00:00:00.240Hello, welcome to another episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Moadad, and today we're
00:00:06.620going to be talking about something easy, light-hearted, simple, the Israeli elections.
00:00:13.820And I don't know how to frame this exactly, because when you look at Israeli elections,
00:00:21.260it is quite an incredible mess. You have an electoral system that allows any party with,
00:00:27.660I think more than 5% of the vote to get representation in the Knesset.
00:00:32.040You have around, well exactly, 120 seats in the Knesset.
00:00:38.860And the game is who can build a functioning block in this proportional representation system
00:00:45.940that allows them to reach 61 seats and to therefore govern with a stable majority.
00:00:53.240And over the last few decades, Israeli politics has been dominated by Benjamin Netanyahu.
00:00:58.620Netanyahu is a bit of a secular right-winger in the Israeli context and will go over the
00:01:06.160different kinds of parties and what they represent. But what's unique about him is his
00:01:11.500sheer political genius. Because when you look at a lot of the rival parties to Benjamin Netanyahu,
00:01:18.280what distinguishes them is that they are led by people who had at some point been very closely
00:01:24.360affiliated with him, who he had then proceeded to stab in the back, and who have now vowed never to
00:01:30.920work with him again. And the latest candidate for the Netanyahu treatment is one Gadier Eisenkot.0.50
00:01:36.700We will get to a profile of him in a few minutes. But I think where I want to start this
00:01:43.760is by going through some of the polling for the Israeli elections and explaining who the different
00:01:50.320parties are and what their various issues and their commitments to their voters actually look
00:01:58.560like. And Wikipedia has been extremely helpful with this table of Israeli political parties
00:02:05.880and where they stand in the polls and what is expected. And I have to say that just five minutes
00:02:15.480before going live, there was a bit of a substantial change because one of the parties that had
00:02:21.720had some hopes of being in the election ended up pulling out. But I don't think this changes
00:02:27.360the polling very much because they were barely at 1%. Now, the contenders. On the one side,
00:02:35.960there is the Netanyahu coalition. And what characterizes this coalition is that it is
00:02:41.580the secular Likud party, nominally secular, although with a bunch of pretty religious Jews
00:02:47.520involved in it. These guys are through and through expansionists. And the claim to fame0.89
00:02:55.620that they've always had was that the mainstream political party of Israel, from the founding of
00:03:03.240the state in 1948 all the way through to the 80s, the Labour Party, was too soft. And Netanyahu
00:03:11.540became more prominent as a result of his opposition to Labour after they signed a peace accord with
00:03:18.840the Palestinians, which in theory would have given the Palestinians a state over the West Bank and
00:03:25.820over Gaza, the so-called two-state solution, which would have been a way, according to the signatory
00:03:32.720of that agreement, the Oslo Peace Accords, Ishak Rabin, which would have been a way to basically0.57
00:03:40.140separate the two populations, put the Palestinians in a quasi-state that would be disarmed, that would
00:03:48.900be heavily under Israeli influence, and that would give the two sides security and end the war between
00:03:55.600them, paving the way for normal relations between Israel and the other Arab states. So this is Likud.
00:04:03.720Their whole shtick is that actually we don't want any kind of peace agreement with the Palestinians,0.86
00:04:10.140we don't want to tolerate a Palestinian state. Rather, what should happen is that Likud should
00:04:17.020lead a national coalition with religious Jewish parties in Israel in order to slowly expel the0.97
00:04:25.240Palestinians. That's the thinking behind it. And so Netanyahu has been in a coalition leading Likud0.99
00:04:32.800with a party called Religious Zionism,
00:04:37.140which is expected to win between five and seven seats.
00:04:44.860Otsma Yehudit literally translates as Jewish power.
00:04:50.140These two parties together represent the interests of the settlers.
