The upcoming Israeli election promises to be one of the most important since 1967, and could decide the fate of most of the territory Israel captured in that year’s Six Day War. It also could help consolidate Israel’s place in the Middle East — and have significant ramifications for resources allocated to education and the fight against poverty.
Given Israel’s system of proportional representation, dozens of parties will vie for power. So who are the main players? What do the various parties stand for? What are the key issues? And how does the system work?
The players:
The main players are the three leaders with genuine prime ministerial aspirations:
Ehud Olmert, 60, Kadima Party leader and acting prime minister. A Knesset member at the age of 28, Olmert has held the health, trade and industry and finance portfolios, and served a decade as mayor of Jerusalem.
He is a lawyer with degrees in philosophy and psychology. He will try to convince voters that he is the true heir of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Amir Peretz, 53, leader of the Labor Party and former boss of the Histadrut trade union federation. Peretz was born in Morocco, came to Israel at age four and became a Knesset member in 1988 after serving as mayor of the southern border town of Sderot.
With no ministerial experience or academic qualifications, his primary task will be to convince voters that he has the makings of a prime minister.
Benjamin Netanyahu, 56, Likud Party leader and former prime minister. The son of a history professor, Netanyahu was born in Jerusalem but spent his formative years in the United States, where he attained a degree in business administration from MIT.
The most experienced of the three candidates, he has served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, foreign minister, finance minister and prime minister. Despite his qualifications, Netanyahu starts the race at a serious disadvantage: His term as prime minister is widely regarded as a failure, he is blamed for reviving the economy in recent years on the backs of Israel’s poor and for causing the split in the Likud by making Sharon’s position as party leader intolerable.
The electoral system:
Since the founding of the state in 1948, Israeli politics has suffered from inherent instability. Trying to hold together a society of veterans and immigrants, religious and secular, Ashkenazi and Sephardi, with a significant Arab minority, Israel opted for a system of proportional representation.
The upshot was a plethora of parties, unwieldy coalitions and 31 governments in 55 years. In the late 1990s, in an effort to strengthen the central government, Israel instituted a system of direct election of the prime minister.
The new system granted voters two ballots — one for prime minister and the other for the party of their choice — but instead of a more stable government, it produced greater fragmentation. After choosing their candidate for prime minister, many voters used the second ballot to vote for small, single-issue parties, decimating the larger, nationally oriented parties like Labor and Likud and leading to even more unwieldy multiparty coalitions.
By the time the last election came around, in January 2003, Israel had restored the old system, but with two significant changes designed to promote stability: The first, “constructive no-confidence,” stipulated that winning a simple majority in a no-confidence vote no longer was enough to force a sitting prime minister out of office. Instead, it would take an absolute majority of 61 Knesset members in the 120-member Parliament, and they would have to unite around an alternative candidate for prime minister.
The revised system also made it more difficult for small parties to make it into the Knesset, raising the parliamentary threshold from 1.5 percent to 2 percent, or some 70,000-80,000 votes.
The 2006 elections will operate according to this revised version of the old system. Israelis will vote with a single ballot for the party of their choice, and each party will win a number of Knesset seats directly proportional to its share of the vote. Parties that fail to garner at least 2 percent of the vote will not get any seats.
The leader of the party most likely to be able to form a new government — invariably the party that wins most seats — will be invited by the president to begin coalition negotiations.
The parties and the issues:
Kadima: Formed by Sharon in November when he split from the Likud, its overarching policy thrust is to continue the process of separation from the Palestinians that was started by the withdrawal from Gaza and the northern West Bank last summer. Kadima spokesmen say this should be by agreement with the Palestinians but imply that if not, there will be more unilateral withdrawals.
Labor: To make up for Peretz’s lack of experience, Labor will highlight its list of Knesset candidates. On foreign affairs and defense, it will argue that its approach is similar to Kadima’s; but it will assert that the main threat to Israeli society is the growing gap between rich and poor, which it alone intends to address.
Likud: To avoid appearing too right-wing or irrelevant, Likud will gravitate toward the center, emphasizing that it too seeks separation from the Palestinians. Netanyahu says the difference between Likud and Kadima or Labor is that the latter parties would withdraw to the pre-1967 borders, whereas he would move the separation fence deeper into the West Bank and hold on to the Jordan Valley.
Shinui: The third-largest party with 15 seats in the last Knesset, the secular, centrist Shinui may disappear from the political arena without having achieved any of its major goals: army service for Yeshiva students, civil marriage and equality between the various streams of Judaism in Israel. After bitter personal clashes, the party is on the verge of splitting in two, and polls show that neither wing would cross the 2 percent threshold.
Tafnit: A new centrist party led by former National Security Adviser Uzi Dayan. Running on an anti-corruption ticket, it too seems unlikely to win enough votes to cross the threshold. Talks between Tafnit and some Shinui breakaways so far have failed to produce a merger.
Shas: The fervently Orthodox Sephardi party will campaign for a restoration of religious values and an end to alleged discrimination against religious and Sephardi Jews, but without the secular challenge posed by Shinui, it will find it more difficult to mobilize support. It also may see some of its traditional Sephardi voters migrate to Labor because of Peretz’s Moroccan roots.
United Torah Judaism: A sectoral party that appeals to haredi, or fervently Orthodox, Ashkenazi Jews, and is capable of forming a coalition with parties of the left, right or center.
National Religious Party: A right-wing, Zionist religious party that appeals to non-haredi Orthodox Jews. Much of its support has tended to come from Jewish settlers, but the party now is playing down its Greater Israel philosophy and emphasizing the need to strengthen Jewish identity through Jewish education. Polls show it hovering close to the minimum threshold.
National Union: A one-issue, Greater Israel pro-settler party. Its Moledet wing advocates the voluntary transfer of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza Strip to third countries.
Yisrael Beiteinu: A right-wing party with a large Russian immigrant base, it proposes land swaps with a future Palestinian state that would leave many Israeli Arabs on the Palestinian side of the border.
Meretz: The most dovish of the Zionist parties, it emphasizes its readiness to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders and divide Jerusalem in the context of an agreement with the Palestinians.
Arab parties: The Communist Hadash party, the secular Balad and the Islamicist United Arab List are dominated by Israeli Arabs and claim to represent Arab interests and rights. But their main focus has been on regional politics and Palestinian claims, leading many Israeli Arabs to say that this time they will vote for Zionist parties like Kadima and Labor that might do more to address local Israeli Arab concerns. The result could be some Arab parties not making the threshold.
Special interest parties: In previous elections, one-issue parties for everything from the legalization of marijuana to the banning of taxes have run, but usually failed to make it to the Knesset.
The timetable:
Candidate lists must be presented to the Central Election Committee on Feb. 8 or 9. That will leave a bit less than seven weeks for all-out campaigning that will include billboards, newspaper ads, public meetings and party political broadcasts.
Just over 5 million registered voters will be eligible to cast their ballots March 28 in hundreds of polling stations, usually schoolrooms temporarily converted for the purpose. An 80 percent turnout, not uncommon in Israel, will mean 4 million votes cast and one Knesset seat per 33,000 votes — assuming a party crosses the minimum threshold.
The morning after, the coalition-building will begin. The kind of coalition that the winner puts together — left-leaning or right-leaning, with religious parties or without — will offer a clue to the policies the new government is likely to adopt.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
