The Central Elections Committee opened 2013 by doing something unusual. Rather
than telling parties and campaign managers how they should behave and promote
themselves, the committee made a suggestion to reporters on Tuesday: Write more
about small parties.
Central Elections Committee chairman Justice Elyakim
Rubinstein asked journalists if they could give more attention to smaller
parties, which may or may not make it into the next Knesset.
Of course,
Rubinstein wrote, those parties wouldn’t get the same amount of coverage as,
say, Likud Beytenu or Labor, but they deserve a chance to be heard.
With
34 parties running and 12 expected to make it into the Knesset, not everyone can
get attention, but here are some of the most interesting:
Eretz Hadasha
The smug
bad-boy party of this election season is the anti-corruption Eretz Hadasha list.
Party leader Eldad Yaniv, an attorney and former adviser to Defense Minister
Ehud Barak, has put out a series of YouTube videos called The System that has
turned him into both a blogger favorite and – at least in his own mind – Public
Enemy Number One of the mainstream press.
Together with actor Rani Blair,
third on the Eretz Hadasha list, Yaniv reveals in the videos that the most
powerful people in Israel act like “the Cosa Nostra” and tells secrets that make
them “go in their pants,” as he says in one of the clips. The party has produced
10 The System videos in which Yaniv tells insider stories from his past as a
political operative, “without fear,” as Eretz Hadasha’s slogan says. The first
clip claims that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu keeps dollars in his socks,
which he uses to pay for dirty political maneuvers. Blair plays the role of the
unconnected average citizen, asking questions and acting appalled at Yaniv’s
tales.
Recently, the party has gone after Yediot Aharonot publisher Amnon
Moses, claiming that he controls politicians and endangers
democracy.
They protested outside his office and bought a billboard in
Tel Aviv – Moses reportedly passes it on his commute – which Eretz Hadasha
claims the Yediot publisher pressured Tel Aviv Mayor Ron Huldai to
remove.
Eretz Hadasha candidate Merav David, a former Ma’ariv political
correspondent and second on the list, refused to be interviewed for an article
that isn’t exclusively about her party, saying that she is sure it will pass the
2- percent election threshold. Though Yaniv and Blair are the highest-profile
candidates in Eretz Hadasha thanks to their video series, David is second
because the list was arranged by gender and is half male, half female.
We
Are Brothers
Although there have been Ethiopian immigrant MKs, We are Brothers
leader David Abebe says they have not done enough. His sectorial party will be
more effective than the Ethiopian MKs in Kadima, Likud, Shas and Labor have
been, Abeze explains, because they will be elected by the immigrant community
and will feel accountable to its members.
“The government brought us to
Israel but doesn’t know how to absorb us, and it’s getting worse each year,” he
states.
By not helping the Ethiopian community, Abebe says, the country
is losing out on a new, educated generation – including members born in Israel –
who feel they are discriminated against in school and in employment after
serving in the army.
The name “We Are Brothers” is a quote from Genesis and is meant to emphasize
that even if Jews are different from one another, they are still
family.
Abebe also criticizes the “cynical use of the Ethiopian community
to get donations from abroad.”
“The government should be ashamed” of the
way it treats the Ethiopian community, he says, which is why he calls for
members of the community to vote “We Are Brothers.”
“This time, no black
man will vote for a white man,” Abebe says emphatically, predicting that his
party will get four seats in the 19th Knesset.
The Green Leaf – Liberal
List
Green Leaf is best known for the issue its name describes, one that it has
been promoting since the party first ran for the Knesset in 1999 – the
legalization of cannabis.
In the current election, the party has shorn
its dreadlocks and cleaned up its act to promote a wider economic stance,
straddling the border between classic liberalism and libertarianism, with an
agenda that party leader Yaron Lerman promises will bring freedom of the
individual.
Green Leaf’s goals include separating religion and state;
transportation on Saturdays; freeing up land belonging to the Israel Land
Authority; and lowering all taxes.
“The last government raised all taxes
– on gas, electricity, even beer,” Lerman explains, “and the tax money doesn’t
go to all citizens, it goes to pressure groups like large unions, haredim and
corporate tycoons.”
In addition, Lerman says his party calls for a school
voucher system, which would allow for governmentfunded education while
encouraging competition and giving parents freedom to choose schools and
teachers for their children, rather than giving that power to Education Ministry
bureaucrats.
