For Yisrael Beytenu, an investigation to end all investigations?
Long immune to political fallout from corruption probes, Avigdor Liberman and his party may be facing a harsh new reality
Haviv Rettig Gur is The Times of Israel's senior analyst.
Yisrael Beytenu has a problem. Multiple party higher-ups, past and present, were arrested this week in a massive police dragnet on suspicion of systemic, pervasive corruption.
A year-long covert investigation “revealed a calculated method wherein the suspects and their representatives unlawfully transferred, using their powers as public officials, large sums of public funds to [various] bodies and authorities, in exchange for generous benefits for them or their associates, including appointments, payments and more,” police investigators said in a statement.
The party is no stranger to scandal. Its leader, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman — who is not a suspect in the current investigation — was embroiled in corruption investigations for the better part of 17 years. The most recent indictment against Liberman was filed in December 2012, just six weeks before the elections of January 2013, forcing him to resign as foreign minister. But just a year later, in November 2013, Liberman was acquitted of the last set of remaining charges and reinstated as Israel’s chief diplomat.
And through it all, as Liberman’s ballot box fortunes ebbed and flowed, there was no evidence that the shifting tides were driven by the allegations against him. For years Liberman claimed police and state prosecutors were abusing their power in an attempt to bring him down, and his constituency largely agreed with him. The circumstances — decade-long investigations, the publicizing of new investigations in the midst of election campaigns — did nothing to quell accusations of ulterior police motives.
In this context, Yisrael Beytenu’s response to Wednesday’s news was not unexpected.
“As in every election since the establishment of Yisrael Beytenu in 1999, the police aren’t giving up their publicity-hungry arrests and investigations against members of the party,” the party said in a statement. “If news of the investigation had become public before early elections were called, or after them, it would have been possible to believe that this might be an honest effort. But the fact that it was done, once again, during elections points to the motives behind the matter, which is intended to damage Yisrael Beytenu.”
Channel 2 on Wednesday asked Israelis whether they believed the timing of the publicizing of the investigation demonstrated ulterior motives on the part of police investigators. Fully 31 percent said yes, 36% said no and 33% didn’t know.
And, indeed, in the day since the arrests were announced, not one leader of the seven largest parties competing in the elections has commented on the case. The discomfort is palpable.
So the question must be asked: Can the party weather the latest scandal as it has the previous ones? Will voters recoil from alleged police malfeasance to rally around their embattled party?
(Before we proceed, a note: This discussion is limited to the political fallout, not the facts of the investigation. But for clarity’s sake, it must be said that police fraud unit investigators have denied any ulterior motive behind the investigation and pointed to state’s witnesses and other evidence that seems to corroborate the latest suspicions. The Rishon Lezion Magistrate’s Court has also extended the remand of many of the suspects based on these initial findings. A police source also said that police were as surprised as anyone by the timing of the elections and could not have planned the past year’s investigation to coincide with the government’s collapse, and that any attempt by investigators to keep a major corruption investigation under wraps because of the election would have been as problematic as publicizing it.)
At the end of the day, there are two good reasons to believe the allegations will cause serious harm to the party’s ballot box performance on Election Day.
The first is straightforward. The police announcement on Wednesday named two of Yisrael Beytenu’s most important campaign organizers — Deputy Interior Minister Faina Kirshenbaum and the party’s chief of staff, David Godowsky — as key suspects.
Godowsky, who was arrested Wednesday, will not be available to run the party machine during the coming weeks of electioneering. Kirshenbaum, the party’s former director general and one of Liberman’s closest confidantes, has long been considered Yisrael Beytenu’s most effective and influential manager. She is protected from arrest by her parliamentary immunity, but will no doubt be too busy managing her legal defense to spearhead the election campaign.
Meanwhile, voters may be responding more skeptically than in the past to the party’s protestations of innocence. The most straightforward evidence comes from a Thursday morning Army Radio poll that asked voters how the news affected them. Among all likely voters, 2% said they were more likely to vote for the party — a figure that represents a protest vote against perceived police abuse of power — while 29% said they were less likely to do so. Among those who said they had planned to vote for the party, 13% were more likely to do so, while 41% were less likely.
Among former party voters hailing from the former Soviet Union, the group that forms the party’s most stable constituency, 31% said they wouldn’t vote for Yisrael Beytenu on March 17.
These worrying figures come in the wake of two years of poor ballot box performance. Beytenu’s union with Likud in the January 2013 elections dropped it from 15 seats to 11. A Globes poll in October 2013 gave it just six, while in that month’s nationwide municipal elections, the party’s showing on the city council of Ashdod, the city with the highest number of Russian-speaking Israelis, fell precipitously from five seats to two.
Neither was the combined support of Liberman and Shas leader Aryeh Deri for Likud candidate Moshe Leon in Jerusalem’s mayoral race last year enough to win Leon victory over incumbent Nir Barkat.
And on Tuesday, before the corruption allegations went public, Nehemia Gershuni-Aylho’s “Project 61” average of recent polls, weighted according to each pollster’s past per-party accuracy (Hebrew link), gave Yisrael Beytenu just seven seats (Hebrew link).
With poll numbers already soft, its key organizers under investigation, and at least one survey suggesting many past Yisrael Beytenu voters are beginning to question their support, the days ahead look bleak for the once-invincible political machine of Avigdor Liberman.
