Israeli politicians were secretly delighted by the timing of the fifth election in four years.
Not only did they get two full weeks of summer holiday once the candidates’ lists were filed on 15 August with the Central Election Commission, but then came the High Holidays. With the main chagim stuck in midweek this year they got plenty of days off during the period when they would normally have been expected to be campaigning like mad.
Imagine their chagrin when this week, as they were expecting to have a last dose of me-time over Succot before getting back after Simchat Torah for one last two-week dash of electioneering, they got called in to study the new gas-field treaty with Lebanon.
Michel Aoun GettyImages-1133770112
Michael Aoun
For mere Knesset backbenchers, who won’t have to vote on it, it’s less of an issue. They can fall back on the party line, for or against depending whether they’re in the outgoing coalition or opposition. But ministers are actually expected to study the damn thing.
“All these dense pages of maritime law and maps with lines in the sea,” grumbled one minister this week as the final agreement was released to them.
“Only Yoaz Hendel [the communications minister who is a former officer in the Naval Commando unit] can make head or tail of it.” The rush to get the agreement passed isn’t just because of the upcoming election, and not only so that the energy company can start pumping gas from the Karish platform. There’s the Lebanese side as well.
Under Lebanese law the agreement needs to be signed by the president. Michel Aoun’s six-year term finishes at the end of this month, and the Lebanese parliament, elected back in May, has so far failed to form a new government, let alone agree on a new president, so there really is no time to lose.
Yoaz Hendel
Yoaz Hendel
“This is creating very bad optics for us,” says one senior government adviser. “It makes it look as if we’re trying to push through a deal with Lebanon on the eve of the election to avoid public scrutiny. While the truth is we would much prefer to have time to explain why this is a good deal for Israel.”
In a television address on Tuesday night, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah crowed that his movement’s tough position had got Lebanon all its demands while the Israelis have been embarrassed.
Normally Israel’s government would have been bothered by Hezbollah’s claims of victory but right now they’re more concerned over the way the Leader of the Opposition, Benjamin Netanyahu, is using the agreement as yet another opportunity to bash them for being “weak and inexperienced.”
But if the latest poll is anything to go by, they don’t have too much to worry about. No less than 38 percent of right-wingers responded that they simply don’t know enough about the deal to either support or oppose it. It seems that voters are on still on holiday as well.
Swinging
Many of those voters have of course spent a large part of the last few weeks in shul. Politics has never been sacrosanct in Israeli synagogues but in recent years they have become one of the last remaining non-virtual electoral battlefields, as most campaigning has gone online.
An entire media industry has sprung up printing and distributing aloney bet Knesset — shul pamphlets — dumped in big piles in the synagogue doorways on Friday afternoons.
Originally and ostensibly they are meant to provide some light spiritual reading for those who find it difficult to concentrate throughout the entire prayer- and Torah-reading, but it’s becoming more difficult to locate the short homilies on the weekly portion, squashed between the campaign ads and appeals by party leaders.
These leaflets are targeting one of the most critical constituencies in the Israeli electorate. With the polls near-static throughout the campaign and nearly identical to the previous four elections, the pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs remaining in a dead heat, the holy grail of the parties is the mythical swing voter, if any still exist.
There is one potential source of such voters.
According to a poll commissioned by the Israel Democracy Institute, the sector of the Israeli population with the highest proportion of undecided voters is the Dati-Leumi, or national-religious community — those sitting in shul and reading the alonim. 27 percent of them, at least two Knesset seats’ worth, still don’t know which party they’ll be choosing on 1 November and from all anecdotal evidence the uncertainty is mainly on the liberal, modern Orthodox end of the spectrum.
That’s urban and cosmopolitan religious people, with above-average income and education, who don’t like making too much of a fuss of their ideology and devoutness.
These are voters who are mainly right-wing leaning, but not that radical, and who are relatively liberal on religions affairs.
And for them, there isn’t a clear option. Religious Zionism’s leader Bezalel Smotrich is too extreme for them both politically and religiously, and certainly disqualified by his alliance with Jewish supremacist Itamar Ben Gvir.
They’re uncomfortable with Likud, partly because of Mr Netanyahu, partly because of how the party has become his personal platform. Some would have voted for the rejuvenated Jewish Home list, led now by Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked, and with the popular Givat Shmuel mayor Yossi Brodny in second place, but in all the polls they’re failing to cross the electoral threshold, so why waste votes?
Benny Gantz’s National Unity list is making a strong play for these voters, with four national-religious candidates in its top ten spots, including the reformist former Religious Affairs Minister Matan Kahana.
But some see Mr Gantz as being too much to the left, and are of course aware that a vote for him is a vote for the centre-left bloc. Can they go there?
The Dati-Leumi vote (some are calling it the Givat Shmuel vote, after the largely religious middle-class suburb of Tel Aviv where many such voters live) isn’t just the most undecided when it comes to party vote; it also contains within it the potential “switchers” — those who could conceivably vote for either parties of the two blocs.
In an election which is likely to be decided by one or two seats, they’re the hottest property right now.
Which is why Mr Netanyahu, whose campaign strategy is largely focused on boosting turnout in Likud’s traditional base, has also been making forays into this territory, holding long sessions in main shuls in Givat Shmuel, Petach Tikva and Modiin. As has Mr Gantz.
“It’s not like any previous election,” says a candidate in one of the parties targeting this vote. “We’re talking about a very politically aware and literate community, where people usually know who they’re voting for long in advance, and this time we’re hearing from so many of them that they don’t feel they have a party to vote for.”
