The Israeli Election: A Preview

Israel goes to the polls on January 22. Everyone has already conceded that Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu will be heading the next government. His Likud Beitenu (Union: Our Home) party is forecast to receive between 34 and 38 seats out of 120 in the Knesset. Next largest will be the centrist Labor Party with 16 to 18 seats--up from 13 in 2009. Third will be the Jewish Home (haBeit haYehudi) party with 13-14 seats- (Hebrew link) --this will be a record for the old National Religious Party, which normally received anywhere from four to ten seats in each election since the 1950s. For another forecast in English see here. The Kadima party, founded by Ariel Sharon as a splinted from the Likud in November 2005, is likely to only receive two seats despite being the largest party after the 2009 election with 28 seats. Most of its voters are said to be either returning to the Likud after seven years, returning to Labor after three years, or going to former Kadima leader Tzipi Livni's haTnua (the Movement) party that is projected to receive seven seats. Overall the Right is projected to receive about 53 seats and the Center-Left about ten seats less than that. Daniel Levy, an analyst affiliated with a number of European and American think tanks as their resident Israel expert, has a very good article organized around the concept of Israel's "four tribes" or electoral blocs.

There are many explanations for this move to the right.  But the important thing is the effect that it will have on the policy of the Israeli government. Netanyahu is likely to form another rightist coalition with one of the Center parties in the coalition, such as Yesh Atid (There is a Future), as a legitimizing party in the small role that Labor has periodically filled (after 2001, after 2009 etc.) An attempt to form a Center bloc with Yesh Atid, Labor, and haTnua blew up last week when Tzipi Livni issued a statement about a meeting that the three party leaders held and then the other two contradicted her.  This will make it easy for Netanyahu to play the three parties off against one another after the election. The most interesting figure in this election cycle has been Naftali Bennett, leader of the Jewish Home party, portrayed in this New Yorker article by David Remnick.  Here is an article that ran on Sunday January 20--two days before the election--in The Times of Israel on the Likud's post-election coalition options.

A solution to the flags issue in Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland, particularly the Greater Belfast area and East Belfast in particular, has witnessed protests accompanied by rioting for the last five weeks in response to a Belfast City Council decision to fly the Union flag (the British flag) over city hall only on some 15-20 designated days per year rather than 365 days per year as had previously been the practice. This decision actually brings Northern Ireland into line with the rest of the United Kingdom. But the loyalist working class, backed up by elements of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in East Belfast and initially by the mainstream unionist parties are determined to show their Britishness by behaving in a thoroughly un-British manner. 

As has been pointed out at the Slugger O'Toole website (see comments) the American South also has a flags problem. Ever since the beginning of desegregation in the mid-1950s the Confederate flag has been used as a symbol of racists opposed to integration and equality. When pressed, in order to be politically correct, they claim it as a symbol of cultural pride. But in reality, as in Northern Ireland it functions as a territorial marker in the South warning blacks to keep out.

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. 

2013 Predictions

When I was younger I used to love watching the pundits on ABC'S Nightline have their predictions read to them from the previous year with the obligatory buzzer sound signalling that the prediction had failed to pan out. It confirmed my opinion of the punditocracy as being composed of a bunch of pompose windbags who did not really know very much. So now I'll risk the buzzer by going public with my predictions in the world of international politics for 2013.

1) The Syrian civil war will continue for several months until Assad is finally driven from power. Then fighting will break out among the contending factions over who will inherit power. This will take several months to sort out.

2) Benjamin Netanyahu will be reelected as prime minister in Israel later this month. His third term will be as vacuous as his second term. He will not attack Iran.  His coalition will be another coalition of the Right consisting of Likud Beitenu, Jewish Home, Shas, and possibly Yesh Atid to balance off the religious parties.

3) Obama will reach an agreement with Iran limiting the level of refinement of uranium and opening up Iranian nuclear facilities for international inspection. Iran will attempt to cheat on the agreement in 2014, but will be caught.

4) The UUP and SDLP will continue to stumble in Northern Ireland as they continue to lose public support to the DUP and Sinn Fein. 

5) Alliance will come out of the flag protests marginally stronger as middle class unionists and nationalists give it votes for having stood up to the loyalists.

6) Muhammad Morsi will continue to grab for power when he can and retreat when he is faced with a strong backlash from liberals. Morsi will attempt to mobilize anti-Copt sentiment to increase his power.

7) Obama will continue with his plan to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014. Ultimately little will come out of all of the blood, treasure, and prestige invested by the United States in Afghanistan.

8) The Benghazi hearings will reveal little of substance--no smoking gun. But the GOP will continue to criticize the Obama administration as weak and vacillating. Americans will continue to ignore the GOP attacks on foreign policy and foreign policy in general.

9) Bahrain will be the next crisis of the Arab Spring. The U.S. will be faced with a decision to either back the regime, thereby losing credibility in the rest of the Arab world and risking our future if the Sunni majority comes to power or backing the Sunni opposition and risking that it will betray the U.S. when it comes to power. I don't know how Obama will come down on this.

