Israeli elections 2015

[rmi5]

So far, we have one Likud, one Kulanu, and one Zionist Union votes in this thread. @Falcon29 whom did you vote to?

 

[Ahiska]

Why Netanyahu again...............
Israel needed change and i thought Hezog can win.....

 

[Archdemon]

So far, we have one Likud, one Kulanu, and one Zionist Union votes in this thread. @Falcon29 whom did you vote to?

Mahane HaZioni.

 

[Falcon29]

So far, we have one Likud, one Kulanu, and one Zionist Union votes in this thread. @Falcon29 whom did you vote to?

I voted for Hamas.

 

[Solomon2]

After electoral trouncing, what future for the Israeli left?
A lot of lessons can be gleaned from Tuesday’s results. Some of them might be uncomfortable
BY HAVIV RETTIG GUR March 18, 2015, 2:26 pm

Israeli supporters of the Zionist Union party react to exit poll figures outside the party's headquarters on March 17, 2015 in the city of Tel Aviv. (photo credit: AFP/THOMAS COEX)

A lot of groups are licking their wounds after Likud’s trouncing of the Labor-led Zionist Union on Tuesday.

The Israeli left, to be sure, did better than it has done in almost a generation. It rallied around the Labor party, energized the base, sent thousands of volunteers to “get out the vote.”

And it lost. Spectacularly.

In the process, politicians, pundits, pollsters and analysts learned some important lessons – not just in humility, but also in the changing face of the Israeli electorate.

The right learned that Likud is its great indispensable party, the big tent to which it rallies in times of danger. That ethos of underlying unity among the usually bickering factions of the right headed off on Tuesday the left’s most potent challenge in almost two decades. It won’t be forgotten anytime soon.

We all learned that the right knows how to get out the vote. Or, at least, that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu does. His method was simple: talk incessantly about the turnout of the enemy – the left, the Arabs, the shadowy foreign funding behind it all. It wasn’t exactly a noble or honest final few days in Likud’s campaign, but it worked.


Zionist Camp leader Isaac Herzog speaks at the party’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, after the exit polls in the Israeli general elections for the 20th parliament were announced on March 17, 2015. (Photo credit: Hadas Parush/FLASH90

Overall turnout spiked in this election, and the smart money held that this rise would favor the left. It was leftists, after all, who have been missing from previous elections. But in the wake of Likud’s stunning surge in the final count, a surge predicted by no poll and no pollster, the simple fact is inescapable: right-wingers came out to vote, right-wingers who haven’t bothered to vote in recent elections, right-wingers who did not like or support Netanyahu — all felt compelled to save Israel from the prospect of a left-wing victory. In last two hours of voting, a two-point turnout jump over 2013 swelled to a five-point spike. That rush, it’s now fair to say, was of right-wing voters delivering the first “election surprise” of the right.

Each election in recent memory has had an Election Day surprise. The Pensioners Party soared to 7 on Election Day in 2006 after polling two. Yesh Atid hit 19 on Election Day after polling at perhaps 14. But these surprises have only ever happened on the center and left. No longer. Likud pulled off its own surprise, and it did so by winning the turnout race.

Why did turnout rise so dramatically? Simple: the majority of the Israeli electorate continues to distrust the left’s judgment. It is a trust deficit rooted in a more general distrust of Palestinian intentions, of the Obama White House and other touchstones of left-wing policy. In hindsight, it may be one of the bitter ironies of this campaign that Labor’s own slogan, “It’s us or him,” may have done as much to guarantee Netanyahu victory as anything Netanyahu may have done.


Likud supporters celebrate at party headquarters in Tel Aviv on March 18, 2015. (Photo credit: Miriam Alster/FLASH90)

And that brings us to what the left can learn from this race. The despair emanating from left-wing voters and pundits is misplaced. The left did better in this election than it has done in a long time. But the left has spent almost two decades essentially writing off the electorate as too benighted, too trapped in fear or hate to be worth seriously campaigning for. That, at least, has been the explanation of left-wing media outlets such as Haaretz over the years for Benjamin Netanyahu’s continued triumphs at the ballot box. The path to reclaiming an electorate one has ridiculed and despised for so long is a hard one. But, alas, the left will not actually lead Israel without the support of a majority of Israelis. Isaac Herzog is the first leader of the left in quite a few years who seems to understand that.

Luckily for the left, the sun will rise on Thursday morning, and again on Friday, and every day next week too. And eventually, probably sooner rather than later given Israel’s recent history, this new government will fall. Politics do not end in any single defeat.