00:04:53.900The settlers are maybe 700,000 in total,
00:05:00.460including the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
00:05:02.800and come out of a Jewish population of seven to eight million, so almost 10 percent of the
00:05:08.080population, which means in practical terms that if there was going to be a peace treaty between
00:05:14.140the Palestinians and the Israelis, these people would have to leave their homes and move into
00:05:20.840Israel, which is never going to happen. A state will never give up territory on which 10 percent
00:05:27.300of its population lives just to get a peace treaty with its enemies, especially because nobody
00:05:32.380believes that this would end the conflict between the israelis and the palestinians
00:05:36.540the palestinians want more or less a full recovery of the territory
00:05:44.220of the state of israel as established in 1948 they want to kick out the israelis the jews completely0.96
00:05:50.940and the response from the israelis is well actually we want the whole thing
00:05:56.620as well basically it's two sides saying i'm going to kick you out into
00:06:01.260the wider world and the other side saying no no I'm going to kick you out into the wider world.
00:06:06.060It is an irreconcilable conflict by definition. So Netanyahu builds this coalition or has this
00:06:12.060coalition with the religious Zionists and Otzma Yehudit. These are0.85
00:06:19.980different from the ultra-Orthodox which I will explain in a moment and with the
00:06:25.420Shas and United Torah Judaism, which are basically the parties of the ultra-Orthodox who refuse to
00:06:36.240serve in the Israeli military and who insist that the state should subsidize them while they study
00:06:44.060the Torah. And these guys are around, like the ultra-Orthodox in Israel, are around 1.4 million
00:06:51.600people. And so that's a pretty substantial share of the population, and everybody resents them1.00
00:06:58.360because they get an enormous amount in benefits, and they don't have to do the three-year military
00:07:04.720service that is mandatory for men or the two-year military service that is mandatory for women.
00:07:10.980The way that Israel functions is as a garrison state. It has to keep on fighting in order to0.91
00:07:18.140That part is absolutely true. The minute they stop fighting, they will be completely relieved of any political power in a best-case scenario and massacred in a worst-case scenario. This is something that we have to be honest about.
00:07:36.760So this coalition that Netanyahu leads involves these parties.
00:07:44.520And the problem for the opposition to Netanyahu is not the strength of his coalition.
00:07:53.500It's that there's another chunk in Israel that the opposition also cannot work with.
00:08:50.260But what this means is that as you are trying to reach 61 seats, if you're the leader of
00:08:55.920the opposition trying to unseat Netanyahu, you've got this big chunk of seats that are
00:09:01.360not available to you because if you ally with them the resulting coalition will be so fragmented
00:09:10.960that it can survive and it would be rejected by the majority of the israeli public
00:09:16.720who over the years has increasingly hardened and become much more right-wing compared to what it
00:09:23.200was, say, in the 1980s. In the 1980s, one of the, or the, shall we call him the intellectual father
00:09:31.920behind a party like Otsma Yahudit, Jewish power, this was a guy by the name of Meir Kahane,
00:09:39.560born in the United States, a New Yorker, immigrated to Israel, founded a party,
00:09:45.720won a single seat in the Knesset in the 1980s. Whenever he spoke in the Knesset,
00:09:52.300even when the Knesset had a right-wing majority, most members of the Knesset would just boycott
00:09:57.900the session and would just leave rather than listen to him because he was seen as too far right.
00:10:05.900One of his acolytes, a man by the name of Baruch Goldstein, went to Hebron in the West Bank here,
00:10:13.740and there is a site there which is the cave of the patriarchs which where Abraham and Isaac and
00:10:25.100Jacob are supposedly buried. He goes there and he opens fire, kills 29 people, enters hundreds more
00:10:32.980and the leader of Otsma Yahudit had a photograph of that man in his living room for years and years
00:10:43.960and years, only took it down when he ran for elections. And now that man, Itamar Ben-Gvir,
00:10:52.380leads a block of, I think, 10, 12 members of the Knesset and sits as the Israeli security minister.
00:11:02.980So Israeli politics has fundamentally changed and it's gone much further to the right.
00:11:07.560And as the number of settlers in the West Bank has increased, as a proportion of the population, their representation in the Knesset has increased.
00:11:19.540Historically, Israeli cabinets always included some representatives of religious Zionists, the parties who want to expand settlement in the West Bank.
00:11:29.140But their influence has never been stronger than it has been in the last few years.
00:11:34.920So there is this bloc in the Israeli Knesset, might be in the next election, something between 12 and 15 members of the Knesset.0.82
00:11:46.220These guys will only partner with someone who wants to keep on expanding the settlements.
00:11:51.320And if you're partnered with them, well, then you might as well partner with Likud.0.68