How did Jewish Home become this election’s coolest campaign?

Tuesday was Labor’s primary. Wednesday is Jewish Home’s. The differences between the two should worry Labor supporters — and Likud ones too.

Labor’s primary, with 49,000 eligible voters, was the party’s smallest ever. Jewish Home’s, with 77,000, was its largest ever.

Labor MKs spent the day uploading photo collages of their supporters to Facebook – in technological terms, not exactly cutting edge.

https://www.facebook.com/NachmanShai/photos/a.403906082970964.105652.291524437542463/977920922236141/?type=1

Party leader Isaac Herzog even made a video – in which he implores Labor members to vote.

Jewish Home, meanwhile, took advantage of the proximity of the two primaries to publish two biting videos about Labor.

In one, Yinon Magal, outgoing editor-in-chief of the Walla news site and a celebrity primary candidate in Jewish Home, conducts interviews with Israelis asking them about the Maarach, or “Alignment,” the name of the Labor-led Knesset list until 1991. The interviewees – at least the ones who made it into the final video – seem unaware that the Alignment no longer exists, and are skeptical about its chances in the coming elections.

In the second video, Herzog is seen delivering a speech on an old-fashioned television. But the television signal is bad, and Herzog’s voice is constantly replaced by that of Shimon Peres as he declares that “this occupation is bad for Israel…there is an immediate need to reach an agreement…with the backing of the superpowers and the Arab League…to [return] to agreed-upon borders, 1967 borders, with the settlement blocs and land swaps.”

The screen then goes black, and overlaid white and pink text explains that “Peres is the nineties…Boujie [Herzog] is the nineties.”

It’s a potent campaign message. Labor hasn’t won an election since the disastrous collapse of the peace talks and the Second Intifada in 2000. The claim that Labor is “the nineties” amounts to an assertion that it has not learned the bloody lessons of the intervening years, that blinded by its ideology it will once again lead Israel into new waves of terror.

The two Jewish Home videos got over 90,000 views by mid-day Tuesday. Labor’s Herzog got fewer than 20,000 in nearly 40 hours between Monday and Wednesday afternoon. More importantly, the planning and production value that Jewish Home showcased in rolling out the videos on the day of Labor’s primary should worry both Labor and Jewish Home’s competitors on the right. It’s still early in the campaign, but Jewish Home’s campaign is proving to be a clever, nimble, professional operation.

Getting high

But for all Jewish Home’s talents, when it comes to nimble, tech-savvy PR at this early stage of the race, the award must surely go to the Green Leaf party whose main demand is to legalize cannabis.

“This time we can bring real change. We can put Green Leaf in the Knesset,” declares Oren Leibovich, the new chairman of the party, in a fast-moving YouTube video set to a funk rhythm.

“We’re 500,000 cannabis consumers in Israel,” he explains. “If one quarter of us put ‘Green Leaf’ in the ballot box, the change will happen. This is the time to unite.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJBdHroo4Dc

No, Green Leaf doesn’t win the “cool campaign” award for a single polished video, but for coming up with the, um, novel idea of raising its campaign funds by selling — you guessed it — marijuana futures.

“In exchange for your donations,” Leibovich explains, “you’ll receive an IOU that will be exchangeable for real cannabis on the day the law [legalizing cannabis] passes.”

That’s right. Green Leaf is selling IOUs for pot.

Will it work? By Wednesday, just three days after the video first went online, the party’s page on the crowdfunding site Headstart had already raised NIS 121,011.

So yeah, it’s working.