Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has achieved three terms totalling nine years in office in a political system notorious for its volatility. Photo / AP
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has achieved three terms totalling nine years in office in a political system notorious for its volatility. Photo / AP
Polls show PM’s gamble on early election may have backfire.
With portraits of the late Menachem Begin on prominent display, the bustling Jerusalem market should have been comfortable home turf for Benjamin Netanyahu.
More than 30 years after he left office, Begin, the founding father of Israel's right-wing Likud Party and one of the country's most distinguished prime ministers, is still revered in Mahane Yehuda's warren of fruit stalls, coffee shops and fishmongers.
Yet Netanyahu - Begin's successor as premier and Likud leader - entered this once solid party stronghold as a supplicant uncertain of a welcome in his own house.
Ahead of tomorrow's general election, the Prime Minister was so worried about his plunging popularity his aides tried to stop the media from attending. With opinion polls showing Likud falling further behind the left-wing Zionist Union, Netanyahu apparently feared being accosted by voters angry about Israel's spiralling cost of living.
By all accounts, the Prime Minister was greeted politely, but not ecstatically. Akiva Eli, 50, who runs a fruit stall, said: "Security isn't everything. You need other things, you need money, you need to help the poor. Netanyahu doesn't solve the problems of the common people."
Netanyahu has achieved three terms totalling nine years in office in a political system notorious for its volatility. But his sure touch seems to have deserted him.
Moshe Shahar, 67, the owner of a delicatessen, said he would not vote for Netanyahu. "We have many poor people in this country, especially Holocaust survivors. He does nothing to help them. He is selfish, he doesn't care about anyone else."
The comments illustrate Netanyahu's predicament in the run-up to a poll he deliberately triggered by sacking two centrist ministers, thereby ensuring the early collapse of his own coalition. That move was prompted by the calculation he would win an increased mandate in fresh elections.
Netanyahu wanted to campaign solely on national security and emerge strong enough to form a more stable right-wing government. He has run a campaign centred almost exclusively on Iran's nuclear programme, which he says is a threat to Israel's existence.
Tzipi Livni, a former government minister and Hatnuah party leader, leaves the stage during a debate in Tel Aviv. Photo / AP
But three opinion polls late last week showed Likud trailing four seats behind the Zionist Union, an alliance between the Labour Party led by Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni's Hatnuah Party.
Netanyahu's political antennae seemed to fail him last month when he responded to an official report on rising house prices and Israel's over-heated property market. "When we talk about housing prices, about the cost of living, I do not for a second forget about life itself. The biggest threat to our life at the moment is a nuclear-armed Iran."
"Until three or four years ago, the most salient issue in Israeli politics was foreign policy and the peace process," said Professor Sam Lehman-Wilzig of Bar Ilan University. "Since then, the big issue has been socio-economic inequality instead of foreign policy."
The conflict with the Palestinians has been conspicuously absent from the campaign. That silence leaves many Israelis uneasy, even if there is little faith in the prospect of peace. Many fear the Palestinian Authority's impending membership of the International Criminal Court, which could see Israeli soldiers pursued for alleged war crimes.
"We feel Israel is isolated from the rest of the world," said Rafael Gaisenberg, 53, an engineer. "I think the isolation is mainly due to Bibi and his policy that we are going to fight the world and we need nobody's help. There is at least going to be some negotiations and some confidence and co-operation if the Zionist Union wins." But the Prime Minister still has a bedrock of loyalists, including Avraham Levy, 62, a fruit seller at Mehane Yehuda market. "I'll vote for him wholeheartedly and with joy. The Zionist Union is ahead and the media is against him. But the problem in Israel is security and it costs a lot of money[people] ... see there's no alternative to him."
Isaac Herzog is the leader of the Zionist Union party. Photo / AP
Aided by such support and Israel's purely proportional voting system, Netanyahu could yet hold power, not least because former supporters might vote for other right-wing or religious parties, which are more natural coalition partners of Likud than of the Zionist Union.
The main candidates
Benjamin Netanyahu
Born in 1949, Netanyahu grew up in America after his father Benzion, a history professor, was considered so right wing in Labour-dominated Israel that he was forced to leave. He served in an elite Israeli army commando unit, rising to captain and was wounded in combat. He was deeply affected by the death of his elder brother Yonatan while leading the 1976 Israeli commando raid to free the passengers of an Air France plane hijacked by Palestinians. He was posted to Israel's embassy in Washington and was later made ambassador to the United Nations. When first elected in 1996, Netanyahu was Israel's youngest-ever premier. If re-elected, he will become the second longest-serving, after the country's founding father, David Ben-Gurion.
Isaac Herzog Until as recently as 2013, Isaac Herzog was a second-rank politician seen by almost nobody as a future prime minister. In that year, he became leader of the Labour Party and the polls suggest he now stands on the brink of defeating Netanyahu. Herzog has benefited from a makeover designed to spruce up his nerdish appearance and improve his high-pitched speaking voice. Herzog's father, Chaim, was the sixth president of Israel and his grandfather was Chief Rabbi. Herzog was born in 1960, served as an intelligence officer, entered the Knesset in 2003 and spent four years as social affairs minister. He has taken Labour into an alliance with a centrist party led by a former rival, Tzipi Livni, to create the Zionist Union.
Tzipi Livni Tzipi Livni began her political career as a member of Likud and a follower of Benjamin Netanyahu, before becoming one of his fiercest opponents. She is the daughter of a senior commander in the Irgun, the Jewish underground that helped to bomb the British out of Palestine in the 1940s. Born in 1958, Livni began her career as an intelligence officer in the Mossad. She later entered the Knesset as a member of Likud and a protege of Ariel Sharon, then a hardline Prime Minister.