Of course, Green Leaf still wants Israelis to be able to
“smoke pot at home with no police bothering you,” the party leader
emphasizes.
Lerman points to two Geocartography polls not sponsored by
Green Leaf in recent weeks, which show the party passing the election threshold
with three seats, and explains that major pollsters only call landlines, which
means they don’t reach as many young voters – Green Leaf’s main demographic –
who only use cellphones. Mock elections at Ben–Gurion University of the Negev
and Bar-Ilan University gave Green Leaf 10 and seven seats, respectively, Lerman
adds.
Da’am: The Workers’ Party
On the opposite end of the economic
spectrum is Da’am, a party that is proud to be socialist and puts ending
privatization and nationalizing natural resources at the top of its list of
priorities.
Da’am’s Asma Agbaria Zahalka, the only female Israeli Arab
leading a party running for the next Knesset, emphasizes that her party, unlike
Hadash, the other Arab-Jewish party with socialist economic views, is fighting
the patriarchal nature of Arab society and refuses to pander to hamulot, or Arab
clans. Three of the party’s top five candidates are women.
For those to
whom Agbaria Zahalka’s name sounds familiar, she is not related to Hadash MK Afo
Agbaria.
Her husband is a distant relative of Balad leader Jamal Zahalka,
though she says her political opinions are light-years away from
his.
Agbaria Zahalka is one of the leaders of the Workers Advice Center,
which she says represents thousands of working-class people, including farmers,
truck drivers and others, and fights for employment for Arab women, 80% of whom
are unemployed. She calls for an end to the system of contract work, which she
compares to slavery.
In addition, Da’am believes that “social justice
cannot exist without diplomatic justice, which includes ending the occupation,
dismantling settlements, making peace with the Palestinians and lowering the
defense budget in order to invest in the public’s welfare,” the party leader
explains, calling for affirmative action in that investment for Israeli Arabs
and anyone living in the periphery.
“Jews and Arabs cooperate
successfully in Da’am,” Agbaria Zahalka says. “I call for people not to vote
based on sector, but based on class, to promote the struggle of the
workers.”
Koah Lehashpia
Two parties are chipping away at Shas’s voter
base of haredim and traditional Sephardim in this election.
The first is
Am Shalem, started by rebel Shas MK Haim Amsallem, and the second is Koah
Lehashpia, or “The Power to Influence,” started by Rabbi Amnon
Yitzhak.
Yitzhak is not running on the party’s list, but plans to serve
as a spiritual guide; much like Rabbi Ovadia Yosef does for Shas. He also has
said he does not plan to vote for his own party and boycotts all Knesset
elections, as he is anti-Zionist. Yitzhak has said in the past that Adolf Hitler
and Theodor Herzl were the “greatest criminals” in recent Jewish
history.
Yitzhak is a leader of the “Shofar” movement, which claims to
have convinced thousands of Jews to become haredi.
The rabbi is probably
best-known outside of the haredi world for his fire-and-brimstone speeches, in
which he describes the punishments in hell awaiting secular people. He also
holds mass becoming-religious ceremonies, in which women cover their hair and
men remove earrings and don tzitzit [ritual fringes].
Yitzhak’s speeches,
which can be found on YouTube, often warn of the evils of technology. Although
Yitzhak has said that smartphone owners should be excommunicated, he was
recently seen using an iPhone.
In addition, Yitzhak claims to have
prophesied the coming of Operation Pillar of Defense as a punishment to the
Israeli government for attempting to force haredim to enlist in the
IDF.
As such, one of Koah Lehashpia’s positions is to relegislate the
“Tal Law,” which exempted haredi yeshiva students from serving in the army so
that they can learn Torah. The party also calls to lower the cost of basic food
items by cancelling VAT and subsidizing bread so that it will cost one shekel
per loaf. In addition, Koah Lehashpia’s platform includes raising speed limits
on highways to 140 kilometers per hour; nationalizing kibbutz lands and building
homes for young couples on them; increased furloughs for criminals in prison;
and for rabbinical ordination to be considered equivalent to a Bachelor’s Degree
from a university.
All of these parties hope to pass the election
threshold after January 22, though Green Leaf and Da’am have failed at the
effort before. Only time will tell whether a Koah Lehashpia MK will tell his
fellow lawmakers about hell or Yaniv will have met the people he has been
bad-mouthing face-to-face when the 19th Knesset is sworn in.
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