In a campaign of mudslinging, both sides may suffer

It can be difficult for the leading contenders for the premiership, Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud and Isaac Herzog of Labor, to articulate any meaningful policy difference between them.

Labor seeks peace with the Palestinians, but can’t seem to explain why it believes it will succeed in delivering an agreement where previous governments failed. It accuses Netanyahu of responsibility for growing wage disparities and rising housing costs, but has not published any detailed plan for changing government policy. Indeed, Labor’s declared candidate for Israel’s next finance minister, the economist Manuel Trajtenberg, was appointed by Netanyahu in 2011 to head his government’s committee on reducing the cost of living.

On the Iranian nuclear program, Labor’s pick for defense chief, retired IDF major general Amos Yadlin, is hardly an outspoken critic of the outgoing government’s policies. Even on social issues, the last coalition advanced legislation, from the ultra-Orthodox draft reforms to the raised electoral threshold, long championed by Labor and other left-wing parties.

This observation is not an advertisement for either Labor or Likud. If one supports the aforementioned policies but dislikes Netanyahu, this overlap in policy means one can comfortably vote Herzog at the ballot box. If one dislikes the Netanyahu government’s policies, this similarity suggests a vote for Herzog is likely to disappoint.

But it may explain why the election campaigns of both right and left have gone out of their way to eschew substantive debates, preferring to talk about personalities and, with startling zealousness in recent days, corruption.

The Netanyahu family is embroiled in “Bottlegate,” allegations that Sara Netanyahu pocketed several thousand shekels — perhaps as high as NIS 24,000 according to a disgruntled former employee currently suing the Prime Minister’s Residence — from the returns on recycled bottles purchased with state funds for the premier’s home.

In response, Likud called a 1 p.m. press conference Sunday to offer “evidence” of alleged illegal campaign financing on the left. “Millions of dollars from left-wing people overseas are flowing into the campaign to topple Netanyahu and Likud,” the party alleged in a statement Saturday night. It referred explicitly to the campaign known as V15, a grassroots effort funded by some overseas sources whose declared goal is to end the right’s rule of the country.

The statement recalled the campaign finance irregularities of Ehud Barak’s campaign 16 years ago — not for nostalgia’s sake, but because Herzog was then involved in managing the campaign and invoked his right to remain silent in the police investigation of the allegations.

It’s not yet clear if the campaigns of mutual recriminations are working. But one party that is clearly happy with the new focus on corruption is Yesh Atid, which has made the fight against corruption the heart of its campaign.

In a video published online over the weekend, the party’s leader, former finance minister Yair Lapid, tried to offer Israelis a path out of what the party has called “a politics of corruption.”

“Here’s something amazing,” Lapid tells viewers. “Of all the large parties in the Knesset — Likud, Labor, Jewish Home, Shas, Yisrael Beytenu — we are the only party, the only one, that has not seen a single one of its leaders or members investigated, arrested, suspected, invoking the right to remain silent, convicted, or sitting in prison. The only one.”

The Times of Israel has not fact-checked this claim, but its potency is obvious in the simple fact that both Labor and Likud are now spending more time on corruption allegations than any other issue.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this as an accomplishment,” Lapid continues. “That should be the standard. If that’s your standard, if you’re saying to yourself, ‘I’m willing to vote only for honest people. My vote will only go to those who I’m certain are completely clean and will fight corruption,’ then you only have one choice. Isn’t that amazing?”

Ever since Herzog’s Labor party united with Tzipi Livni’s Hatnua to form a broad-based center-left alliance, the election has been a contest between the two camps, with the centrist parties weakening as hundreds of thousands of voters returned to the traditional politics of left-vs.-right.

But the centrist Lapid’s nimble and viral response (the video got over 83,000 views in its first 15 hours on Facebook) to the mudslinging of the larger camps suggests there may be a danger for both left and right in an election campaign centered on delegitimizing the other side. It is, simply, that Israeli voters who grow too disgusted with their political camp to vote for it have a third option.