A fight at the end of the tunnel: 7 things to know for March 1

1. Race to the bottom: For the third time in under a year Israeli politicians are at the finish line before elections that just may determine the makeup of Israel’s next government.

• Or will it? Final polls published Friday night by Israel’s major networks show Likud and Blue and White in almost a dead heat, or a slight lead for Likud, and neither prospective bloc able to muster a majority. I.e., exactly where they were about a year ago.
• The polls also show that despite the indictments against him, Netanyahu still holds about a 10-point lead on the question of who is more qualified to be prime minister. (The use of the word qualified may give away the bias. Netanyahu might be more qualified by sheer experience, just like Bernie Madoff might be more qualified than me to run a hedge fund. It doesn’t mean he should, though.)
• Not to worry, though, as party leaders have hit the airwaves to make final pitches to interviewer Rina Matzliah, going after each other as unfit one by one, instead of just having a debate like normal politicians.
• Netanyahu calls Gantz “weak” and “not a real leader.”
• Gantz says Netanyahu is “acting like a mafioso.”
• The candidates also hit lots of other news sites, like Kan, Channel 13, Walla and more.
• “Gantz needs to act like the leader of the country, not the leader of a party,” Labor-Gesher-Meretz head Amir Peretz chides the Blue and White leader in a Channel 13 interview, saying he should admit publicly that he needs the support of the Joint List.
• Blue and White number 2 Yair Lapid tells Army Radio that his party wants no part of working with the Joint List.
• “I’ve been trying for two days to figure out where Amir Peretz is getting this garbage. I assume he did it to try and stop votes from leaking [to Blue and White],” he says.

2. In Israel, joint smokes you: The question of working with the Joint List is especially relevant with the polls showing a modest surge for the party to 14 or 15 seats, the number it predicted it could get months ago. Channel 13 notes that its survey finds 83 percent of non-Jews polled planning on voting, versus 70% of Jewish voters, which could also mean upped support for the Arab-led faction.

• ToI editor David Horovitz notes that the party thinks that opposition to the Trump plan is helping galvanize its voters and sending them to the polls to take down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
• “[Netanyahu] plainly anticipated that it would help him win Monday’s elections. It would be a momentous irony if that plan — and especially the provision for redrawing the border; a provision that a worried Netanyahu last week said he rejects — were to wind up costing him a Knesset majority, again,” he writes.
• Party leader Ayman Odeh tells Channel 12’s “Meet the Press” he’s aiming even higher: “If we get 16 seats, Netanyahu can’t set up a coalition,” Odeh says.

3. Fit for office? Yamina leader Naftali Bennett, meanwhile, may be on the downswing after throwing a tantrum on “Meet the Press,” over Matzliah pressing him on the fact that there have been more rockets shot out of Gaza in the four months since he took over as defense minister than the four months before.

• Bennett storms out of the studio, but not before grabbing his mic back to accuse Matzliah of trying to hurt his party.
• “You’re dealing with a journalist, not Hezbollah. I hope that as defense minister you don’t lose your cool like this during security deliberations,” she shoots back as he leaves.
• Walla’s Nadav Menuchin writes that Bennett’s hissy fit may have been a form of “political theater” loved by the networks for providing “authenticity,” but which does not serve the voting public.
• Either way, he writes, Bennett “came out the loser, as someone who could not handle dealing with a strong interviewer.”
• In Haaretz, TV reviewer Irina Melamed writes that every candidate, save Odeh, that Matzliah interviewed hit back at her with “the Bibi method of going to war with the press: personal, frontal and disgusting attacks.”
• “You can play the victim too, but you have to know how to do it more convincingly than Bennett and his show of a tantrum in the studio,” she writes.
• How unconvincing was he? Only 31% of viewers bought his story, according to Channel 12, which publishes the results of an unscientific survey in which it asked viewers to vote online for how convincing the candidates were. Gantz is the big winner with 67%, while Netanyahu finishes in the middle of the pack with 41%. Dead last is Odeh, whose 24% is just a little worse than Aryeh Deri, who once used onions to fake tears in a campaign spot about the death of his spiritual leader.

4. When life gives you onions…: Deri and Netanyahu may also be less than convincing in their reactions to the scandal du jour: a tape published by the channel of Netanyahu aide Natan Eshel saying that the party is “united by hate,” and apparently knocking Mizrahi voters.

• Netanyahu says he called Eshel and Eshel apologized. Deri, whose Shas party is supposed to represent Mizrahi interests, tells Kan radio that Eshel sent him a text message overnight saying that some of his grandkids are Moroccan, which apparently means it’s all good.
• ToI notes that initially, Eshel issued a statement blasting the recording as “lies,” though it was unclear what exactly he was disputing as his voice could clearly be heard on the tape.
• In Yedioth, Ben-Dror Yemini writes that Eshel’s comments are worse than other anti-Mizrahi epithets thrown into the political stew over the years, because they were coming from someone so close to Netanyahu: “It seems that this broke all the records of sad moments in Israeli politics.”

