They were halfway through a liter bottle of Finlandia Vodka when the
“Center-Left” bloc of south Tel Aviv’s Hatikva Park – a half-dozen single moms
barbecuing on Election Day – started talking about how Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu had lost their votes, and how they were all going to vote for Labor’s
Shelly Yacimovich, maybe even Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid, if the vodka and Red Bulls
didn’t slow them down too much.
The moms railed about Netanyahu – in
language not fit for a family newspaper – with 30-year-old Eti Harazi saying,
“Once, all of us were Likud, Likud was in our blood, but today? We can’t vote
for Bibi, he wants a country only for the rich.”
In a refrain repeated by
several other women at the barbecue, Harazi said that while Netanyahu was strong
on security, “he doesn’t care about social issues.”
In addition to their
dismay with the Likud and Netanyahu, they also expressed a general malaise with
Israeli leaders. One woman’s husband shared that sentiment, saying on the phone
from Ayalon Prison in Ramle, where he’s doing a fouryear bid, that “all of the
guys here are either voting a blank ballot or Shas. They don’t have any faith in
the leadership or think that anyone cares about prisoners” – a statement echoed
by a fellow inmate on his cell block who took the line.
Not far away from
the girls’ day out, at an adjacent family barbecue at Hatikva Park, Aharon
Yehezkel – a 46-year-old resident of the Yad Eliyahu neighborhood – said that
while he was voting Shas on his rabbi’s orders, he was “hearing from tons of
people who said, okay, the Likud will win anyway, why not vote for Naftali
Bennett or Shas, to push Bibi right or get more social issues on there?” He
added, “I think Bibi’s really going to eat it in the end.”
Speaking to
residents of the Hatikva neighborhood, a classic workingclass Sephardi Likud
stronghold, it was hard to ignore the fact that very few people said they
planned to vote for the Likud. Virtually everyone asked said they were going for
either Bennett’s Bayit Yehudi party or Shas, with a surprising number expressing
support for Yesh Atid and Labor. Though the man-onthe- street interviews weren’t
scientific, if they are any indication of the final results tonight, Netanyahu
and the Likud-Beytenu list could be facing some stiff odds.
That feeling
was clear in conversations with two Likud-Beytenu volunteers outside the Tiferet
Yosef elementary school on the Hatikva neighborhood’s Hahagana
Street.
The two volunteers, who asked not to be named, said that what
they observed on the ground Tuesday indicated that many people who had supported
Likud for generations were voting Bennett, Shas or Yesh Atid, and that the Likud
was in real trouble.
“It’s the single mothers, people like them,” one
volunteer said.
“People who were always Likudniks will never forgive Bibi
for cutting benefits to the poor; 30 years from now they’ll still be cursing
him.”
The Shapira neighborhood of south Tel Aviv – also heavily working-
class, traditional and Sephardi, was also enemy territory of sorts for Likud,
with only Bayit Yehudi and Shas banners on display. The security guard said he
hadn’t seen anyone from the Likud all day, and that a carload of Labor
supporters had come by for five minutes before leaving.
One of those in
the Shas-heavy crowd was Haim Mula, the 20- year-old Shapira resident who signed
a plea bargain for throwing Molotov cocktails at African migrants’ houses one
night in May. Asked for whom he was voting, he said, “Shas, all of us,” with a
shrug before walking his grandparents out of the polling station.
Not far
from Shapira, along the Neveh Sha’anan promenade in the heart of the African
migrant community, storefront owners expressed a variety of views, showing
support for Tzipi Livni, Lapid, and Shas – with the Likud by no means scoring a
majority.
Shoe store owner Efram Yakobi, 80, who has worked at the store
for 47 years and seen the neighborhood “become a landfill after the [African]
infiltrators moved in,” said he was considering voting for Livni, though in the
past he had voted for Likud and the Alignment, an earlier incarnation of the
Labor Party.
When asked if the anti-migrant stance of Shas, Strong Israel
or Likud Beytenu would influence his vote, he said, “I support that stance, I
think it’s a good thing, but it’s not what will decide my vote” – a statement
that several other store owners repeated.
Another shoe store owner, Avi
Behar, said he would vote Shas like always, adding that while he supported the
anti-migrant protests and “south Tel Aviv has become south Sudan,” the real
reason he was voting Shas was that “they’ll keep our country Jewish. It’s
important we keep our Jewish character.”
Around the corner from Neveh
Sha’anan, on Fein Street – long a center of the city’s sex and drug trade – a
man standing outside the Eroscenter sex store expressed his desire for Bayit
Yehudi to do well in Tuesday’s election.
“I hope they’ll be able to
influence the Supreme Court and the Knesset, where we hear the leftists too
much, and not enough Jewish values,” he said with no hint of irony.
A sex
worker on Fein Street, who asked not to be named, expressed frustration with the
Likud Party, and from the entrance to a brothel, said, “Last time I voted Likud,
but I no longer trust Bibi. He doesn’t care about the people, the pensioners,
the poor. Maybe I’ll vote Lapid.”
Further down the street, outside a
second Eroscenter branch, which also has “private viewing rooms,” a transgender
sex worker and a friend stood outside waiting for punters as three YASSAM patrol
officers in a police cruiser stopped cars and asked drivers what they were
looking for in the underbelly of Tel Aviv.
The two were undecided, and
probably not going to vote, they said, but one thing was certain: Netanyahu
wouldn’t get their vote.
The transgendered one, “Jennifer,” said she
would vote for Haim Amsalem’s Am Shalem party, because he would, in her words,
“stick it to the haredim,” while her friend, Or-ani, had a message for all the
candidates in the 2013 elections, Netanyahu included: “I won’t vote for any of
them; they’re all bigger whores than we are.”