Think local, vote local: 9 things to know for October 30

1. All politics is local: Tuesday is election day in Israel for cities, towns and local councils, bringing an end to a campaign season that has seen incessant text messaging, race-baiting ads, mud-slinging, catchy jingles and everything else that comes with the democratic process.

• Ballot stations nationwide open at 7 a.m. and close by 10 p.m. The preliminary results are expected to trickle in overnight Tuesday-Wednesday, with a final count anticipated by Wednesday.
• The Times of Israel will be liveblogging the elections (and other news) and results all day and into the night. In 2013 our liveblog (written by yours truly) only closed at 4 a.m. when Nir Barkat in Jerusalem claimed victory.
• Why should non-Israelis care? Haaretz’s Hagai Amit explains that the local elections are being used as a bellwether for coalition parties ahead of national elections, expected to be called any day now, and may also determine whether national parties can install local power structures in a kind of corrupt symbiosis.
• “[Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu may have been kidding at a conference in Beit She’an up north when he told residents that if they vote for Likud’s Jackie Levy they’ll be rewarded with the building of a direct train line to Tel Aviv. But his ministers aren’t joking when they promise Jerusalemites direct access to government coffers if they elect Likud candidates,” he writes.

2. Jerusalem ground zero: Over 1,000 candidates are running for spots on councils in 251 cities, towns and regional councils (the Israeli equivalent of counties).

• In a frankly impressive feat, Yedioth Ahronoth manages to have stories and briefs on several dozen of the contests, from big cities like Tel Aviv to backwaters like Mitzpeh Ramon.
• The most closely watched races nationally are naturally in the biggest cities. In Tel Aviv and Haifa mayors are facing upstart insurgent campaigns, and in Jerusalem, there’s a tight battle to fill Barkat’s shoes.
• Yedioth takes for granted that Jerusalem will head to a runoff, calling the city “ground zero for the political tensions in the country.”
• “A series of political incidents and the personalities of the candidates and of rabbis have led the capital to a situation in which on the eve of the election all four main candidates have a reasonable path toward victory,” Haaretz reports.
• Ze’ev Elkin has the support of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his political machine. Moshe Lion has a chunk of the ultra-Orthodox public thanks to some deal between backer Avigdor Liberman and the Shas party. Ofer Berkovitch has the vote of the progressives. Yossi Deitch has the rest of the ultra-Orthodox vote.
• The paper’s lead editorial endorses progressive candidate Ofer Berkovitch in Jerusalem. Meanwhile in Israel Hayom, which also focuses major attention on Jerusalem, columnist Nadav Shragai aims most of his ire at Berkovitch for refusing to answer whether he supports dividing Jerusalem, instead answering that it’s a question for the government.
• “A candidate who convinces the public that he will devote everything to Jerusalem’s internal municipal matters cannot ignore the fact that almost everything touching on the municipal matters of a city like Jerusalem also has a diplomatic vector,” he writes.

3. Feuding friends: Not all politics is nasty though. After a reporter asks Berkovitch who he would like to face in a runoff, he answers Yossi Deitch, because he ran a positive campaign.

• On Twitter, Deitch responds by thanking Berkovitch for the last few months of a hard-fought campaign. “I’m glad we were able to keep things respectful between us and for Jerusalem.”

4. Where are all the women? Out of 723 people running to be mayors or council heads, only 58 are women. That gender gap is even more stark in the settlements, where only one woman has ever headed a local council.

• That may change this year, with three women running to head settlements or regional councils in the West Bank, though they all face uphill battles.
• “As if the prospect of elbowing into the male-dominated political arena weren’t daunting enough, the three women will be facing off against incumbent council chairmen with more established ties to their communities as well as to the Israeli government,” writes Jacob Magid, who spoke to all three.

5. Democracy vs. the beach: Thanks to a new law, this is the first year that local elections are a day off for the whole country.

• The move is meant to help raise historically low turnout numbers, but some have noted that with the day off, Israelis may skip the polls and head straight for the beach.
• Museums, national parks, and other attractions were expected to attract hundreds of thousands of vacationing Israelis on Tuesday, while daytime election-themed dance and drinking parties were scheduled across the major cities.
• According to a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute earlier this month, 83% of Jewish Israelis and 71% of the Arab public plan on voting (are either sure or think they will). That number would represent a massive jump over the 51% who turned in ballots last year.
• Noting the historically low numbers for local elections, President Reuven Rivlin writes in Yedioth that people should take local elections as seriously as national ones. “They give you the power to influence your immediate surroundings … local powers are responsible for nearly everything that make up our day-to-day lives,” he writes.