One of the more long-term questions that arise from this race is whether the left will be able to use this loss as a catalyst for future victory. If, as has been its wont, the left falls back on its traditional rhetoric depicting Netanyahu’s Israel as wracked by famine, poverty and war, and facing imminent collapse, then it will be setting itself up for continued failure. Such talk is hard to take seriously when battling an election; it would be truly dangerous to take it seriously after losing one. The left now needs to build on its success, find new constituencies, develop a “ground game” not just in the two months before an election but in the three years that separate them. Despair will not get it from where it is now to where it needs to be to win.

Finally, the world’s professional Israel watchers, journalists, pundits, think tank analysts, should (but probably won’t) learn an important lesson from this race about Israelis. A recurring theme on the Twitter accounts of foreign correspondents – at least of the overwhelming majority whose opinion of Netanyahu is not favorable – is that Netanyahu won the election through “fear-mongering.”

It is true that Netanyahu explicitly “fear-mongered,” and that this won him his steep lead on Tuesday. But Netanyahu’s international critics fundamentally misunderstand his audience, his electorate, and so deeply misconstrue what exactly he was “fear-mongering” about.

Netanyahu’s critics insist that he fear-mongered about Iran and the Palestinians. He did not – because he doesn’t have to. The Israeli electorate has long ago written off Palestinian politicians as untrustworthy and unable to deliver peace. And it is Iran, not Netanyahu, that has convinced nearly all Israelis from all parts of the political spectrum that Iran is a very real danger to Israel.


An Arab Israeli girl casts her mother’s ballot at a polling station in the northern Israeli town of Umm al-Fahm on March 17, 2015. (photo credit: AFP / AHMAD GHARABLI)

All Netanyahu had to do was to warn, at times in blatantly racist terms, that the left and Arab voters were “turning out in droves.” His fear-mongering was not on the substance of the disagreement with the left – the electorate already mistrusts the left’s judgment on these issues – but simply to warn that the left might win. That alone spiked the Likud vote, even in the cold late-evening hours of Election Day.

The assumption behind the “fear-mongering” accusation is that Netanyahu is the reason Israelis are distrustful of peace initiatives or Iran deals. It is a convenient conceit, suggesting that if one could get rid of Netanyahu the problem would be solved, but it is entirely wrong. The White House’s or European Union’s policy feuds with Netanyahu are not actually with Netanyahu himself, but with the mainstream Israeli electorate that responded so forcefully on Tuesday when they were finally convinced that their country might soon be forced into dangerous new concessions or compromises in a precarious Middle East.

The election turned from a near-rout of the right predicted in poll after poll by the entire panoply of Israeli pollsters into one of the right’s most dramatic victories in decades. The lessons abound: shifting turnout meant that geography didn’t quite play its expected role, settlers switched en masse to Likud even as they disappeared as a pressure group in Likud’s primaries, and the V15 campaign probably ended up mobilizing more rightists than leftists on Election Day.

But the main lesson is also the most obvious one. The left did better on Tuesday than it has in a long time. Yet it only really took its first step on the long road to rehabilitation and victory.

 

[Solomon2]

PA Will Work With 'Any Israeli PM Committed to Two States'
Palestinian Authority reacts to Netanyahu victory, saying it 'expects' the new Israeli gov't 'to recognize the two-state solution.'

By Arutz Sheva Staff
First Publish: 3/18/2015, 4:05 PM

Mahmoud Abbas
Issam Rimawi/Flash 90​

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas will work with any Israeli government that accepts the principle of a two-state solution, his spokesman said after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu won a surprise landslide reelection victory.

"It doesn't matter to us who the next prime minister of Israel is, what we expect from this government is to recognize the two-state solution," Nabil Abu Rudeina said in a statement.

"On this basis, we will continue to cooperate with any Israeli government that is committed to international resolutions."

Rudeina's low-key statement follows an all-out tirade against the Israeli election results by senior PLO official Yasser Abed Rabbo.

Abed Rabbo called on the PA to halt all security coordination with Israel inresponse to the right-wing victory in Israel.

Over the course of the election campaign, Netanyahu's position on a two state solution - in which Israel would be expected to expel all Jews from Judea and Samaria and hand over the territory to the PA - became a topic of some intrigue, particularly during his last-minute, successful attempt to woo nationalist voters by rejecting the concept given the current regional upheaval.

In an interview with Arutz Sheva Netanyahu insisted that he had changed his position since the 2009 Bar Ilan speech, in which he declared support for establishing a Palestinian state. Netanyahu cited a change in the realities of the Middle East as being behind his shift.

However, just days earlier, his office denied a report in which MK Tzipi Hotovely said Netanyahu had renounced the Bar Ilan speech as being "void," saying that this was Hotovely's position, not Netanyahu's.

In terms of the PA's own commitment to "international resolutions", Israeli officials have pointed out that last year's nine-month talks ultimately broke down in acrimony after Abbas violated previous treaties and launched a unilateral diplomatic offensive against Israel in the UN and the ICC.

