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the communists are coming!

Three things to watch in the municipal election this Tuesday:

1. Tel Aviv: Mayor Ron Huldai is running for a third term after 10 years in office, backed by both Kadima and Labor parties. On the previous election Huldai won in a landslide without really campaigning, but public opinion of him has changed in the last two years. Huldai has failed to address the problem of raising rent and further worsened the situation for himsels by declaring that this was a normal result of the free market. Tel Aviv during his time in office became so attractive, he claimed, that everyone wanted to live in it. Huldai, a former pilot for the Air Force, who became a national figure as the successful principal of one of the city's most prestigious high schools, has also made some unpopular decisions, such as taking down the legendary Osishkin basketball arena, home of Hapoel Tel Aviv, the second most popular team in the city.

   His surprising challenger is MK Dov Khenin of Hadash, the radical left wing party. Khenin has built an Obama-like coalition of representatives from the poor neighborhoods in the south of the city, and the young students, journalists and bohemian crowd from the city center. Khenin is the grandson of an important Chabad rabbi, and was the former chairman of the “Environment and Life” organization, which amalgamates most of the environmental organizations in Israel.

The polls gave Huldai a 20 plus points advantage just a month ago, but the race has tightened since and the margin is considered to be in the high single digit area. Still, even the slight chance that a communist like Khenin will lead Israel's cultural and financial capital is surprising, to say the least, considering the current political atmosphere.

My prediction: Huldai, by a margin of 15 points or more.

2. Jerusalem: Israel's bankrupt capital presents its next mayor with too many challenges: the population is poor, most of the secular elite and business people have long fled the city, and the Palestinians on the east side are getting more and more hostile (it's no surprise: Israel has made everything in its power to make their lives miserable). Still, being the mayor of one of the worlds most holly and well known cities carries some prestige; so three men are actually running for the post.

   Reb Uri Lupoliansky, the city's first Hasidic mayor, is not running for re-election. The front runner in the polls is the secular right-wing leaning businessman Nir Barkat, who had until recently a 15 points advantage over ultra-orthodox MK Meir Porush. It was supposed to be an easy one for Barkat, since some important rabbis have opposed Porush's candidacy publicly. But Barkat has alienated the few liberal seculars left in the city with his anti Arab rhetoric, and Porush has gained some momentum. The eccentric millionaire Arkady Gaidamak is also running, and might hurt Barkat even further with the secular vote.

   My prediction: Porush will turn out to be the surprise of this election, winning the capitol with a narrow margin.

3. The Green Party: The municipal election in Israel is a split vote: you cast one vote for the mayor and another for a party to be elected for the city council. The ecological ideology, once totally foreign to Israeli discourse, has continuously been gaining ground, and the Greens are now expected to get 2-3 MK for the first time in the general election. Could the Green Party be “the default vote” for the city council this Tuesday for those interested only in the race for the mayoral position?

   My prediction: The Greens will have a good day, especially on the northern suburbs of Tel Aviv (though not in Tel Aviv itself, where Khenin's party, “city for all of us” – the name doesn't sound better in Hebrew – will carry most of the ecological vote). It will be also interesting to watch Avigdor Liberman's “Israel Beitenu” performance tomorrow. The party chose to go with a national campaign, presenting only Liberman's picture and non of the municipal candidates. I think Liberman might perform well in the mixed cities.

   As for myself, I will vote for Dov Khenin for mayor of Tel Aviv and Meretz for city council.

Rabin Square

On my way back home from a friend's house, I passed by Rabin square during the annual rally commemorating PM Yitzhak Rabin. Both Ehud Barak and Tzipi Livni spoke on stage, and were equally unimpressive. I don't think I can name a single Israeli politician who can give a decent speech (some say Menachem Begin could, but that was before my time).

