Yakhimovich admits that her stand cost Labor Party seats

972 blogger Israeli journalist Noam Sheizaf had a short item about Israeli Labor Party leader Shelli Yakhimovich telling party activists that her refusal to campaign on the Palestinian issue (or the diplomatic issue as she puts it) cost the party four seats in the January 22, 2013 election. She assigned these four as two to Meretz and two to Tzipi Livni's haTnua (the Movement) party. Why did she make this admission and is it true?

Two Likely Coalitions for Netanyahu

With the final results of the Israeli election to the 19th Knesset in  two possible coalition choices for Netanyahu appear likely.  The first would be a Center-Right coalition with Yesh Atid:

Likud Beitenu      31

Yesh Atid             19

Jewish Home       11

________________

Total                    61

Kadima with two seats could be added to provide a little safety margin. In this scenario, Netanyahu would agree to a draft of the ultra-Orthodox Haredim and Yesh Atid would go along with continued settlement. As Yesh Atid appears to put more emphasis on ending religious privilege and coercion and the ultra-Orthodox draft exemption than on achieving peace, this is possible. Certainly, if Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid is anything like his father, Tommy Lapid, leader of the Shinui party of the 1990s-2006, he is closer to the Likud when it comes to borders than he is to Labor. Here is an article from Foreign Affairs that indicates that on territorial issues Lapid is very compatible with Netanyahu.

The second coalition, would be more Centrist:

Likud Beitenu    31

Yesh Atid          19

Labor                15

--------------------------

Total                65

Under this scenario, there would be a religious draft, an end to subsidies to the ultra-Orthodox, and settlement construction would probably be defined by some formula or committee that would allow for "natural expansion" within settlements but not much in the way of new settlements outside of Jerusalem.  There would also probably not be any renewed peace talks with the Palestinian Authority. Labor leader Shelli Yakhimovich campaigned on socio-economic issues, so as long as there was a change in budget priorities towards helping out the secular poor it would probably be happy.

This Jerusalem Post article discusses various coalition possibilities and graphically illustrates four of them. And here Ben Birnbaum of The New Republic discusses the winners and losers of the latest Israeli election in terms both of parties and individuals.

The Center-Left lacks the sufficient Knesset votes to construct a stable coalition of its own without the Likud, even if it was inclined to include the Arabs--which they have not been willing to do in the past.

The Israeli elections and Israeli psyschology

Yesterday Americans for Peace Now, the support organization for Israel's mainstream peace movement, hosted a briefing phone call-in on the Israeli elections on Jan. 22 by retired Ha'Aretz senior diplomatic correspondent Akiva Eldar. A recording link can be obtained by going to the APN website (www.peacenow.org) or by emailing Sarah Sagan at ssagan@peacenow.org. Unfortunately there was very little analysis of the polling data or of the trends. Usually with these call-ins there is a mixed audience of very knowledgeable American Jews who follow both the American and Israeli media and either newcomers who just happened to see the link or freelance journalists who aren't up to speed on the beat. 

Eldar did mention that the discrepancy between the percentage of Israelis who claim to support a two-state solution and the election results in election after election can be easily explained by the tendency of Israelis to believe that they don't have a real partner and that the conflict is all the fault of the other side. But Israelis don't want to sound like they are opposed to peace so they say they support a two-state solution and vote for parties of the Right. Israelis lie to themselves and then vote for leaders who lie to the world. 

A return to 1965? Is this the year of the blocs in Israel?

It was announced this weekend that the two main parties of the Israeli Right, the Likud and Israel Beitenu (Israel is Our Home) have formed a joint list to run in the Israeli election on January 22, 2013. The new list is named Likud Beitenu (Likud is Our Home). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will head the list and Israel Beitenu leader Avigdor Lieberman will be the number two man on the list and will have his pick of ministries after the coalition is formed: foreign minister, defense minister, or finance minister. Last night the Likud by a large majority approved the merger, without Netanyahu having revealed the number of seats that each party would receive on the joint list. To see Netanyahu's acceptance speech (in Hebrew) go here.

The immediate reaction on the Center-Left was one of shock. Everyone in Israel was pretty much resigned to Netanyahu continuing as prime minister after the election, but the thought that the merger might become permanent and leave Lieberman as Netanyahu's successor as the new party leader has people in shock. Many in Israel claim that Lieberman's role model is not any of the figures on the secular Right such as Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Menahem Begin, or Yitzhak Shamir but rather Vladimir Putin, the semi-democratic and semi-authoritarian leader of Russia. Leiberman immigrated to Israel from Moldova--Soviet Romania--in 1978 at age 20. After serving in the army, he worked as a bouncer and entered politics as an aide to Netanyahu during the latter's first term as prime minister. He then left the Likud to found his own party of Russian immigrants to compete with Natan Sharansky's Israel B'Aliya (Israel on the Rise/Israel in Immigration) party. Lieberman has taken his party through a series of mergers and splits on the Right as he searched for a winning formula. This formula was eventually to attack Israel's Arab minority as disloyal and demand a loyalty oath.