AFP contributed to this report.

 

[Solomon2]

‘Deep Investigation’ Coming from Congress on U.S. Funding for Anti-Netanyahu Efforts

by Bridget Johnson
Bio

March 17, 2015 - 9:45 am

Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R) said the State Department funding granted to a group lobbying against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “a big, huge deal and warrants some deep investigation.”

OneVoice, a 501(c)3 organization, partnered with anti-Bibi campaign committee V15, which in turn partnered with 270 Strategies — a political consulting firm with more than a dozen staffers who were in leadership roles in President Obama’s re-election campaign. One of those is Jeremy Bird, who served as national field director for Obama’s 2012 campaign and was reportedly working in Israel to defeat Netanyahu.

Kinzinger told Fox “this is a huge, huge issue.”

“I mean, I don’t know at least of overtly before the U.S. government has ever funded an organization that funded a subsidiary whose sole purpose was to overthrow an elected government of an ally, of a friend. I mean, Benjamin Netanyahu is not a major opponent of the United States. He’s a friend of the United States,” the congressman said. “The Israel people are friends. If, in fact, this is true that the State Department — I mean, money is fungible. So money was given to this group, OneVoice, and they gave money to the subsidiary Victory 15, whose sole purpose stated is to overthrow or dis-elect the current government.”

The State Department has denied that OneVoice was involved in the Israeli election, and said the group got its funding before the election was called.

Press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters yesterday that the department has “historically” cooperated with investigations of the variety it will likely now face.

“I mean, in this case, we’ve only seen the reports. We don’t have any more details… I don’t think we’ve had any official notification of this inquiry or this investigation,” Psaki said.

Called out on the assertion that the department “historically” cooperates in congressional probes, one reporter dropped a Benghazi reference: “There’s a certain select committee that I think would disagree.”

“Well, we would disagree that we haven’t cooperated, and so would 40,000 pages and dozens of hearings’ worth of evidence suggest,” Psaki fired back.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) sent a letter to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen earlier this month asking for information on OneVoice’s tax-exempt status. They sent a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry in January asking about any U.S. funding of anti-Netanyahu campaigns.

Zeldin called it “abundantly clear that OneVoice, a U.S. taxpayer funded 501(c)(3), is fully engaged in political activities to oust the Israeli prime minister.”

“It is important for IRS Commissioner Koskinen to assist with our efforts to hold OneVoice responsible for any possible violation of its tax exempt status,” the freshman congressman added. “U.S. law must always be consistently enforced, and the IRS Commissioner must not make any special exception for OneVoice.”

Cruz said the Obama administration “seems much more interested in regime change in Jerusalem than in Tehran.”

Bridget Johnson is a veteran journalist whose news articles and opinion columns have run in dozens of news outlets across the globe. Bridget first came to Washington to be online editor at The Hill, where she wrote The World from The Hill column on foreign policy. Previously she was an opinion writer and editorial board member at the Rocky Mountain News and nation/world news columnist at the Los Angeles Daily News. She is an NPR contributor and has contributed to USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, National Review Online, Politico and more, and has myriad television and radio credits as a commentator. Bridget is Washington Editor for PJ Media.

Read more: Congressman Wants State Department Investigated for Grants to Anti-Netanyahu Group | PJ Tatler

 

[Solomon2]

The 20th Knesset by the numbers: More Arabs and women, fewer Orthodox members

Changes are coming to the 20th Knesset.

The Knesset . (photo credit:MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)

When the 20th Knesset is sworn in on March 31, there will be quite a few quantitative changes in the legislature's makeup, according to Wednesday's results.

The official election results will come on Thursday, after all the votes by soldiers and others who vote away from their hometown are counted, so some of these numbers are subject to changes, though they're likely to be minor.

The 71.8 percent voter turnout is a 16-year peak, the highest since 1999, when it was 78.7%, according to research by the Israel Democracy Institute, and the number of parties that passed the 3.25% electoral threshold is 10, the smallest since the 1992 election.

Likud grew by 10 seats, more than any other party, followed by Zionist Union and The Joint List, which gained three each, when counting the parties in the previous Knesset that make up each one.

The parties that suffered the greatest losses are Yesh Atid, which lost eight seats, and Bayit Yehudi and Shas, which lost four each.

The new Knesset will have 38 new MKs: Nine each from Likud and Kulanu, eight each from Zionist Union and the Joint List, two each from Bayit Yehudi and Yisrael Beytenu, and one from Yesh Atid.

For the second time in a row, the Knesset broke its record for female parliamentarians, with 28, as opposed to 27 in the 19th Knesset. There will be eight female MKs in Zionist Union, six in Likud, four in Kulanu, three in Yesh Atid, two in Meretz and one each in Bayit Yehudi and Yisrael Beytenu. There are two lists in the Knesset with no women in them: Shas and UTJ.

