As Israel’s major political parties have grown closer on the key issues of security and the economy, other divides are surfacing. These divides, according to Haviv Rettig Gur, hark back to the decades when the left dominated Israel’s government, culture, and society, while the right spoke for the poor, the religious, Mizraḥim, and other non-elite groups. The current electoral campaign suggests that these old cleavages have not disappeared:
[S]upport for the political center-left is concentrated in “large cities,” . . . precisely where Israeli conventional wisdom suggests, while the right is stronger in the geographic and social peripheries, just as it was in [Menachem] Begin’s day. Much has changed over the past five decades, but some of the most basic patterns of Israeli political identity have remained intact.
So when the Likud campaign declares the race to be between “us” and “them,” between patriots and “anti-Zionists,” the explicit personal attack against Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni is only half the story. There is a larger “them” in the right’s political imagination, nebulous, shifting, but undeniably there. Despite ruling Israel for thirteen of the past nineteen years, with Netanyahu himself serving as premier for nine of those, Likud leaders still appeal to the not-yet-forgotten memory of exclusion by that adversary.
Similarly, when the [religious-Zionist] Jewish Home party bases its entire election campaign on the slogan “We don’t apologize anymore,” it too is speaking to this older culture war, the sense that the religious right’s narrative has been shunted aside for too long by the disenfranchising elitism of the left.
These identity politics are less helpful to the left. The party perhaps most clearly identified with socialist politics and a robust welfare state is Meretz, yet Meretz is also the party with arguably the least appeal to the very poor and disenfranchised who loom so large in its ideological narrative. . . . Rightly or wrongly, the party is widely perceived as too secular, too centered on Tel Aviv’s northern suburbs, [and] too Ashkenazi.
Read more on Times of Israel: http://www.timesofisrael.com/an-election-full-of-sound-and-fury