10) The ANC will begin to lose some support in South Africa as Jacob Zuma is exposed as incompetent and corrupt.  

What are Alliance's Future Prospects?

Mick Fealty over at Slugger O'Toole had an interesting post about the middle ground of Ulster politics. As he defines it this consists of the two moderate sectarian parties, the Ulster Unionists (UUP) and the SDLP, and the non-sectarian Alliance Party. In the summer of 1998 when I was researching my first book, Native vs. Settler: Ethnic Conflict in Israel/Palestine, Northern Ireland and South Africa (Greenwood, 2000) I found a dearth of published information on Alliance. I did manage to find an unpublished Masters Thesis on Alliance written in the early 1990s for a politics degree in France as well as the back issues of Alliance's in-house newsletter in the politics collection of the Linen Hall library in Belfast. This book included a chapter on Alliance that then became the core of my next book, Indispensable Traitors: Liberal Parties in Settler Conflicts (Greenwood, 2002).

I learned that Alliance had actually begun life as a non-parliamentary pressure/ginger group, the New Ulster Movement, in Belfast in early 1969. After about a year it decided to form a party that was both liberal and non-sectarian. The Alliance Party of Northern Ireland was launched in April 1970 months before the SDLP. It had its best recruiting periods in its first three years in 1970-73 as The Troubles were becoming a republican insurgency against the state. Alliance reached its peak in a local election in 1977 at just under 15 percent of the total--higher than for the DUP. Then it began to slowly slide back until 1981 when it lost almost all of its vote west of the Bann River. It again had an above-average  recruiting period in the mid-1990s as the province was moving out of The Troubles following the first IRA ceasefire. But by 1997 the vote was shrinking back down to its previous high of 6.5 percent. This continued to deteriorate until it hit just over five percent.

I interviewed a number of Alliance figures including its first leader, Oliver Napier, and then Assembly Speaker John Alderdice and his brother, Lord Mayor David Alderdice, who was kind enough to give me a tour of City Hall before the interview. Noting that the party after the 1981 hunger strike had been limited largely to Greater Belfast--to constituencies with a unionist majority, I suggested to several members that the party declare itself to be a unionist party (it was on record as being pro-union) but emphasis its differences with the other unionist parties i.e. its two Catholic party leaders, high percentage of women office holders, innovative policies, etc. They replied that the party would lose many more votes than it would gain by doing this as its members regarded themselves as belonging to the Other tradition: participants in or issue of mixed marriages or simply non-religious.

Former First Minister David Trimble links protests to East Belfast Seat

In an interview published today on the Newshound site, former First Minister David Trimble, who now sits in the British House of Lords for the Conservatives, linked the flag protests and riots that have engulfed Northern Ireland over the last ten days to the DUP's loss of its East Belfast seat to the Alliance Party in the last general election. This was the seat of party leader Peter Robinson who had held it since first being elected in 1979. It was also the Alliance Party's first parliamentary seat. Trimble was implicitly criticizing his former party, the Ulster Unionist Party, which has teamed up with the DUP to protest the compromise crafted by Alliance with the two nationalist parties on the Belfast City Council. As Alliance councilor Laura McNamee points out in an interview, had Alliance not acted the two parties would simply have voted to eliminate the flag flying over Belfast City Hall altogether.

So what are the motives for the unionist parties in these protests? Peter Robinson gets to act out and extract some revenge on Alliance for taking his seat. He may even stir up the electorate enough to win the seat back for his party in the next election. The UUP by putting Alliance on the defensive may end the attrition of party members to the party that has been going on since the last general election when Alliance outperformed the party. And the tiny Progressive Unionist Party can look statesmanlike by issuing statements calling for restraint and condemning the violence while also condemning the compromise. So, the unionist parties are the winners. 

Needing inferiors for self-asteem in Belfast--sectarian riots

For the last six days there has been renewed rioting by loyalists mobs in Belfast and now in Derry also ostensibly over a compromise provision that limits the flying of the Union Flag at Belfast City Hall to only seventeen designated days per year. Nationalists wanted the flag not to be flown at all at the City Hall but settled for an Alliance Party compromise motion that limited it to flying on designated days only. Alliance offices have been broken into in response to the compromise and a leaflet put out by the DUP calling on constituents to let Alliance know how they feel about the measure. Unionist commentator John Coulter sees this possibly reverberating to the benefit of the struggling UUP.

This has been the second major period of rioting in Belfast since the peace process was finally bedded down in mid 2007. There were major riots two years ago in North Belfast. These riots all have ostensible local causes but the real reasons are the need for loyalist paramilitary organizations to demonstrate that they still have relevance and justify their existence and the unhappiness of working class unionists--loyalists--with the gains made by nationalists and republicans since the start of the peace process. The traditional position of loyalists was to be looked down upon by middle class unionists and to look down upon nationalists. Unionist parties neglected the educational, employment and social needs of loyalists and nationalists. Loyalists compensated by looking down upon nationalists. The gains made by nationalists to a situation of equality with loyalists is seen as a net loss by the loyalists. That at least is the analysis of Peter Shirlow, lecturer at Queen's University at Belfast.