6. Dirty politics: Many Israelis are just relieved the campaign season will be over, after being bombarded with robocalls, mailers and targeted ads for months.
One colleague notes that though he’s lived in Tel Aviv for years, he’s been harassed by candidates running in Hadera, his old place of residence. Another journalist says he got a robocall at 11 p.m. the night before from a candidate.

• Myself, I have been living across the street from a campaign sign with large flashing lights for the past several weeks. Unfortunately for my neighbor, the ambient lighting around the sign is so poor that you can barely read the sign at night, flashing lights or not.
• Even worse is the litter. Haaretz’s Nir Hasson tweets a video from his ride through an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem, where he says Yossi Deitch’s people just dumped their flyers everywhere.

לאנשי דייטש ועץ זה היה נראה הגיוני לזרוק עלינו טונות של אשפה על הבוקר. כך זה נראה מהאופניים בכל השכונות החרדיות במרכז ירושלים pic.twitter.com/cfPytorpst

— نير حسون Nir Hasson ניר חסון (@nirhasson) October 30, 2018

• The phenomenon, unfortunately, is not unique.

A street in Jerusalem filled with election fliers on October 21, 2013. ( Yaakov Lederman/Flash90)

7. Miri Regev could be your daughter: An infamous campaign poster from Ramle, which showed a girl in a hijab and warned that “this could be your daughter,” has been mashed up with a picture of Culture Minister Miri Regev in Abu Dhabi for hilarious affect:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10157283231594947&set=a.10155240027749947&type=3&theater

8. Not a Jew: While Israel is worried about their future leaders, Americans are still attempting to recover from the Pittsburgh synagogue attack. Vice President Mike Pence’s decision to invite a messianic rabbi on stage to pray for the dead isn’t helping any.

• The move is widely pilloried in both the American press. As noted by Slate, “Messianic Jews, commonly known as ‘Jews for Jesus,’ are not considered Jewish at all by most mainstream Jewish groups, and their embrace by evangelical Christians is often considered offensive, even anti-Semitic.”
• In the New Republic, Jeet Heer writes that “To mourn [the synagogue attack] with a rabbi who is not really a rabbi, speaking for a group that is actually Christian, is deeply disrespectful.”
• Candidate Lena Epstein, who apparently invited the “rabbi,” defends the move in the name of unity, but as many note, that doesn’t really hold water.

https://twitter.com/lrozen/status/1057101036589064195

• Meanwhile, in Israel, nobody in the Hebrew-speaking press seems to have taken notice.

9. Not a synagogue? People are still squabbling over whether chief rabbi David Lau refused to say Tree of Life is a synagogue or not, with his comments to Makor Rishon seeming to have some sort of quantum magic to them.

• Coming to the defense of Lau, The Forward translates much of the Makor Rishon article and comes to the conclusion that the press is being unfair to the rabbi.
• “Lau’s quote was grossly taken out of context — not a single news report actually quoted the full interview, in which the rabbi mourned the victims and emphasized that a conversation about denominational differences is irrelevant here,” he writes.

10. A Jew, but not in a synagogue: In Tablet magazine, LA rabbi David Wolpe speaks out against calls to ex-communicate Jews who support Trump in the wake of the shooting, including many of his congregants ( and some at Tree of Life)

• “My congregants are not the ones who are dangerous, and manipulating responsibility to turn Jews into perpetrators is ethically appalling—and communally toxic. We can only be a Jewish people when we don’t excommunicate each other—for religious reasons or political reasons or cultural reasons,” he writes.
• But on Twitter, JTA’s Ron Kampeas argues that excommunication is as Jewish as kneidlach.

A thought on this piece by @RabbiWolpe, whom I admire: it is a historical. Herem is a feature, not a bug of Jewish history. Just now, a GOP Jewish congresswoman’s invitation to a born-Jewish Christian “rabbi” to pray for Pittsburgh is… https://t.co/W5wlVCuwAE

— Ron Kampeas (@kampeas) October 30, 2018