The year 5782 is a difficult one to sum up for Israel. What actually happened? It all felt a bit transitional, as if we had ended one period but hadn’t entirely entered a new one.
It’s easier to say what we didn’t have this year in Israel. After nearly two years of the pandemic, there were no lockdowns in 5782, though the Omicron variant raged throughout the country.
It was a rare year in which there was no election (though it did have the first three months of campaigning for next year’s election).
It was the first year in over a decade in which Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t prime minister, even though he has a good chance of making a comeback in 5783. In fact, Israel had two prime ministers this year, neither of whom were Mr Netanyahu.
There was a wave of Palestinian terror attacks and a short, sharp escalation by Islamic Jihad in Gaza, but not a full-blown war or Intifada. At least not yet.
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Mansour Abbas
Iran didn’t get a bomb, though it’s probably closer than ever to the nuclear threshold, and the United States did not rejoin the Iran Deal, even though it seemed on the brink of signing at a number of junctures.
On the economic front, the post-Covid revival continued with most financial indices healthy, despite an ominous rise in inflation. But Israel, thanks largely to its new reserves of natural gas, is not facing an energy crisis such as the one looming in Britain and the rest of Europe.
That is, of course, if the American-brokered agreement with Lebanon over the demarcation of the gas fields is indeed signed and Hezbollah doesn’t attack the offshore platforms.
It was an unremarkable year in many ways. But that makes it quite remarkable for Israel.
In fact, Israelis may well miss 5782 with the West Bank teetering on the brink of chaos as the Palestinian Authority loses control of major cities, with a global financial crisis which will certainly impact on Israel sooner rather than later and yet another election which is unlikely to yield political stability. But all that is still to come next year and, for now, we can at least be thankful for a year in which nothing too dramatic happened. Shana Tova.
Bussed in
And Shana Tova to an estimated 10,000 Breslav Chasidim who will be spending Rosh Hashanah by Rabbi Nahman’s tomb in Uman.
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Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid
It’s a far cry from the 50,000 who gathered there in the pre-pandemic years but it was still unimaginable just eight months earlier when Russia invaded Ukraine. This year the pilgrims have no direct flights to Kyiv or Odesa as Ukraine’s airspace remains closed to commercial flights. Instead they’re being bussed over the border from Poland or Moldova, undeterred by the Israeli government’s travel warnings, in overnight convoys.
The Israeli and Ukrainian governments initially intended to block the pilgrimage as they tried to do during the pandemic but since they largely failed to do so then, and as Uman, is in central Ukraine and hundreds of miles from the front line, they relented. Instead, Ukrainian civil and military officials are cooperating with the organisers and hope to show this is as an example of how they are winning the war and reopening to the world.
They may not be able to host the Eurovision in Kyiv (actually,
why not?) but at least they’ve got Rosh Hashanah.
Whither the Arabs?
One of the difficulties in working out how Israel’s Arab citizens intend to vote is that it’s nearly impossible to assess the size of each group.
“There are three circles of Arab-Israeli voters,” says Professor Amal Jamal of Tel Aviv University. “There’s the tribal voters who are either activists or relatives of activists in one of the four parties.
"Then there are those who have an ideological or religious affiliation with one of the parties. A more religious Muslim voter will lean towards Ra’am while secular and Christian left-wingers trend towards Hadash. And then are the instrumental voters. Those who want a party which can influence government policy.”
He continues: “As a political scientist, surveys are one of my tools. But polling isn’t that reliable with Arab voters. When they get a phone call from a pollster, they think there’s also a Shin Bet agent listening in.”
And then there’s the fourth circle — those who aren’t going to vote. According to recent surveys, a large majority — around two thirds of Arab-Israelis — want the parties representing them to join the next government. The same surveys indicate that a similar proportion, around 60 per cent, are going to stay home on election day. This would seem like a contradiction but it’s borne out in the best poll of all — the actual election results.
The Joint List, which was formed in 2015 by four Arab parties, is no more. Literally minutes before the deadline to file candidate lists with the Central Election Commission last Thursday, the three remaining parties (after Ra’am broke away last year with the intention of joining the coalition) failed to agree how to allocate the spots on the list and broke up.
If the results of the past six elections from 2013 to 2021 are anything to go by, that is a big mistake.
The four parties may have a hard time working together but their voters loved the Joint List.
In the three elections in which they all ran together Arab turnout averaged 62.5 per cent and they won between 13 and 15 seats. In the three elections in which they ran separately, the average turnout was 50.1 per cent and they won ten or 11 seats.
In other words, Arab voters want their representatives to have greater influence and even join the government but they value unity as well and will punish their politicians if they fight among themselves by not voting for any of them.
If that trend holds in this election as well, nationalist Balad is almost certain to drop beneath the threshold and Hadash and Ra’am will struggle to stay above. A diminished Arab vote means much greater chances for Benjamin Netanyahu’s bloc of parties to secure a winning a majority.
There is, however, one scenario in which the demise of the Joint List could work in favour of Mr Netanyahu’s rivals.
If the turnout is a bit higher than the current dismal predictions — not high enough to push Balad over the threshold but enough to revive the two other Arab parties so that they win a total of ten or 11 seats — then Mr Netanyahu is likely, once again, to miss out on his majority.
And in the absence of Balad which, of the four parties, is most adamantly opposed to any cooperation with any Israeli government, some form of confidence and supply agreement with Hadash, in support of a Lapid government, would be possible.
It would be a minority government that would find it difficult to survive much longer that the previous Bennett-Lapid government did, but it’s probably the only scenario, other than a stalemate and a sixth election, in which Mr Lapid remains prime minister.