5. Get out the vote (for me): Undeterred, the parties are spending their last days pulling out all the stops in a push for voters.

• Reporting from a Blue and White campaign event, ToI’s Raoul Wootliff writes that Benny Gantz took on a more combative tone, juxtaposed with a video of him launching his political career a little over a year earlier.
• “While still centering on ‘hope,’ there was a combative and biting undertone to everything that Gantz, hoarse from repeated campaign events, said during his speech Saturday night, perhaps his most animated and spirited delivery to date,” he writes.
• He also notes that Gantz’s speech included saying Netanyahu was “trying to disrupt election day,” which Channel 13 reports is a reference to fears that the Likud will try to lower turnout in some areas by sending out fake messages about the coronavirus.
• Army Radio reports that both parties will be focused on get out the vote crusades in their strongholds, with the hopes that high turnout will spur them to victory.
• In a seeming push to dispel apathy among voters who might think he does not have the 61 seats necessary to claim victory, Netanyahu tells Kan radio that he’ll get there with a little help from Blue and White turncoats,
• “There will be surprises, Gadi Yevarkan is not the only one,” he tells the station, referring to a Blue and White MK who jumped ship for Likud.

6. Just keep turning right: The campaigns are seemingly being helped along in their final pushes by journalists on both sides.

• Israel Hayom, always in Netanyahu’s corner, runs a front page “expose” on a letter sent from Fifth Dimension, Gantz’s failed tech company, to shareholders which mentions a meeting between “Benny and the commissioner,” which the paper says proves Gantz lied when he said he did not intervene in the issuance of a no-bid tender to the police.
• “Could it be that that the meeting was hidden to distance the name of the Blue and White head from involvement in an affair that has led to the opening of a criminal investigation,” right-wing TV host Erel Segal asks in the story.
• At least the stories are couched in a guise of journalism. Some drop any pretenses, like ultra-Orthodox journalist Yanki Farber, who tweets this gem of impartiality.

https://twitter.com/Farberyanki/status/1233909542620192768

• And settler publication Israel National News runs an editorial explaining that it will do anything to help Netanyahu’s bloc reach 61 votes — well, anything but interview him, which it says could hurt those on the far-right.
• “We won’t agree to go along with the lie that only a vote for Likud will save the right-wing bloc. We won’t be remembered at the last minute, used and then thrown away,” it says, explaining its decision to turn down an offer to interview the prime minister.
• The reasoning may be questionable, but the idea of not giving politicians a soap box is one more Israeli journalists could take seriously.

7. Anything but Netanyahu: On the other side is Haaretz, which steps up its rhetoric against Netanyahu, including columnist Yossi Verter adopting Blue and White’s slogans that portray Netanyahu as a copy of Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Don Corleone.

• “Netanyahu’s conduct in the election campaigns, particularly the one ending on Sunday, is more sad evidence of this. Such a sentence, the mood that causes him to openly threaten his judges, on camera no less, is pure Erdoganism – mafia in the true sense. Actually, it’s not mafia. Even the heads of crime organizations wouldn’t dare talk like that,” he writes, referencing a veiled threat Netanyahu appeared to issue against judges in his Channel 12 interview.
• The paper’s lead editorial also goes full bore in urging voters to push him out of office: “At this point, our only hope is that there are enough people who can see the danger in the radioactive rays emanating from the messiah of hatred, incitement and lies, and will put an end to Netanyahu’s poisonous rule on Monday.”
• More subtle is Channel 13, which runs a story by Sefi Ovadia claiming that members of the judicial community do in fact fear a “cleansing” at the hands of Netanyahu (or rather Justice Minister Amir Ohana), especially after he told the channel in an interview that while he would not fire Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, he would demand that a gag order on a recording of Mandelblit and Blue and White’s Gabi Ashkenazi be lifted,
• “It was only when asked a second time that he said he wouldn’t fire him, and it’s very possible that if he wins, we’ll go back to this tape,” he writes.
• In Yedioth, Nahum Barnea decries all of the secret recordings being leaked out during the campaigns, including one of Gantz’s adviser calling him weak, apparently recorded by a rabbi at Netanyahu’s behest, and journalists’ willingness to go along with them: “[The recordings] have turned the last days of campaigning into a festival paying tribute to the distrustful, crooks, snitches and liars, with the enthusiastic support of the best of the press in Israel. It’s been a long time since such ethical criminality was given such high praise. This is voyeurism.”