There were some 50,000 people there, and the atmosphere was as gloomy as ever. These are the remains of “the Peace Camp”, once a real power in the political arena and now a nostalgic movement which hangs on to the memory of its dead leader. The left is going to crash in the next election, and the only active political force advocating negotiation with Israel's neighbors is Kadima – a party formed mostly by Likud members. If the historical role of the left was to get Israel to leave the occupied territories on its own will, it failed to fulfill it. Israel has left Gaza and Lebanon, and will leave the West Bank, due to terrorism and international pressure. We lost the debate.

Campaign to the Right, Rule to the Left

The right wing smells blood. While the left and center parties are sitting still, wondering what will be the main issue of the upcoming general election (the economy? The peace process? government corruption?) on the right, new parties are being born and retired politicians along with their retired ideas are coming back from the cold, as if the year was 1998. The reason is simple: everybody reads the polls - predicting more than 30 MKs to the Likud and between 60 to 70 MKs to the right block - and everyone wants in.

In the Likud the big news are the return of Bennie Begin (son of the late PM Menachem Begin) who left the Netanyahu government angrily in 1997, in account of the Hebron accord. Begin said some harsh things about Netanyahu (“If I had to chose who to believe, Bibi or [MK Ahmed] Tibi, I'd have no reason to prefer the former”), but the electoral promise of this election presented him with an opportunity even he couldn't resist. Begin is an asset to the Likud, no doubt. He's remembered as a “clean” and honest politician, untainted by the Sharon-Olmert politics of recent years. However, his radical hawkish views might present Netanyahu with a problem later on.

Another new member of the Likud is Brigadier General Miri Regev, former spokeswoman of the IDF. The public opinion on her is mixed at best, because Regev is identified with the failure of the second Lebanon war. Another retired Brigadier General who expressed his will to join the Likud is MK Effi Eitam, who was elected to the Knesset as part of the radical Ihud Leumi Party. Eitam might bring Netanyahu a few votes from the right, but he also presents him with a problem – a Likud with Eitam will make it easier on Labor and Kadima to portray it as an extreme Right-wing party, making it lose ground in the center of the political map. This problem might be solved by a possible endorsement by Yuval Rabin, which was reported in the Israeli media this week. Yuval Rabin is the son of the late PM and hero of “the peace camp” Itzhak Rabin, and the perfect candidate to clear Netanyahu of any radical image.

Altogether, I believe Netanyahu has learned the lesson of his miserable first term in the prime minister office. He knows that in Israel you have to campaign to the right and rule to the left. Right-wing coalitions can't survive: the minute the PM starts any sort of peace talks, his partners will bring him down. It happened to Yitzhak Shamir, to Ariel Sharon (who lost control over his own Likud party) and to Netanyahu himself. This time, It is more than likly that Netanyahu will try to build a coalition with Kadima and even Labor. But first he has to win the election.

Israel Beitenu is the other emerging power on the Right. Its leader, Avigdor Liberman, promotes what looks like the only solution the Right has to offer to the Palestinian problem: he is willing to accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank on one condition – an exchange of territories that will keep the big settlements under Israeli regime, while including in the Palestinian state a few Arab cities which are currently within the Israeli borders. Liberman is a dangerous man: his ideas harvest hatred between Jews and Arabs. He makes many Israelis delegitimize the Arab-Israeli citizens and their rights. He also has the habit of making insulting remarks and even threats towards Arab leaders in the region. With the current nationalistic and even racist atmosphere in Israel, he is getting stronger and I believe he can achieve up to 15 MKs in the next Knesset. It will be hard for him to go beyond that: he is a Russian immigrant, and racism works in many ways.

The rise of Liberman should also worry the Ihud Leumi party (the name means “national unity” in Hebrew). Ihud Leumi was a coalition of four extreme Right wing, mostly religious, parties: Mafdal (the national religious front), Tkuma, Moledet and a party of former Mafdal members. All four have decided last week to unite completely. Currently they are searching for a new name, and a national figure to lead them after Effi Eitam had left them (they weren't too happy with him anyway). The fact that another MK has left and formed his own party – MK Arie Eldad – won't make life easier on them either. “The ideological Right” - as all these movements are sometimes referred to – is experiencing problems gaining ground with mainstream secular voters. I see it as part of the crisis in the religious right and the settlement movement; Maybe I'll elaborate on this issue in the future.

