AxisMundi Jerusalem

You’ve set my mind at ease

Israel’s political picture has been so unclear and complicated since an indecisive Feb. 10 election that President Shimon Peres said he asked right-wing leader Benjamin Netanyahu to put it down on paper that he had in fact agreed to accept his mandate to go out and form the next Israeli government.

“And he has put it in writing, so now my mind is at ease,” Peres joked as he announced his decision to designate Netanyahu, rather than centrist Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, as potential prime minister — once he completes that task of coalition building.

Livni’s Kadima party had outpolled Netanyahu’s Likud, winning 28 seats in parliament to his 27. But Peres chose Netanyahu for the job of would-be prime minister because Netanyahu, a former prime minister, had the most other parliament members recommending him for the job.

But as much as Netanyahu, U.S.-educated and a polished speaker, wanted another shot at the nation’s top job, he certainly had a complex task ahead of him to rebuild a coalition with politicians whose views were disquietingly similar to the far-right lawmakers who effectively toppled his previous government in 1999 and forced an early election.

Writing in the Haaretz newspaper’s Web site, veteran Israeli political columnist Yossi Verter averred that dealing with such a divided Israel was “not how he planned to begin his second term.”

Livni has thus far indicated she would not join any coalition headed by Netanyahu, as she has said she objects to serving as a “fig-leaf” for policies that would not help advance negotiations with Palestinians for a two-state solution.  

Once Peres had formally designated Netanyahu, Kadima’s faction leader in parliament Yoel Hasson told Reuters that the party’s lawmakers were likely to ratify exactly that position when they meet on Sunday, and announce they would opt for the opposition benches in parliament.

Team of rivals for Israel?

Coalition-building in the aftermath of Israel’s inconclusive Feb. 10 election kicks into high gear on Wednesday, when the final results become official and President Shimon Peres begins sounding out party leaders on whom he should appoint to try to form the next administration.

To recap: neither the centrist Kadima party led by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni nor Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud won enough seats for a majority in the 120-member parliament. Kadima took 28 seats to Likud’s 27, but Netanyahu could stand a better chance of getting the nod from Peres because he is likely to have the support of a majority right-wing bloc of 65 legislators.

Army disappoints Bibi, the battle goes on

“When the soldiers’ votes come in, we will be way ahead.” So forecast a senior aide to Israeli right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu just after shock exit poll findings on Tuesday showing his Likud party trailing the centrist Kadima of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni by one seat. But that result, which overturned months of opinion polls in Netanyahu’s favour, turned out to be bang on the money. Throughout Thursday, Likud supporters were banking on votes from army barracks. These were being counted a day after those of civilians and Likud had hoped that a traditional right-wing bias in the military would be enough to turn the election around and give Netanyahu the advantage – a crucial one in terms of persuading President Shimon Peres that Netanyahu, not Livni, should be invited to form a government coalition.

It wasn’t to be. As the elections committee in parliament finally faced the media, over an hour late, and then flustered through their notes on live television to declare the result, it turned out the initial result still stood. Kadima on 28 votes, Likud on 27 in the 120-seat Knesset. So, it’s all over? Not by a long way. The result isn’t absolutely final until it’s published in the official gazette next Wednesday. And from that point Peres has a week to designate someone to form a government. Livni tried and failed in November, triggering this election. Netanyahu, popularly known by his nickname ’Bibi’, says there has been a general rightward shift in the election. That has included a surge for the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu (Our Home is Israel) of Avigdor Lieberman, which elbowed past Labour into third place on 15 seats. That, Netanyahu says, gives him a better chance of forming a stable administration. Perhaps. But in 60 years, Israel’s largely ceremonial president has never passed over the leader of the party that has topped the polls. Cue more intensive negotiation. Watch this space.

Can Israel do a power-share?

A predawn victory party for Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni had all the trappings of a fairytale, including a ballroom setting in a Tel Aviv hotel.

The woman who had edged ahead of rival Benjamin Netanyahu in a national election stood to become Israel’s first woman prime minister in 30 years, and she had surely beaten the odds to get there, just weeks after polls predicted a resounding defeat for her centrist Kadima party.

