New alliances: 5 things to know for November 2
From Beit Shemesh to Gaza to Brazil, friendships both unexpected and obvious are being forged
Joshua Davidovich is The Times of Israel's Deputy Editor
1. Not quite suffragette city: With the dust now almost settled from local elections (at least until runoffs in a couple of weeks) pundits are taking stock of the winners, losers and how the results will or won’t affect the national political scene.
- With the election of Aliza Bloch in Beit Shemesh, womankind is seen as one of the biggest winners.
- Tabloid Yedioth Ahronoth, which a day earlier had a front page photo of new mayors that inadvertently highlighted how few women there actually are leading cities, on Friday picks out three of them who are the first-ever women picked to be mayors, under the headline “Women of the revolution.”
- Revolution? As ToI’s Marissa Newman points out, there are a whopping 11 female mayors or council heads in the whole country; men are still over 95%.
- There’s good news, though. That number could reach 17: Another six female candidates face a runoff on November 13, after no candidate in their respective races received the minimum 40 percent of the vote required.
2. The bloc party is over: As for the losers, the consensus is that it’s the ultra-Orthodox deal makers, whose power is based on playing to a few influential rabbis and hoping the public votes like sheep.
- A headline in Haaretz notes that Bloch’s victory in Beit Shemesh “is yet more proof of ultra-Orthodox protests against wheeler-dealers.”
- “More than Bloch won the vote, [the incumbent Moshe] Abutbul lost it. He was a weak mayor. Some of the ultra-Orthodox got sick of his unfulfilled promises, the dirt in the streets, the services that were not provided,” Nahum Barea writes in Yedioth.
- Israel Hayom reports that in Jerusalem Ofer Berkovitch is close to reaching a deal for support from Jewish Home against Moshe Lion, who was able to make it to the second round of voting thanks to deal making with the ultra-Orthodox.
3. Netanyahu’s got nothing to do with it: On the national level, there doesn’t seem to be much doing, and even the losses of Likud apparatchiks in Yeruham (Nili Aharon) and especially Jerusalem (Ze’ev Elkin) don’t necessarily reflect badly on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite his backing of them.
- “A look at the results across the country shows that having Netanyahu’s backing wasn’t a decisive factor … Whoever won, did so on their own; whoever lost, lost on their own,” Yedioth’s Barnea writes.
- “The losses by Elkin and the Likud in Jerusalem is a perfect example of the gap between local and national elections. For Netanyahu, who did not exactly place Jerusalem as his number one priority, it’s merely a glancing blow,” writes Sima Kadmon in the same paper.
- (She also disputes that ultra-Orthodox wheeler-dealers are necessarily on the outs, noting that Shas head Aryeh Deri successfully played kingmaker in a number of places.)
- In Tel Aviv, though, Haaretz’s lead editorial cheers on Ron Huldai to keep on acting as a counterweight to Netanyahu and his associates in the government.
- “In the face of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s incitement machine and the leadership vacuum on the left, Tel Aviv doesn’t need a nice guy running it. It needs an elected official capable of standing up forcefully for the basic principles that make a country enlightened and liberal,” the editorial reads.
4. The boys from Brazil: Who needs Tel Aviv when you’ve got Rio? Netanyahu’s love affair with Brazil’s soon-to-be president Jair Bolsonaro is already blossoming online.
- After Bolsonaro announces on Twitter that he’ll move the country’s embassy to Jerusalem, Netanyahu responds with a thank you in Hebrew, to which Bolsonaro responds with a thumbs up emoji. Who says diplomacy is a dead art?
???????? https://t.co/2HRMeT8mDH
— Jair M. Bolsonaro (@jairbolsonaro) November 1, 2018
- Bolsonaro’s future chief of staff Onyx Lorenzoni tells AFP that Bolsonaro’s first foreign trips as president will be to Israel, the United States and Chile — countries that “share our worldview.”
- The bromance with Netanyahu is not surprising as Bolsonaro has often been compared to a “tropical Trump.”
- Speaking to pro-Netanyahu Israel Hayom, the president-elect more than embraces the US leader, saying “He’s done a stellar job in the US, work that’s so amazing that there are very many things that I use as an example for what I’m doing in Brazil.”
5. No momentum, no self-awareness: If only everybody loved Trump as much as Bolsonaro and Netanyahu.
- Instead, Trump is being criticized for a statement at a rally Thursday in which he complained that Republicans had “lost momentum” because of Saturday’s synagogue shooting and a series of pipe bomb attacks on prominent Democrats.
Just imagine if past presidents had talked openly about how national tragedies affected their political standing less than a week after the attack – Obama after Charleston, Bush after 9/11, Clinton after Oklahoma City.
It would be a controversy of epic proportions. https://t.co/xTET8slKFf
— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) November 2, 2018
The real victim of the pipe bomb mailings and the Pittsburgh pogrom is Donald Trump. https://t.co/l2btI8tGbt
— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) November 2, 2018
11 Jewish Americans were slaughtered in a synagogue but Trump wants to whine at his KKK rallies about the effect it had on his momentum.
Speaking of maniacs. Today Trump said he will order 15,000 troops to “shoot to kill” if anyone in a crowd of women and children throws a rock. https://t.co/Xzw0bHTZLI
— Ryan Adams
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