As for the two Hasidic parties on the Right block – Shas and Yahadut Hatorah - nothing major is happening with them lately. Shas is running a bit low in the polls (around 10 MKs), and from what I gather, they are having problems with the secular Sepharadic public who used to vote for them in great numbers. But as I wrote before, Shas always under performs in the polls.

Update: Yuval Rabin was on “Meet the Press” on channel 2 today, just hours before the annual memorial service commemorating his father at Rabin square. He didn't deny the reports on him considering to endors Netanyahu, but avoided declaring any final decision. When asked how could he possibly support the man who played such a major role in spreading hate against his father and creating the atmosphere that led to his murder, Rabin answered that “things have changed”. Indeed they have.

Update #2: Dan Meridor, a highly popular former MK and minister for the Likud, who left the party because of differences with Netanyahu, announced his return to the Likud. Things are looking good for Bibi.

An Obama Effect?

Most Israelis were just waking up when John McCain conceded and Barack Obama was officially declared the next president of the United States. On Monday you could still find articles predicting [in Hebrew] that in the end “The Real America” will have the last word and McCain will win. On election day there was an ugly article on Ynet by Naomi Ragan, the right-wing religious novelist, who quoted most of the rumors about Obama as if they were facts (for example: Obama's campaign was funded mostly by rich Arabs, some of them from Gaza). Reading this article again this morning was particularly fun.

As for myself, I guessed a 318-220 victory for Obama and 52-48 on popular vote, which was not that far-off.

We will have to wait for tomorrow's papers to see what the pundits have to say about the outcomes effect on Israel and the middle east. Meanwhile, here are some of my thoughts.

The US support of Israel– both diplomatically and financially –will remain the same. Assuming Israel will continue asking the US for permission to use military force (like it probably did before the attack on the nuclear facility in Syria) we will not see major change in security issues. The million dollar question is what will happen if Israel wishes to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities. My guess is that for as long as the US is in Iraq, nobody in Washington will care to open a third front (this goes for W as well on his two remaining months in the White House).

So what difference does the presidential election make? Well, the US has direct influence on two key issues here: the peace negotiations and the settlements, especially those around Jerusalem.

In his eight years in office, George W. Bush didn't do much to reignite the peace process. Instead, he supported unilateral steps taken by Israel, such as reoccupying the West Bank cities and the withdrawal from Gaza. The result was an increase in the power of all extremist groups in the region, most of all the Hamas. Lately, there have been signs of a change in policy, the result of Condoleezza Rice's efforts. As I wrote before, there is a learning period for any new administration, so it will take some time before we can evaluate if there is a real change in policy.

During this time, Israel will build settlements. We have been doing it for more then 40 years, regardless of the identity of the guy in the oval office – or in the PM office in Jerusalem for that matter.

All settlements are harmful, but some are worst than others. Even the neo-cons and neo-Zionists around Bush didn't allow Israel to build in the area called E1, east of Jerusalem. The Israeli plan is to build there a Jewish neighborhood, an industrail park and even a few hotels, that will eventually be part of Jerusalem, thus diminishing the last option to divide the city into Israeli and Palestinian capitals. And if Bush didn't allow it, nobody else will. Hopefully, Obama's people will also keep a closer eye on other construction project in the West Bank, which only serve to to prevent the two states solution.

Finally, there has been some talk on the influence of an Obama victory on Israeli politics, and especially on the results of the general election in February. Some people, both here [Hebrew] and in the US, think that the “Change” massage coming from America will help those candidates who are perceived as “fresh” (aka Tzipi Livni). It has also been speculated that Netanyahu will be considered as someone who will find it harder to deal with the new president, given his hawkish stands. However, one might also claim that some voters will move to the right, in hope of a government that will stand up to American and international pressure towards concessions. But most importantly - in order to have an Obama-like spirit of change, you must have an Obama-like candidate. We don't.