A swim through mud on the way to the voting booth
Nobody is happy with the nasty turn the campaign has taken, and Likud is reportedly not feeling too good about its chances
Joshua Davidovich is The Times of Israel's Deputy Editor
With a week to go until Democrifest 2015, Israeli papers are gearing up for the big show with exciting reports that everybody hates everybody, unless you are shopping at an outdoor market.
While in America, politicians win votes by kissing babies, in Israel, the way to the prime minister’s office runs right through the outdoor shuks, where glad-handing stumpers show they are just like the common man who goes shopping surrounded by a phalanx of stern-looking security guards.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda outdoor market — where he courted his Mizrahi power base by posing for selfies and buying fresh produce just like the Moshe Buzaglo who takes out his trash — earns him front page coverage in all three major dailies.
Only Yedioth Ahronoth, which thinks of Netanyahu the same way most Moroccans think of gefilte fish, balances out Bibi’s PR push with a picture of Zionist Union head Isaac Herzog buying nuts at a market in Lod, in a bid to show that he, too, is not some crème brulee-masticating blue blood.
But the good feelings surrounding politicians haggling for pistachios are apparently not enough to whitewash the colossal amounts of sludge being slung around in the lead-up to the vote, which has Israelis feeling as good about the elections as a rabbi in a bacon-eating contest.
While Yedioth leads off by reporting that President Reuven Rivlin is embarking on a quest to show haters of democracy the importance of casting a single vote, it’s easy to see why people might be reluctant to spend their day off voting for the band of dirt flingers running for office.
Commentaries abound in all three papers on the particularly nasty mudslinging that took place over the weekend. Among the highlights were a Likud-linked ad likening union workers to Hamas terrorists, a speaker at an anti-Netanyahu rally who said religious people weren’t fit to hold public office and a right-wing columnist who accused another speaker at the rally, a widow of an officer killed in the summer war with Gaza, of murdering her own husband.
In Yedioth, commentator Ben Dror Yemini, no peacenik leftist he, writes that the attacks are only getting meaner, and don’t represent the mainstream public in the slightest.
“There’s another week until the elections and this collection testifies to the fact that it’s only going from bad to worse. These events don’t represent the public,” he writes. “But they do testify to a lack of control. When you are speaking of extremists on the right or the left – so be it. Every camp has its fanatics and they are far from representing the camp. The problem is that somebody is setting this agenda. This isn’t the first appearance of Hamas in the elections. They were already attached to prof. Yossi Yona from the Zionist Union. But the irritation threshold for political spin is dropping.”
Yemini, though, is followed in Yedioth by several pages attacking Likud and Netanyahu, especially over the workers=Hamas ad. The paper quotes a number of officials saying the ad basically means that Likud should not count on many votes from their ranks.
“How does the prime minister think 12,000 electric company workers will vote for him, after he compares them to Hamas,” one union official is quoted saying.
In Haaretz, Yossi Verter sees in Netanyahu’s visit to the market a sign of desperation for Likud, which may be losing support left and right.
“A week before the elections, the ruling party is signaling serious distress. The tie, give or take, with Zionist Union in most polls, is worrying. The feeling among many of them is that the polls aren’t showing the lack of excitement, the tiredness and diminishing energy of the ‘soldiers’ on the front line,” he writes, speaking of Likud’s street-level operatives.
Some might see a sign of that desperation as well in a column by Likud-loving Israel Hayom’s Haim Shine, who pens another entry in his compendium of “Why you should vote Likud” columns he’s gotten so adept at. This time, he pretty much writes that voting Likud (or at least not for leftists) is what millions of Jews through the eons of exile pined to do.
“It’s important to remember that even if there aren’t clear answers. Jews through thousands of years of exile prayed three times a day to return to Jerusalem, a dream throughout the generations that we have merited to make come true,” he writes. “The return to Zion is a success story and Jerusalem is once again united. The heads of the union that calls itself Zionist have gotten tired of the price of freedom and are ready to divide Jerusalem and recognize half of it as the capital of the Palestinian terror state.”
If Jerusalem is united, somebody forgot to tell the Israeli police, who according to Haaretz’s lead story, are having city officials blacklist Arab residents suspected of security offenses and punishing them via extrajudicial measures. Mostly this means severely enforcing back-payment of debts owed the city by families of residents arrested for rioting or throwing stones, in what legal experts tell the paper is “an abuse of power.”
“One list, for instance, gives the names and identity numbers of each suspect, his father, his mother and his spouse, along with the coordinates of his house,” the paper writes. “The list also contains space for each municipal department to report the progress of enforcement measures against those named. For example, the local water company, Hagihon, must report whether a family on the list owes it any money, the building supervision department must report on the house’s legal status (most East Jerusalem houses are built without permits), and the tax department must report whether any municipal tax is owed.“
That saying about people in glass houses, it seems, also holds for those in glass parliaments. At least according to Israel Hayom, which reports that among Jerusalem’s illegally constructed buildings may be none other than the Knesset that all these parties are fighting to get into.
The paper reports that Hagihon has taken the Knesset to court over an NIS 11.1 million debt, claiming that the parliament refused to pay a development fee to the water company, which then did not sign off on permits to add on to the building over the years. While the Knesset has yet to respond, the paper quotes the spokesperson calling the suit “a strange claim over something that happened 50 years or more ago that has no basis in fact and is already obsolete.”
