5 Responses

1. And here comes the obligitory comment from our resident expert on Israeli politics/zionism, akuperma, letting us all know how unreliable Israeli polls are, especially in regards to haredim and arabs.

2. No real changes. Options are: 1) Likud form a government with Hareidi support; 2) Likud forms a government together with Labor, but without hareidim; 3) Labor forms a government with support of the hareidim and the Arabs.

   Hareidi support for a government requires eliminating penal sanctions for draft resistance (though apparentlyu Kulanu and perhaps Bayit Yehudi would not oppose it), so a Likud government with hareidi support is most likely.

3. goofus: all polls are problematic except (as they say in America), the one taken on the first Tursday after a Monday in November.

   People usually try to give the “right” answer to a pollster. If someone comes up to you asking (as a neutral example), do you favor legalization of marijuana, it will affectg the answers if the person is dressed like a 1960s hippie reinactor rather than like a mormon missionary. In America and Israel, the pollsters are identified with the usually left-leaning media, which is why the “left” (Labor in Israel, Democrats in America) typically do better in polls than elections. People from other than western democraties are also more likely to give the “right” answer.

   In the above case, it means the Yachad, Yisrael Beiteinu and the hareidi parties are probably going to do better than the poll (and make the threshold), whereas Meretz might be in trouble..

4. There was an unwritten rule that even the old Labor party adhered to, that the Arab parties would not bee included in the government. Without them, Labor couldn’t form a government, unfortunately, there are too many similarities these days between them.

   The election is a month away. Polls today are meaningless and will change. The more Obama does to harm Israel, the stronger Netanyahu will get. Only Leftist Israelis don’t realize that her’s no friend.

5. to BarryLS1: The original “unwritten rule” was no communists and no revisionists (Labor often had Arab parties supporting them – in fact it ran its own Arab list in early elections). At present both Meretz and Hadash include communists, and Likud, Yisrael Beiteinu, Kulanu, Yesh Atid and Labor (which include Livni) include revisionists. If the left needs the Arabs to form a government, they would probably agree to let them support form outside the government (as Yahadut ha-Torah has done in the past), and the left would probably recruit the hareidim as cover, and since it would allow them to end conscription which is also something important to many on the left.