The diversion game

Netanyahu’s campaign strategy is based on a simple formula: Distract and attack.

By LESLIE SUSSER
Benjamin Netanyahu (photo credit: REUTERS)
Benjamin Netanyahu
(photo credit: REUTERS)
IT SHOULD have been an election over key existential issues pertaining to Israel’s future.
Instead, it has been about a string of scandals that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has cleverly cooked up or latched onto to galvanize his constituency and put his opponents on the back foot.
With little to show for six straight years in office, Netanyahu has been brilliantly manipulating the election agenda. His campaign strategy is based on a simple formula: Distract and attack. This boils down to saying as little as possible on the real issues so as not to give opponents anything to bite into, belittling rivals, discrediting the media and getting the country talking about anything except what really matters.
So far it seems to be working. Netanyahu’s Likud is getting stronger and most other players weaker. The prime minister, however, is taking votes mainly from parties within his own right-wing camp – like Naftali Bennett’s Bayit Yehudi and Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu. His goal is to emerge from the elections as leader of the largest party and so pressure President Reuven Rivlin to give him the nod to form the next government, even if his right-wing bloc does not have a clear-cut majority.
But will his roughhouse tactics continue to reap dividends or eventually backfire? As many as one in four voters are still undecided.
Will they be won over or repelled by the prime minister’s aggressive vacuity? This is where the election could be won or lost.
The election should have been over what kind of Israel the rival candidates are trying to build. In other words, their grand future vision and how they intend to get there. The huge elephant in the room is the Palestinian issue and fading hopes for a two-state solution.
Right-wing parties should be explaining how they intend to maintain a one-state reality and head off growing international ostracism; center-left parties should be spelling out plans to revive efforts to end the occupation and whether these include widening the negotiating process to include moderate Sunni states and a broader regional accommodation.
And, if that fails to materialize, whether they would consider a coordinated occupation-ending unilateral withdrawal.
The center-left needs to explain how it would maintain security in a two-state framework.
But it also needs to drive home the economic implications of failure to move forward – accelerated Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) efforts, reduced investment in Israel and Israeli ventures, and growing pressure on the sale of Israeli goods abroad – and that, on the other hand, an occupation-ending deal would open up new economic vistas. This is what leading business people have been telling Netanyahu, but he, at least for now, has turned his back on their advice.
The main opposition Isaac Herzog-Tzipi Livni Zionist Union has so far refrained from attacking Netanyahu on the far-reaching implications of his do-nothing Palestinian policy.
Party insiders, however, say that a major offensive along these lines is in the works.
Netanyahu has also studiously avoided saying anything on the burning domestic issues of the day. Nor has Likud published a party platform. The idea is to minimize discussion of problems like soaring housing prices and the high cost of living for which Likud – after six straight years of incumbency – could be blamed.
For its part, the Zionist Union has put a detailed “Social Reform Plan” on the table. It proposes increasing government spending to as much as 40 percent of the Gross Domestic Product to upgrade national infrastructure and deal with flagging health, education and welfare services. It also advocates government intervention in the natural gas and housing markets. On the key issue of how best to utilize the country’s still largely untapped huge natural gas resources, it proposes keeping consumer costs down by bringing in new players, regulating prices and having the government pick up the tab on a nationwide gas pipeline grid. On the acute housing problem, it proposes wholesale freeing of state-owned lands for tens of thousands of easily affordable leasing units with tenant rights to buy later.
Moshe Kahlon’s Koolanu has also submitted an economic blueprint, which focuses, inter alia, on drastically reducing bank costs.
And Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid, which is campaigning strongly against public corruption, proposes nationalizing the Jewish National Fund to cut off shady funding of West Bank settlement projects and political parties.
Rather than discuss any of this or submit ideas of his own, Netanyahu combats the implied criticism by deftly changing the subject.
The overarching campaign objective is to establish a Manichean “them or us,” to rouse people into voting by political group identity rather than on issues or perceived interests.
The affair of the empty bottles his wife allegedly recycled to raise petty cash, although presumably not initiated by Netanyahu, played into his hands. Although symptomatic of a failure in the Netanyahu household to draw a line between public and private budgets, it enabled the prime minister to portray his opponents as petty, small-time politicians with nothing really substantive to say against him.
It also enabled him to lay the groundwork for trivializing a critical State Comptroller’s report on the running of his Jerusalem and Caesarea households. A campaign ad shows Netanyahu, the serious leader, engaged in conversation with “the president,” while the opposition raises issues like feeding the goldfish, dirty cups in the sink, snails in the garden.