The number of Arab MKs jumped from 12 to 17, in part because the parties making up the Joint List's numbers went up from 10 to 13, and also because Likud and Zionist Union each added an Arab MK.

The number of Orthodox MKs, including religious-Zionists and haredim, dropped from 39 to 28. The haredi parties lost a combined five seats, Bayit Yehudi lost five religious MKs and Yesh Atid lost one, and Hatnua's Elazar Stern, who ran in Yesh Atid, did not make it in to the Knesset. Likud gained two – Jacky Levy and Avraham Ngosa, in addition to Yuli Edelstein, Ze'ev Elkin and Tzipi Hotovely – and Zionist Union gained one - Revital Swed. Kulanu also has one new religious MK, Rachel Azaria.

 

[East or West India Best]

HABIBI won!

 

[rubyjackass]

Two Zoinist Unions votes, 1 for Kulanu, 1 Likud in PDF. Still Bibi made it.

But Zionist Union also gained seats.
@Solomon2 : It is not correct to say the left is demolished, I guess? Zionist Union and Kulanu gained seats. Everyone including Lieberman declined. What do you say? The left and Arabs actually surged.
@500 ,

 

[500]

Interesting that highest Likud (Netanyahu) vote was in Muslim Arab village Arab al Naim:

• Numberof Votes: 238
• Likud: 177
• Joint ArabList: 35
• Other: 19

The 2015 Israeli Election Awards by Deebo | Israellycool
Arab al-Na'im - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Solomon2]

Interesting that highest Likud (Netanyahu) vote was in Muslim Arab village Arab al Naim

link1, link2

 

[GURU DUTT]

Interesting that highest Likud (Netanyahu) vote was in Muslim Arab village Arab al Naim:

• Numberof Votes: 238
• Likud: 177
• Joint ArabList: 35
• Other: 19

The 2015 Israeli Election Awards by Deebo | Israellycool
Arab al-Na'im - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

thank goodness BIBI won an egg on faces of all the israeli enmies from owt side and inside

link

boker tov bro

 

[Ceylal]

The White House administration would like to see PM Netanyahu lose.

Not really..beside the US's influence in Israeli elections is nil.

 

[Falcon29]

PA Will Work With 'Any Israeli PM Committed to Two States'
Palestinian Authority reacts to Netanyahu victory, saying it 'expects' the new Israeli gov't 'to recognize the two-state solution.'

By Arutz Sheva Staff
First Publish: 3/18/2015, 4:05 PM

Mahmoud Abbas
Issam Rimawi/Flash 90​

Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas will work with any Israeli government that accepts the principle of a two-state solution, his spokesman said after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu won a surprise landslide reelection victory.

"It doesn't matter to us who the next prime minister of Israel is, what we expect from this government is to recognize the two-state solution," Nabil Abu Rudeina said in a statement.

"On this basis, we will continue to cooperate with any Israeli government that is committed to international resolutions."

Rudeina's low-key statement follows an all-out tirade against the Israeli election results by senior PLO official Yasser Abed Rabbo.

Abed Rabbo called on the PA to halt all security coordination with Israel inresponse to the right-wing victory in Israel.

Over the course of the election campaign, Netanyahu's position on a two state solution - in which Israel would be expected to expel all Jews from Judea and Samaria and hand over the territory to the PA - became a topic of some intrigue, particularly during his last-minute, successful attempt to woo nationalist voters by rejecting the concept given the current regional upheaval.

In an interview with Arutz Sheva Netanyahu insisted that he had changed his position since the 2009 Bar Ilan speech, in which he declared support for establishing a Palestinian state. Netanyahu cited a change in the realities of the Middle East as being behind his shift.

However, just days earlier, his office denied a report in which MK Tzipi Hotovely said Netanyahu had renounced the Bar Ilan speech as being "void," saying that this was Hotovely's position, not Netanyahu's.

In terms of the PA's own commitment to "international resolutions", Israeli officials have pointed out that last year's nine-month talks ultimately broke down in acrimony after Abbas violated previous treaties and launched a unilateral diplomatic offensive against Israel in the UN and the ICC.

AFP contributed to this report.

PA will enter trashbin of history very soon. PA has been lying to the Palestinian outright in a disturbing manner. All PA cares for is staying in power illegaly at expense of Palestinian rights. This plea by PA is just their way of stating they of course prefer Israeli government in order for Abbas to protect himself. He is illegally staying in power whilst guaranteeing Israel's occupation in mutual relationship. Their time is over. Following PA, the terrorist illegal state of Israel will fall. PA is protective service for Israel.