Elections in Israel: the end of the political left?

Israeli citizens will go to the polls next Tuesday to vote on the members of the country's 19th parliament or Knesset. Current polls suggest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud-Beiteinu slate will be unable to win an outright majority, meaning they will be required to form a coalition, an Israeli political standard.

Yael Golan

But what is new in this election is a further shift to the right, with pollsters stating that 41 percent of Israeli voters now define themselves as right-wing, an increase of seven percent from the last election three years ago.

With hard-right and extreme-right parties looking to fill the space in Netanyahu’s coalition, the Israeli left is increasingly trying to make itself heard in the run-up to the election.

Outside a bar on a corner in downtown Jerusalem, young Israelis have gathered to talk politics in the run-up to the election.

Emmanuelle Moscovitz is one of a number of left-wing Israelis who say that they are keen to vote, but that the sheer number of parties makes choosing more difficult.

Even so, she is clear on the issues that will drive her choice at the ballot box:

“First of all social issues…I think that the social activism that we had here a year and a half or two years ago now never went anywhere, and it needs to be brought to the forefront, which it hasn’t, so I’m looking for a party that will do that. Obviously also anything to do with the settlements, which I’m against.”

In previous elections, parties such as Kadima or Labor were seen as the traditional choice for leftist Israeli voters.

But a short-lived Kadima-Likud coalition and a surge in social activism around the anti-capitalist J-14 protest movement mean that many leftist voters now feel these parties are out of touch with their views.

Hannah Moscovitz explains why she won’t be voting Labor next week:

“With the changes that are happening right now, the Labor is not the left in my opinion. I have a feeling that the Labor is not going to be the left that it was but it’s going to become the centre, which is now the right- everything is shifting.”

One of the parties that has benefited from the J-14 movement is Da’am.

Party leader Asma Aghbaria Zahalka says she is spurred on by their recent surge in popularity, with leftist newspaper Ha’aretz naming her as the person who could spark a new kind of politics in Israel.

“Arabs and Jews can live together, can struggle together against racism and against the fascist right wing in the Israeli Knesset and to be in solidarity with the Palestinian issues. What we say is that this is the only way to gain social justice in Israel. If in ’48 the land was stolen from the Arabs, now in the past twenty years it’s been stolen from the Jews- by the tycoons, by the rich.”

But Da’am could fail to meet its potential without being able to form a coalition from among the splintered leftist parties, including among others the socialist party Meretz, the communist party Hadash and the anti-Zionist party, Balad.

Zahalka says Da’am’s choice of coalition partners will be governed by their attitudes to the wider Middle East:

“We want to build a left here that is against every oppression, and when the people come together to fight for social justice and freedom, we have to support that. This is very obvious to us- and to support the Arab Spring, the left in Israel is very afraid of the Arab Spring. They are afraid of Islam. But we see that there is also a left in the Arab world, not only Islam, and we want to be part of this left.”

Da’am’s message may be seen as radical by some, but for others it doesn’t go far enough. Human rights activist Ronnie Barkan explains why he has become disillusioned with voting altogether:

“I did vote in the past, actually I voted for Da’am then to Hadash and then Balad. But I won’t vote in the upcoming election simply because I don’t think any of these parties challenged the system enough, not in the way that I would have liked them to challenge it.”