“This is truly amazing, the public has had its say and it’s Tzipi,” Yaacov Edri, a former cabinet minister from Kadima, told me as supporters broke out in song and dance, proclaiming Livni as “queen of Israel,” and waving blue and red party flags.

A hip-hop style ode to the centrist party leader blared from loudspeakers.

Livni, flashing a triumphant V sign with her fingers called it “a wonderful day for Israel,” and said “the Israeli people have chosen Kadima and we will respect that choice by forming the next government, headed by Kadima.”

It didn’t take long for it to sink in for many that Livni’s victory celebration may have been premature. Netanyahu, whose right-wing Likud party trailed Kadima by only one seat in the 120-member parliament, also claimed victory, saying parties belonging to the “nationalist camp” had secured a governing majority.

“It’s not going to be easy at all,” Edri remarked about Livni’s chances of pulling together a coalition.Her first order of business may have to be implementing an electoral reform plan that whittles down the number of parties running in Israeli elections from the incredible 30 that took part in this latest contest.

Israel votes, Palestinians groan

Posted by Wafa Amr.

With each Israeli election since the 1993 historic Palestinian-Israeli interim peace deals, the Palestinians feel their situation has gone from bad to worse. This time, their sense of desperation deepened as they woke up to an Israeli political map strongly dominated by the right wing. People say the chances for peace and ending occupation seem more remote than ever. The editor-in-chief of the Palestinian official al-Hayat daily newspaper, Hafez al-Barghouthi, called the growing strength of the right-wingers in Israel the “Right-wing Tsunami”. Israel’s shift to the right has added to the Palestinians’ sense of hopelessness. “The victory of the Israeli right means an open invitation for the Palestinian factions to turn fanatic to confront the advocates of settlements and land theft,” Barghouthi wrote on election day.

Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima party led in Tuesday’s election with 28 seats, one seat over Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud in the 120-member parliament. The centre-left Labour party, which made peace with the Palestinians 16 years ago, suffered a heavy blow. The rise of Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party who has vowed to keep settlements and advocates tougher measures with the Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, has added to the Palestinians’ despair.

Senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said this election showed the Israelis were not focused on issues of peace, and any coalition that will be formed wil be unable to deliver on the requirements of peace by freezing Jewish settlements and ceding occupied land for a future Palestinian state.

In past Israeli elections, and there were four prime ministers since Oslo, the choice was often seen as between a hawkish camp and a peace camp. This time, many Palestinians saw Israelis choosing between the far-right, the right wing and the centre-right. The election campaign was overshadowed by Israel’s January’s 22-day offensive against Palestinian militants in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip. Voters were seeking a leader who can best assure their security. Palestinians fear this translates into more daily hardships, more violence, a continued land grab for Jewish settlements and the loss of hope for a peaceful settlement to end 42 years of occupation.

While the “peace camp” has lost support in Israel, lack of progress on peace has weakened the Palestinian peace negotiators significantly. A power struggle between the Islamist Hamas, which won a parliamentary vote in 2006 and seized control of Gaza Strip in 2007 from Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and his secular Fatah group, has seriously undermined peace efforts. Popular anger at Israel during the January war in Gaza and resentment of rival policies of Hamas and Abbas have hardened the Palestinians. Abbas’ aides fear the rise of the right-wing in Israel could boost hardliners and Hamas.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Um Mahmoud, 65, sat in her living room in the city of Ramallah watching Livni speak to a crowd in Tel Aviv on TV. The Palestinian woman said Palestinians’ living conditions would not improve under any Israeli leader. “They rule the world and they put us in a cage confined to borders running between one checkpoint to the other in Ramallah. In the good old days, before Oslo, we used to drive to Gaza Strip to eat fish and swim in the sea and come back the same day,” she said.

