And Aside From the Armed Revolt, Assad Is Having a Pretty Good Year Too
April 6, 2012 § 2 Comments
Bibi Netanyahu gave an interview to Haaretz on Wednesday where he dismissed the concerns over growing inequality in Israel – it is in the bottom three of IMF countries and bottom four of OECD members with the largest gap between rich and poor – because Israel is “in great shape” if you don’t take into account Haredim and Israeli Arabs. This statement bends the limits of credulity given that the latest IMF report on Israel specifically mentions integrating the Haredi and Arab sectors into the economy if Israel is to maintain its high growth. This summer’s upcoming social protests are also expected to focus on Haredi military exemptions and the drain on state resources through Haredi subsidies and special provisions, so dismissing the Haredim and Arabs out of hand as if they are a small and simple problem to be easily overcome is hasty at best and irresponsibly negligent at worst.
Netanyahu’s cavalier treatment of Israel’s inequality issue is also curious given the report issued by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics in March. The CBS forecasted that there will be an additional 350,000 Haredi Jews and an additional 300-400,000 Arabs in Israel’s population by 2019, and that by 2059 the Haredi population will equal the non-Haredi Jewish population. If this forecast is correct, then Netanyahu’s dismissing these two segments of the populace and insisting that Israel is in reality doing well on measures of inequality is dangerously off-base. Furthermore, the insistence that mainstream Israelis are not suffering from inequality is going to do him no favors politically as socially minded Israelis gear up for a repeat of last summer’s protests that rocked the country. The people that flocked to Rothschild Boulevard and erected tent cities across the country came primarily from the secular Jewish majority that Netanyahu needs to reassure, and Shaul Mofaz’s strategy of using social justice issues to bludgeon Netanyahu with is only going to ensure that Bibi’s comments are not soon forgotten. Many Israelis would take great exception to the claim that Israel is in great shape when it comes to inequality, and the CBS forecast confirms that the problem will only get worse as the Haredi and Arab populations grow relative to the rest of Israel. Netanyahu meant to reassure both domestic and international audiences that he has the problem under control, but his comments actually underscore that he believes he can ignore Israel’s economic gap and that he has no real strategy to correct what should be a pressing concern.
Being Shaul Mofaz
March 29, 2012 § 2 Comments
After Kadima won the most Knesset seats in the 2009 elections and was unable to form a coalition, Tzipi Livni had a choice: she could either bring Kadima into the Netanyahu coalition or she could position Kadima as the primary opposition to Likud. She chose the latter, partly because she understandably could not stomach the thought of serving in a coalition in which her party had the most seats but someone else would get to be prime minister, and now it appears that her exit from politics is imminent. New Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz is about to face what appears to be a similar choice, and he also appears to be taking the Livni route, but I don’t think his strategy is going to last very long.
Mofaz is trying to position Kadima as the champion of social and economic equality, announcing that he will lead protests this summer against Haredi military exemptions and economic subsidies. It is an interesting tactic, since Kadima has not as of yet been viewed as leading the vanguard of the social protest movement, and his targeting of Haredim suggests that he believes there is a hole where Tommy Lapid’s Shinui party used to exist. Announcing his desire to lead a protest movement puts him squarely and clearly in the opposition, and going after Haredi sacred cows will earn him the wrath of Bibi’s coalition partners Shas and UTJ. This move makes sense in context; after all, Mofaz is now the head of Israel’s opposition and controls the mosts single party seats in the Knesset, and there is no reason why he should not make an attempt to succeed where Livni failed and become the next prime minister.
Ultimately though, it’s not going to happen. Polling after the Mofaz victory indicates that Kadima will only win 12 seats in the next Knesset, which will make Mofaz and his party irrelevant. No matter what happens between now and the next elections, Kadima is not going to make up enough ground to win outright or remain as the largest opposition party. Mofaz is not viewed as someone genuinely concerned with social issues given his history, and does not have the trust of Israeli voters or protest leaders who are predominantly concerned with inequality. Additionally, Yair Lapid’s new party will capture any secular anti-Haredi voters that Mofaz is trying to win over with the upcoming summer protests, so his new strategy is a losing one. Already, Interior Minister and Shas head Eli Yishai is calling for Mofaz to bring Kadima into the cabinet and as soon as Mofaz awakens to the fact that socially-minded Israelis will be voting for Lapid or for their traditional champions in Labor and Meretz, he will end up joining the coalition. Mofaz is gutsy by attempting to carve out a new space for himself and for Kadima, but he also has no desire to be consigned to irrelevance as Livni now is, and so my prediction is that he will give up sooner rather than later and join the Netanyahu government before his window to do so closes for good.
