Israel has been ruled by a right-wing strongman for nearly 12 years now and the best chance of getting rid of him in March comes from the far right– Gideon Sa’ar or Naftali Bennett are the latest hopes for the anti-Netanyahu bloc.
And according to a pollster, left-wing Israelis will vote for right-wingers Sa’ar or Avigdor Lieberman to get rid of Netanyahu.
I tuned in to a webinar by pollster Dahlia Scheindlin, for Americans for Peace Now on February 8, and here were three takeaways:
- A plurality of Israelis support a “two-state solution.” So Scheindlin and liberal Zionists argue it is not a dead letter– whatever two states means.
2. The right wing makes up as much as 60 percent of the Jewish vote, but don’t worry, the left is not going away, it’s hanging in there at 20 percent. Though about half of that is Palestinian voters, who don’t count in the formation of Israeli governments. And a lot of those leftwing voters will vote right because they want to help form a coalition to take out Netanyahu.
3. While it’s troubling that young Jews appear to be more right-wing than other Israelis, this trend actually goes back to the 1950s. The young are caught up in the “romantic spirit of the nation” which is “militarist and nationalist,” Scheindlin says.
Let’s look at Scheindlin’s key findings.
First, the two-state results. The left is overwhelmingly for two states (84 to 9 percent), the right is overwhelmingly against it (64 to 24). But the center is a lot closer to the left, she says, at 63 to 22 percent for two states.
The problem with those numbers is that, by Scheindlin’s own data center and left are fractional in Israeli political life. They’ve not formed a governing coalition for years. They make up 42 or 43 percent of the electorate by her numbers pretty consistently over the years. While the right is now at 52 percent.
The left in Israel (and their liberal Zionist friends) have embraced centrist candidates in recent years: Benny Gantz in the last three elections; this time, Yair Lapid.
Benny Gantz folded and became part of the Netanyahu coalition, and lately showed up on Netanyahu’s right on settlements.
As for Yair Lapid, he is all for settlement blocs that go deep into the West Bank, and for a unified Jerusalem, only not for annexation and new settlements.
Lapid sounds a lot like Netanyahu when Netanyahu was briefly for a Palestinian state: Palestinians won’t get a capital in Jerusalem, and Israel will annex a large portion of the West Bank, the Jordan Valley.
Today Gantz’s centrist voters– who are supposedly two-to-one for a Palestinian state– are switching over to settler-champion Gideon Sa’ar, Scheindlin says. Sa’ar is to the right of Netanyahu on settlements and Palestinian sovereignty. Though Sa’ar is making an outreach to American Democrats: He’s a right-wing settler advocate but he’s a well-spoken guy, and his lieutenant, settler Dani Dayan, is charming.
There really is a consensus against a Palestinian state in Israeli Jewish politics. If a plurality of Israeli voters supports “two states” in Scheindlin’s numbers, we really need to ask what they have in mind.
Point 2, the viability of the left. Scheindlin’s own numbers show the left going down over many years since the end of the peace process/Second Intifada. From 26 to 17 percent.
Her response is that it could have been a lot worse. There’s an “expectation that the percentage of people who identify as left is tiny, non-existent or disappearing,” she says. “It’s not disappearing. It is small and a minority, but it’s not nothing, it’s 20 percent.”
Well, a lot of that number are Palestinian voters. And again and again, Israeli centrists and even leftists have said, We don’t want Palestinians as part of our Zionist government. That’s how the “Jewish state” works! This polling discussion never touched on the charge that Israel is a “Jewish supremacist regime,” as B’Tselem characterized Israel a month ago in its apartheid report– in which one group has the upper hand, and has no interest in pushing for equity.
The Jewish left polls at about 12 percent– and it will give Zionist parties Labor and Meretz a projected nine seats in the next parliament, or Knesset.
That 12 percent ought to get Labor/Meretz to 14-15 seats in a parliament of 120. The reason it won’t, Scheindlin says, is that, “The left wing like everyone is desperate to get Netanyahu out.”
So many of these “leftists” will throw their vote behind a centrist party, like Lapid’s Yesh Atid. And some of them are looking at Avigdor Lieberman or Sa’ar, Scheindlin says!
Avigdor Lieberman lives on a settlement, and Sa’ar says he will never agree to the removal of Israeli colonists to make way for a Palestinian state. So that’s Israel’s definition of “Jewish left.”
You can see that ideologically, Israeli society is firmly right-wing by party: two thirds of Israeli parliamentary seats will be right-wing, according to polls as of February 4, Scheindlin says.
Only 40 seats are on the left, and ten of them are Palestinian legislators– who, again, don’t count in Israeli coalition building. Scheindlin says the 80-40 number is deceptive because among the 80 are Gideon Sa’ar and Lieberman, who are on the anti-Netanyahu side. And the anti-Netanyahu forces outweight the pro-Netanyahu forces 62 to 58. But again, even if they formed a right-center-left governing coalition, it’s not like they’d ever support a Palestinian state.
Finally, let’s get to the young people. Scheindlin says one of the most negative groups in Israeli society when it comes to the Israeli Supreme Court and civil liberties is 18-34-year-olds. They have a negative view of the Supreme Court by 38 to 30 percent. This is distressing to liberal Zionists because it shows how right-wing Israel is. “This is worrying but in general a consistent pattern,” Scheindlin reports. “Young people are more conservative, more right-wing, more hard line, in Israel, among Jews.”
But Scheindlin links this pattern with the birth of the nation. She’s looked at data from the 1950s that shows young people then were also more right-wing.
And it has to do with the idea that the romantic spirit of the nation is militarist and nationalist… So maybe it’s not so new.
Other explanations are that the young are disproportionately religious because the religious have more babies, and: “This is a generation of young people who had no experience of a peace process, they only heard about it, and they usually hear about it nowadays in negative terms,” Scheindlin says. They grew up during and after the Second Intifada and were told, “We have no partner, and the Palestinians are terrorists.”
“The general social discourse was going in a very, very nationalist populist direction. It became a dirty word to be seen as left.”
But Scheindlin says, there is “stability” of the left-wing number over the years. The left hangs in at 20 percent. You’d think that all those young right-wingers would be pushing the right-wing side of Israeli politics. “Something is curbing the right-wing growth. We should have seen it over the roof by now,” she says.
Correction: This post originally stated that the right wing makes up as much as 60 percent of the Israeli electorate. The 60 percent figure is accurate with respect to Jewish voters only. The rightwing vote in Israeli elections, per Scheindlin’s polling, tops out at about 52 percent. Apologies for the mistake.
And I softened some of the original criticism in this post because on reflection I thought it was harsh and undeserved.
