Shrewd Likud How Prime Minister Netanyahu has dominated Israeli politics by capitalizing on ethnic divisions
22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32
34
by Zachary Harris ’22
E
35 36 37 38 39 40 41
illustrator Stephanie Wu ’21
ven after 11 years in office and three indictments for corruption, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu can’t be stopped at the polls. By mid-March, Israel will have had three elections in one year, a tumultuous state of affairs arising from the failures of both Netanyahu’s center-right Likud party and rival Benny Gantz’s center-left Blue and White party to secure a parliamentary majority following elections in April and September 2019. Netanyahu, like US President Donald Trump, has stunned pundits with his apparent immunity to legal and political consequences. However, his grip on power may be rooted in little more than basic demography. A recent study by the Adva Center, a progressive Israeli think tank, combined electoral results from the April and September elections with socioeconomic data to measure the class divide between Likud and Blue and White’s constituencies. The study’s socioeconomic component is drawn from Israel’s official geographic socioeconomic ranking system, which ranks each of the country’s 1,183 municipalities on a scale from poorest to wealthiest. Importantly, the data captures only those municipalities whose residents are eligible to vote in Israeli elections; illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank are counted, while Palestinian citizens in the West Bank, subject to varying degrees of Israeli civil and military control, are not.
33
THE ELECTIONS ISSUE