I won! No, I did…

It’s a recipe for trouble and it will be down to Israel’s veteran president, 85-year-old Shimon Peres to sort it out. In sum, Livni of the ruling Kadima centrists, has a one-seat lead over former premier Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud. But neither party has as much as a quarter of the seats in the Knesset. Cue possibly weeks of haggling among the parties on forming a coalition government. By tradition, Peres ought to ask the leader of the biggest party – thus far, Livni – to try and build a cabinet first. But Netanyahu, rejecting her offer of joining her in a national unity government, says that overall the new parliament has a right-wing majority and that he is therefore in the better position to forge a stable administration.

Peres is no stranger to Israel’s convoluted coalition arithmetic. In 1984, he agreed to one of the weirdest election outcomes seen when, as left-wing Labour party leader, he did a deal with Yitzhak Shamir of Likud whereby the two spent two years each as prime minister during the four-year term of the parliament. There has been talk again today of the famous “rotation”, though few remember it with much fondness and recall a time of general political stalemate. Anxious to push for peace in the Middle East after Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip last month, new U.S. President Barack Obama will be among those concerned at the gridlock.

Also likely to get more attention in the coming days may be perennial talk of electoral reform in Israel, notably restricting seats in parliament to fewer parties in an effort to promote larger, more stable blocs. Avigdor Lieberman, the far-right Russian-speaking immigrant whose Yisrael Beiteinu party leapt past Labour into third place, proposes raising the threshold for winning seats in parliament from the present 2 percent to 5 percent – a level in line with, for example, Germany, where 5 parties currently sit in parliament compared with the dozen expected to have seats in the Knesset. The Israeli parliament’s web site notes some of the other ideas for electoral reform that have been discussed. The complex party matrix is, however, an obstacle in itself to reform of that system.

Lieberman, a potential kingmaker whose rhetoric has alarmed Arabs at home and abroad, also wants a strong presidency for Israel to cut through decades of deadlock as he sees it. For now, the president has few clear-cut powers beyond the ceremonial. But Peres (right), who has been a leading political figure throughout Israel’s 60-year history, now finds himself with potentially enormous influence in his choice of who will form the next government. Without a written constitution, he has a variety of laws, parliamentary regulations and 60 years of tradition to consider as he looks for a solution.

Confused? So must Peres be as he tries to untangle what the Yedioth headline calls the ”Political Knot”.

(PICTURES: Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper front page, Feb 11, 2009. REUTERS/Kineret Kaufman; Israeli President Shimon Peres looks through binoculars. www.president.co.il )

It ain’t over

A lesser blog than this one might resort to some trite cliche about how ‘it ain’t over until the fat lady sings’.

We will refrain – but it is tempting.

Despite taking the most Knesset seats according to exit polls after Israelis went to the polls – Tzipi Livni is still a long way from being anointed as Israel’s new Prime Minister.

Israeli exit polls – like tonight’s that give Livni a two seat lead over her rival Benjamin Netanyahu - have foxed us in the past.

In the primary elections for Livni’s Kadima party last year – the first exit polls had her leading her rival Shaul Mofaz by a significant margin. As the night wore on it became evident that the two were much, much closer than originally thought to the extent that there were some calls for a recount.

Like a hurricane…

Amid fears that voters would stay away from Israel’s polling stations because of bad weather, apathy born of a coalition-based political system that forces elections every two years or so and a lacklustre campaign overshadowed by the Gaza war – you knew at least these guys would show up at the ballot box.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, Ehud Olmert and Avigdor Lieberman all voted early - hoping that their supporters would follow them to the polling stations.

Lieberman – who voted near his home in the West Bank Jewish settlement of Nokdim – said even a hurricane could not keep his supporters away.

Early voter turnout numbers suggested he’s right with some estimates suggesting voting was proceeding at a higher pace than in the last election held in 2006 under sunnier skies.

And anyone who missed the handshaking, baby-kissing and ‘on message’ soundbites of a political campaign in the build up to the elections need not fear. After casting their ballots the candidates are all spending the rest of election day working the crowds in a blizzard of visits to as many different polling stations as they can get to.

Meanwhile, it seems another storm was averted when police intervened to keep far-right Jewish politicians out of an Arab-majority town in the north of Israel.

Tzipi Livni – man of the moment?

