left is Arabs.”4
In the 2015 elections, Netanyahu was the primary instigator of the negative and inflammatory structuring of the cleavage of collective identity in the election campaign. This sort of discourse was documented during Operation Protective Edge in the summer of 2014 (Lev-On 2016) and remained on the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary agenda and in public discourse after the 2015 elections—especially on social networks, but not only there. This was the focus of the 2015 elections, and many of the chapters in this collection address this from various perspectives: the voters (Chapter 7), the media and the opinion polls (Chapters 9 and 10), and the parties and the competition in the elections (Chapters 4 and 5). In addition to the behavioral and political communication aspects, the collection analyzes the elections and the party system in Israel from the institutional perspective. Here too, one can identify clear signs of this discourse in the politics of the change in the legal electoral threshold and its impact on Arab representation (Chapter 3).

The Background for the Elections

The third Netanyahu government began its term on March 18, 2013, slightly less than two months after the elections. The coalition makeup was imposed on Netanyahu by the unexpected alliance of “the brothers” forged by Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett, the respective leaders of the new Yesh Atid party and the renewed Jewish Home party. The sixty-eight-member coalition was led by Likud–Beiteinu, a partnership between the Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu parties (thirty-one seats), and included the right-wing Jewish Home party (twelve seats) and two centrist parties—Yesh Atid (nineteen seats) and Hatnua (six seats). The coalition, whose components held very different views on foreign affairs and matters of state and religion, focused on economic and social concerns, seemingly in response to the social–economic protest of the summer of 2011.
At first, it appeared that the government, which was formed in the name of the “new politics” as opposed to the rules of the “old politics,” was stable. In March 2014, the coalition was able to pass three important laws in a sort of “package deal” among its key partners (This later turned out to be the coalition’s first and last significant joint effort). The first law, known as the “Governance Law,” set a maximum number of nineteen ministers (including the prime minister) and four deputy ministers; it adopted a full constructive vote of no-confidence mechanism that requires presentation of an alternative government supported by at least sixty-one Members of Knesset (MKs) as a condition for toppling and replacing the government; and it raised the legal electoral threshold from 2 percent to 3.25 percent. The influence of the increased threshold was apparent at the 2015 elections: on the one hand, it blocked the extreme-right Yachad party from entering the Knesset; on the other hand, it was a catalyst for the formation of the Joint List by the four main parties in the Arab sector, which ultimately increased Arab representation in the Knesset. Thus, it apparently boomeranged on some of its proponents. In addition, as explained in Chapter 3, the discussion on the electoral threshold was superficial and artificially detached from other components of the electoral system.
The second law, the “Equality in Burden Law,” was Yair Lapid’s flagship issue in the election campaign. It provided more equality in army conscription of ultra-Orthodox Jews and was adopted despite bitter opposition from the ultra-Orthodox parties and public. This legislation would be the first to be gutted in the coalition talks between the Likud and the ultra-Orthodox parties following the 2015 elections. The third law, Basic Law: Referendum, sponsored by the Jewish Home party, set another obstacle in the path of a possible territorial compromise as part of a future peace agreement. It states that any concession of territory in which Israeli law, jurisdiction, and administration were applied (i.e., the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem) would require approval in a referendum unless supported by eighty MKs (two-thirds of the Knesset).
Netanyahu managed to maneuver between the hawks and doves in his government, while conducting negotiations with the Palestinians as well as after the collapse of these talks and the deterioration in security in the summer of 2014. Following the abduction of three teenagers in Gush Etzion, Israel initiated Operation Shuvu Achim [literally: Return, Brothers] in the West Bank, which rolled into Operation Protective Edge in Gaza. As Moran Azulay wrote:
Nearly every substantial subject that came before [the coalition] drew fire from both sides of the divide. The role of the opposition in the Knesset was filled by the coalition itself: It voiced the most scathing criticism, blocked the legislative initiatives of its members, and stymied important reforms to settle personal accounts. As the days passed, the crises widened and distrust among the coalition partners grew. The proposed Nationality Law raised considerable commotion, and was followed by disagreements over budget issues, the Arrangements Law and, in particular, the Zero VAT Law – which initially won the prime minister’s support, but Netanyahu reneged just before completion of the legislation … (2014).
There was also a bill intended to prevent the free distribution of Israel Hayom, a freely distributed pro-Netanyahu daily owned by his patron Sheldon Adelson. The prime minister fiercely opposed the bill, but it was approved in a preliminary reading in November 2014, despite expectations that the coalition would bury the bill. Some claim that this was the catalyst for Netanyahu’s decision to call for early elections.5
On December 1, Netanyahu fired the two center party leaders in his cabinet, Finance Minister Yair Lapid and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni. A week later, a huge majority of ninety-three MKs voted to dissolve the nineteenth Knesset, with none opposed. Azulay wrote: “It is one of the only election campaigns whose rationale and timing cannot be explained by any of the coalition members” (2014). Nahum Barnea summarized: “They [the government] committed suicide. It was not an ideological dispute that killed it, nor an extraordinary fiasco or popular protest. It died because of mutual loathing, because of the prime minister’s failure to function, because of a loss of direction” (2014). The government that was born with great fanfare—“violating” the convention of creating a closed coalition (in terms of the primary ideological cleavage on security and foreign affairs) and ignoring a cardinal rule of Israeli politics (“the ultra-Orthodox are always inside”)—died an early death. A government that wanted to take pride in advancing reforms to stabilize the system of government never tasted the fruits of enhanced stability.

The Election Campaign

The 2013 election campaign began with the formation of a joint list of Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu. In 2015, a similar significant development at the start of the campaign was the announcement by the leaders of Labor and Hatnua, Isaac (Bougie) Herzog and Tzipi Livni that they would run together in a joint list called the Zionist Camp, with a rotation in prime ministership. The rotation formula drew considerable criticism and, less than twenty-four hours before the elections, Livni announced that she would not insist on the rotation with Herzog if this proved to be an obstacle to form a government under his leadership. The creation of Zionist Camp generated a dynamic of competition between the two large lists (Likud and Zionist Camp) and an incentive to vote for them, based on the notion—which these parties encouraged, though incorrect from a constitutional perspective—that the largest party would be asked to form a government. Thus, unlike the 2013 elections (Rahat and Hazan 2013), the large parties did not lose votes to smaller ones ...

Table of contents