Stump and grind

The reality of a looming Likud loss in the upcoming elections, lurking just under the surface for several days, seems Thursday to have finally sunk in, with just five days left until Israelis go to the ballot box.

Israel Hayom is pretty much printing bullets of sweat over the impending defeat, and doing everything it can to stop it (I mean reporting that Likud is doing everything it can to stop it).

From across the aisle though, Yedioth Ahronoth, instead of confirming the kill, suddenly seems to have pulled back from its anti-Netanyahu campaigning, giving equal space and importance to all the candidates and their final glad-handing push across the nation, with a Hollywood Squares-like front page package.

(In case you are wondering what they teach in newspaper design class, it’s to never ever ever make a front page like this. Ever.)

Haaretz, meanwhile, leads off with a poll confirming what surveys have been saying for several days now, that the Zionist Union is ahead of Likud 24 seats to 21 seats. The most interesting results are toward the bottom, where the survey shows Yisrael Beytenu barely making it into the Knesset, and slight jumps for far left-wing Meretz and far-right/ultra-Orthodox Yachad.

The paper surmises the slump for Yisrael Beytenu is a direct result of voters heading back into the Likud fold. “This could be tied to Likud’s intense campaign to return to its ranks voters who had previously defected to satellite parties; there are many similarities between Yisrael Beytenu voters and those of Likud,” survey jockey Yossi Verter writes.

The survey also finds that an increasing number of voters see Zionist Union head Isaac Herzog as prime minister material, while support for Benjamin Netanyahu staying in the post is slightly eroding — though he’s still far ahead, 48% to 34%. Even Kulanu head Moshe Kahlon, a former Likud stalwart and possible future kingmaker, is seen by Likud as readying to recommend that Herzog and not Netanyahu get first crack at forming a coalition, according to a report in the paper.

Why anybody would want Herzog and his partner in crime Tzipi Livni to lead the country is beyond Israel Hayom’s Haim Shine, who continues to use his newspaper to openly campaign for Likud and against the Zionist Union, this time in a post headlined “Excuse me, but what exactly have Boujie and Livni done in their careers?”

The politeness pretty much ends there.

“Any serious person in Israel who sees the future of the country, the society and the economy as important, needs to ask themselves whether Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni, by looking at their past doings, have the ability to lead the country at a time like this,” he writes. “Can we vote for them based on a single essential action of theirs or any real influence they wielded during their years of public service? Have they written even one line in the story of the history of the State of Israel?”

The paper also goes on full frontal attack against American PAC Ameinu, which is running a campaign to spread joy and democracy (okay, only democracy) through Israel’s Arab community. Heavily citing that august publication The Washington Free Beacon, the paper recounts that the group is funded by the State Department, as well as “progressive” American groups (scare quotes theirs), but is not campaigning on behalf of a specific party, only to get out the vote.

However, the paper claims that the group is only really out to get young secular Jews and Arab Israelis to cast their ballots, with the unspoken upshot that those voters are more likely to cast ballots for left-wing parties.

In response, the group claims that even Arabs vote for Likud, which is true. In Kafr Manda, for instance, 71 people out of some 7,000 voters cast ballots for Likud-Beytenu in 2013, which is definitely a number that is more than zero.

Every vote counts, though (or so we are lead to believe), which is why Yedioth has plenty of material to fill several pages of blurbs about different parties’ whistle-stop tours as they stump for last minute support.

A horde of Zionist Union MKs and operatives, for instance, are shown on a literal train making their pitch to a nice passenger who looks like she just wants to get back to staring out the window. “The Netanyahu government doesn’t see people who ride buses and trains. I use public transportation and my bike every day, and suggest that voters don’t forget about life itself,” MK Stav Shafir is quoted saying, riffing off Netanyahu’s recent comment that quality of life issues pale in comparison to the Iranian threat.

Even Netanyahu’s plea for right-leaning voters to abandon the smaller parties and come home to Likud gets some play in the paper. “This time we don’t have the privilege of voting for smaller parties in the rightist camp,” he’s quoted as saying ( conveniently forgetting that he made the same claim last time around too). “Especially when [Avigdor] Liberman and [Moshe] Kahlon won’t commit to go along with Likud. Only a vote for Likud will close the gap with Labor and prevent a leftist government supported by the Arabs, Meretz and [Yair] Lapid.”

What’s an election, though, without some good old-fashioned chauvinism? The paper reports that Yachad is under fire after giving members of the gentler sex a gift of chocolate and Passover cleaning tips, though by under fire they actually mean that some people on Facebook made derisive comments. “Now I can vote for Yachad with a clear conscience,” one sarcastic commenter is quoted writing. “Who needs a representative for women in the Knesset when finally somebody is showering us with chocolate?!”

In Haaretz, Ari Shavit writes something of a mea culpa for another woman wronged – Tzipi Livni. While admitting that she’s no Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton or even Menachem Begin, Shavit still give full-throated approval to the Zionist Union and its second in command with a hagiographic op-ed that could have easily been written in the faction’s campaign headquarters.

“Livni has proven how much she has matured and softened since 2009, and how much she has grown,” he writes. “With Herzog, over the past four months, she has pulled off one of the most amazing miracles ever seen here: creating something from nothing, hope from despair, illumination from darkness. All of a sudden, thanks to her, you can see Israel returning to itself, to its essence, to what it’s supposed to be.”