If You Read Only One Thing Today…
March 15, 2012 § Leave a comment
…let it be this. I clearly do not share Steven’s reluctance to write about Israel, but he should do it more often since he is dead on about a one-sided view that has taken hold among center-left intellectuals and commentators about Israeli leadership. Do I think that Netanyahu is a particularly good prime minister? No, I don’t. Would I vote for Likud were I an Israeli citizen? Absolutely not. But there needs to be a greater recognition among those who tend to pen critiques of the current Israeli government that to some extent it is trapped into a corner by coalition politics and the Israeli electoral system.
This does not excuse a host of wrong-headed Israeli policies that restrict speech or minority rights, and it certainly does not excuse much of what takes place in the West Bank. It does, however, mean that Israel is like any other democracy that uses a proportional representation system of voting and that requires coalition building. For a variety of reasons, Knesset coalitions increasingly rely on smaller parties to sustain them as the traditional powerhouse parties no longer command the share of votes that they once did, and this means that shifts in policy can more easily bring down a government and that extremist parties and figures can hold the government hostage.
In 1992, Labor won 44 seats and Likud won 32. In 1996, Labor won 34 and the Likud alliance won 32. In 1999, the Labor alliance won 26 and Likud 19. You can obviously see the developing trend, bringing us to 2009 when Kadima won 28, Likud 27, and Labor was a distant fourth with 13. It takes 61 seats to control the Knesset, and the percentage of seats that the winning party controls has nosedived. As I pointed out yesterday, there is no slack at all in Netanyahu’s current coalition and so whether he is inclined to moderate on some issues or not, he is for all intents and purposes stuck.
In addition, it cannot escape notice that the Israeli populace is a lot more hardline these days in light of the Palestinian response to the Gaza disengagement (and yes, I know the withdrawal was and still is in many ways incomplete, but rockets aimed at civilians are still rockets aimed at civilians), the 2006 war with Hizballah, the global BDS movement, and last but certainly not least an imminent nuclear Iran. It is easy to blame everything on right wing reactionary politicians, but in democracies politicians reflect their constituent populations, and Israelis have many good reasons to feel shell-shocked these days. Sure, Bibi is rightwing and hawkish by nature, but attributing illiberal trends in Israeli politics to nothing more than “Bibi is a fascist” is lazy analysis that does not capture even a smidgen of what is going on in Israel today.
Does This Kind of Stuff Matter?
March 14, 2012 § Leave a comment
Via Haaretz, a popular niche restaurant in Jerusalem is cutting back on its waitresses’ hours in order to placate its Haredi customers. This is the kind of thing that makes my blood boil, since anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of the laws of kashrut knows that employing women as servers has absolutely nothing to do with a restaurant’s kosher status, and yet this is a growing trend that does not appear to be abating. What makes this even more galling is that a large group of this particular restaurant’s customers are Americans spending a post-high school year in Israel at various yeshivot, and this is the type of behavior that could potentially influence their thinking when they return home about whether such blatantly unnecessary gender segregation is appropriate. No doubt those who are critical of illiberal trends in Israel stemming from ultra-Orthodox influence (and I unquestionably fall squarely into this category of critics) view this type of nonsense as a bad harbinger of things to come.
On the other hand, does it actually matter in the greater scheme of things when considering the future of Israel? Alright, a bunch of Haredi owned establishments are going even more overboard than usual (my favorite most cringeworthy example is a pizza place called American Pizza with a picture of the World Trade Center on its facade because the Statue of Liberty is deemed spiritually problematic due to its association with unfettered freedom – http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/world/middleeast/02orthodox.html?pagewanted=all) but the Haredi community has always done its own thing. The risks of Haredim taking over all of Israel are remote at best, and the risk of Haredi customs and restrictions seeping over into the rest of Israeli society is even lower. So while reading about increasingly extreme Haredi behavior makes me crazy, I wonder if I and people who share my mindset make too big of a deal of it than is necessary. In a perfect world, Haredim would not behave this way toward women, but in looking at the big picture, does this actually hold any predictive value for the direction in which Israeli society at large is going when it comes to gender issues?
On a more positive note, the restaurant’s owner has resisted all entreaties to fire his Arab employee, which is a good thing and means that the pressure on gender issues is far tougher than the pressure on Palestinian issues. It also tells you something about Haredi priorities and why their inclusion in government coalitions may not need to be a fatal blow to ending settlement activity or negotiating a successful peace deal if the incentive structure can be managed deftly.