The Desperation of the Israeli Center-Left

It is with some surprise that it was announced recently that Shaul Mofaz, leader of the Kadima Party, has agreed to step down in favor of former party leader Ehud Olmert. Ehud Olmert, a veteran of the Free Center Party and the Likud on the Israeli Right, followed Sharon into Kadima as his deputy in November 2005. Two months later he took over as party leader when Sharon suffered a debilitating stroke that has left him in a coma since. In the summer of 2006 he led Israel into the Second Lebanon War this time against Hezbollah and the civilian population of southern Lebanon. Following Israel's poor performance in that war he emerged as a virtual lame duck prime minister with an approval rating of only three percent. In late 2008 he was forced to resign because of corruption allegations against him from his time as mayor of Jerusalem in the 1990s. Some of the charges proved to be politically motivated and he was acquitted of the worst allegations. But he did not emerge from the trial with his reputation intact, as this op-ed piece in the free newspaper Israel Hayom indicates.  This is the man that the Kadima Party is now pinning its hopes upon? 

After the collapse of Labor starting in late 2000, following the outbreak of the Al-Aksa Intifada in October, Kadima became the new hope of the Israeli Center-Left. The new hope of all those who supported a two-state solution with the Palestinians. Now it looks to receive less than 10 seats in the next Knesset. The Israeli Left should pin its hopes on the Labor Party and the strategy of its leader, Shelli Yachimovich. The Middle East is not yet ripe for peace. Labor should pin its future on other issues so that when the Middle East is ready, Labor and Israel will be ready as well.

Update: Chemi Shalev, the U.S. correspondent of the Israeli newspaper Ha'Aretz, has reported in a briefing call with Americans for Peace Now that there is talk of Olmert heading up a Center-Left bloc consisting of Yair Lapid's new Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party, Kadima, and the Israeli Labor Party. Shalev said that nearly all Israeli journalists and political analysts are convinced that no one can stop Netanyahu from forming the next coalition government in January. Here is APN's analyst Yossi Alpher's take on the elections in his usual Q & A column for APN.

Israel Labor Party Has New Leader

The Israel Labor Party, America's partner for peace in Israel for three decades from 1969 to 2000, has a new leader--Shelli Yachimovich (pronounced Yakhimovich). She defeated former leader Amir Peretz in a runoff election after the two led a field of four candidates. Yachimovich is a former journalist who joined the party in 1999. She advocates a return to emphasizing social and economic issues rather than the peace process. In other words, she wants to return Labor to its more centrist position on defense and security issues that it held up until Oslo, while taking it slightly to the left on economic matters.

I think this is a very good idea. Politically she has to restore the party's brand among Israeli voters. During and after Oslo it became too identified with Meretz and this led to brand confusion to the detriment of Labor. Labor has lost some four-fifths of its Knesset seats since Rabin was elected prime minister for the second time in 1992 (from 44 to 8). This decline is due to a number of reasons including the fallout from the peace process, the lack of policy development, the failure to develop a successor generation of leaders during the Peres-Rabin rivalry from 1974 to 1994, and the over-reliance on former generals to provide the party with electoral charisma.

And finally there was the split earlier this year when leader Ehud Barak left with a third of the party's MKs. Barak was said to be the protege of Yitzhak Rabin but he behaved more like Moshe Dayan or David Ben-Gurion at the end of their political careers. Ben-Gurion split from Mapai (the main predecessor of Labor) to form Rafi in 1965. When Rafi recombined with Mapai and another socialist party, Ahdut Ha'Avoda, to form Labor in 1968 Ben-Gurion stayed out and eventually his tiny splinter party became part of the Likud when that camp was founded in 1973. Dayan left Labor as an independent in 1977 and joined the new Likud government as foreign minister. He then formed his own private list in 1981 for the election shortly before his death. Barak just wants to be defense minister as Dayan wanted to be foreign minister.

Yachimovich's key challenge will be to find a comfortable working relationship with Kadima without letting her party be swallowed up by the larger party and lose its identity. If Yachimovich can take Kadima to the left on social and economic issues there may be eventually grounds for a merger of the parties. This would be a historic reconciliation between the descendants of the nationalist Revisionists of Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky and the descendants of Mapai.