Netanyahu’s most elaborate diversionary tactic so far has been his scheduled early March “nuclear Iran” speech to Congress. For days it had people arguing about whether or not he should deliver the address, rather than focusing on the economy or the prime minister’s performance in other spheres. Although the decision to make the speech, widely seen as blatant Republican-inspired meddling in America’s internal affairs, is clearly hurting ties with the Obama White House and compromising Israel’s standing in Congress, it strengthened Netanyahu domestically as the protective Churchillian father figure, the national guardian or self-styled “Bibisitter.”
Netanyahu’s readiness to pay a price to highlight the threat a nuclear Iran would pose to Israel also reinforced the Manichean us and them trope, this time the uncaring world on one side, and Netanyahu-led Israel on the other.
With just over a month to go to election day, Netanyahu escalated his media attack, honing in on powerful Yedioth Ahronoth publisher Arnon (Noni) Mozes, accusing him personally of conducting a persistent smear campaign against him and his wife. (This, despite the fact that the recycled bottles affair had originated in another newspaper, Haaretz.) Mozes’ crimes, in Netanyahu’s book, were trying to bring down the government and eliminate the competition – both ostensibly legitimate goals in a democracy.
The attack on Mozes was part of an ongoing media war between Yedioth and the Yisrael Hayom freebie, which is funded by casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and serves as Netanyahu’s political mouthpiece. Netanyahu actually called the election after the preliminary passage of a bill that would have forced Yisrael Hayom to charge. Netanyahu is clearly beholden to Adelson, a major donor to the Republican Party. Some even suggest that Netanyahu’s Congressional speech came at Adelson’s behest.
The offensive against Mozes, however, served Netanyahu’s electoral agenda: It suggested that Yedioth’s criticism of him, although penned by some of the country’s top journalists, should not be taken seriously, as it stemmed from a tainted web of inimical financial interests.
Netanyahu’s next target was the prestigious Israel prize. As acting Education Minister he fired two judges from the literature prize panel and one of the film prize judges.
A procession of judges and short-listed candidates resigned in protest. Netanyahu insisted that the process had been reduced to a small clique of non or post-Zionist radicals, not representative of most of the nation, giving prizes to each other.
In actual fact, it had been a reflection of Israel at its best, recognition by their peers of the work of the country’s outstanding contributors in all fields of cultural, scientific and national endeavor. It was by definition a celebration of the nation’s elite, and rightly so.
By trying to politicize the process, his critics argued, the prime minister had contaminated it. It was, the more kindly among them said, like the king or prime minister of Sweden trying to influence the composition of Nobel Prize committees.
Again, however, the storm served Netanyahu’s campaign. It strongly underlined the us and them theme, we the nation, they the pampered elites. The aggressive head-on tackling of the presumably left-leaning elites was designed to take more votes from Bennett, his main challenger on the far-right. And although he later recanted on the firings on the advice of the Attorney General, the political statement had already been made.
Netanyahu’s political opponents asked how could a sitting prime minister resort to such tactics, putting Israel’s ties with the US at risk, riding roughshod over the free press and impugning the integrity of the intellectual elite. Yet the more seemingly outrageous his electioneering, the more votes he seems to gain.
On a deeper level, Netanyahu is one of the chief architects of the right-tending Israeli public mind. He has skillfully woven tragic elements of the Jewish and Israeli past to promote a sense of victimhood and selfrighteousness, and the concomitant need for an uncompromising fortress Israel against a largely hostile world. It is these deep-seated feelings he himself helped to create that his aggressive campaigning is meant to tap.
Given the pervasive sense of a campaign that lacks gravitas, the media are pressuring the leading candidates to hold an issuesoriented debate. But given his evasive election strategy Netanyahu seems unlikely to agree to participate. He says he will give a final answer when he returns from Washington after his Congressional address in early March. Only if he feels he is behind in the polls is he likely to rise to the challenge.
That could be a mistake. The election, which is too close to call, will likely be settled by the large proportion of as yet undecided voters. The bad news for Netanyahu is that according to focused polling carried out for Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu only one in 10 undecided voters are likely to vote Likud.
Other polls are less dramatic. But they too show waverers choosing the center-left over the right by a majority of two to one.
Netanyahu’s dilemma is that while his abrasive and evasive tactics against the center-left may be resonating among the right, they could fatally undermine his chances among the undecided, and, ultimately, cost him the election.