Sex has rarely been far from centre-stage in an otherwise low-key campaign for Israel’s election on Tuesday. The fact that the ruling Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni is a woman has, however, been largely debated by allusion and suggestion, often in a  far from gentlemanly way in the still macho world of Israeli politics. So it’s striking then, in the campaign’s final days, to see Livni herself, bidding to become the country’s first woman leader since Golda Meir in the 1970s, putting the issue front and centre. Take a look at this poster, photographed in Jerusalem by my colleague Jerry Lampen.  It reads, in French, “Tzipi Livni – Man of the Moment”, or perhaps “The Right Man for the Job”. It looks like a direct response to repeated attacks from right-wing opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu especially that “she” is not ready to lead a country facing threats on numerous fronts. “She’s not up to the job,” runs one ad from Netanyahu’s Likud party. It shows Livni, slumped, with her head in her hands.

On Tuesday at 10 p.m.  (2000 GMT) we should know if Livni has been able to turn around Netanyahu’s opinion poll lead. Even if she does, it is not guaranteed that she can form a coalition government. The reason this election is being held over a year early is because Livni, taking over from the corruption-hit Ehud Olmert, was unable to cobble together a workable coalition. As my colleague Jeffrey Heller had predicted when she took over her party’s leadership, many believed the former soldiers running the other leading parties found it hard to accept her. Some saw the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party to join her cabinet as a reflection of religious sexism. That wasn’t the official reason. But Livni, a secular denizen of liberal Tel Aviv, did go out of her way, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to appeal to religious tradition. She donned monochrome clothing and swapped her favoured pant suits for long skirts when meeting Shas leaders. Even so, the Orthodox press would not even print her picture. They would airbrush her out of group photos. Or, as for other women, they might photoshop her into “a tree, or something”, one journalist at an ultra-Orthodox paper told my colleague Dan Williams.

Livni seems to have been reluctant to “play the woman card” early in the campaign, focusing on her record. But observers have detected a clear strategy to play the men at their own game. Both Netanyahu and Labour party leader Ehud Barak were commandos, Barak indeed is Israel’s most decorated soldier. Livni has pushed her family credentials – her parents were famed guerrilla fighters against the British and Arabs in the 1940s – and her own shadowy past in the Mossad intelligence agency. This TV ad showing a pixellated figure intones a list of career highlights down the years: “… he served in the Mossad … he served as foreign minister…” and so on. “No one would doubt he could lead the government.” Then the figure is revealed as Livni and the narrator says, “If only he wasn’t… a woman.” Hitting back at snide chauvinistic comments that, as a Mossad agent in Paris in the early 1980s she did only menial chores, Livni told an audience in Tel Aviv last week: “I make decisions, not coffee.”

With the poll gap narrowing sharply in the final days, the gender issue could be crucial.  Rina Bar-Tal, chairwoman of the Israel Women’s Network,  told my colleague Allyn Fisher-Ilan that Likud’s poster jibe at Livni that “the job is too big for her” – with clear emphasis on the final pronoun - could backfire on Netanyahu. Bar-Tal said: ”There are women who pass by these posters and say, ‘I wasn’t going to vote for her but I certainly will now.’”

So is Tzipi Livni the man of the hour? If she makes it through, she can always recall what Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion said of Golda Meir: “She’s the only man in the cabinet.”

http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2008/09/21/tzipi-livni-as-israels-next-golda-meir-well-not-so-fast/

A yawning gap

With just two days to go before Israel’s general election, opinion polls show more than a quarter of the electorate is still undecided.

Call it the yawning gap in an election race that’s largely been one big snooze.

Israelis could be forgiven for failing to be energised by a lacklustre campaign waged by familiar faces and interrupted by a 22-day offensive in the Gaza Strip. Political positions are well-known and well-entrenched.

Big campaign rallies have become a tiresome thing of the past in a country that has held five national elections in the past 10 years. But the leading candidates have been hitting the campaign trail harder in recent days.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, head of the ruling, centrist Kadima party, played DJ during a visit to a dance club in Tel Aviv.