One Israel. Fakta Yang Perlu Di Ketahui
Background
One Israel was formed by Labor leader Ehud Barak in the run-up to the 1999 elections with the aim of making Labor appear more centrist and to reduce its secularist and elitist reputation amongst Mizrahi voters (Gesher was led by prominent Mizrahi politician and former Likud MK David Levy whilst Meimad is a religious party) modelled on Tony Blair's transformation of the British Labour Party into New Labour.[1] The coalition agreement gave Gesher the number three spot on the list (behind Barak and Shimon Peres), two other safe positions and a promise that Levy would get a ministerial position. Meimad were promised one safe spot on the list and a ministerial position for a member who did not make it into the Knesset.
In the run-up to the election, surveys predicted the party would win 33 seats. However, although One Israel did emerge as the largest faction in the Knesset, its 26 seats was the lowest ever by a winning party (Labor's 34 in the 1996 elections whilst running alone had been the previous low). Of the 26 seats, Labor took 22, Gesher 3 and Meimad one. As per the pre-election agreement, Levy was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Meimad's Michael Melchior was made Minister of Social and Diaspora Affairs.
Barak, who had beaten Binyamin Netanyahu in the election for Prime Minister, had to form an unstable coalition government with six other parties: Shas, Meretz, Yisrael BaAliyah, the Centre Party, the National Religious Party and United Torah Judaism.
Barak's participation in the Camp David Summit with Yasser Arafat in summer 2000 led to Gesher pulling out of the alliance on 7 March 2001. On 7 May the alliance was joined by the single member New Way faction, but on 15 May 2001 it ceased to exist, as the parliamentary group was renamed Labor-Meimad.
After the party's collapse, Barak was investigated following allegations that the One Israel had broken the party funding law by allowing money from abroad to be directed into campaign funds through non-profit groups in order to get around spending limits. State Comptroller Eliezer Goldberg had already fined the party 13 million shekels for breaking fund-raising laws.[2] It later became known as the "Barak Organisation Affair".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Israel
Barak’s ‘One Israel’
By Tzvi Fleischer
Israeli Opposition Leader Ehud Barak has had a good couple of weeks. First, on March 4, he managed to put together the "One Israel" bloc, the linchpin of his plans to re-position his Labor party to gain more swing votes and deliver him government in the Israeli elections scheduled for May 17. Then, the results of an inquiry by the Israeli State Comptroller, released on March 15, cleared Barak of any improper conduct during the 1992 Tzeelim training accident, hopefully clearing him of allegations which have dogged his political career since he retired as IDF Chief of Staff to eventually become Foreign Minister under Shimon Peres in 1996. And finally, opinion polls have taken a turn for the better for Barak, moving him from a position where he was at best neck and neck with Prime Minister Netanyahu to a position where he seems to have opened up a lead over Netanyahu of at least five percentage points (although Israeli opinion polling is notoriously inaccurate).
Israeli political analysts have begun to rethink their political wisdom. A few weeks ago, the majority view was that, barring a major scandal or political shake-up, Netanyahu was more likely than not to retain government. Today, the majority view is that election results are at this point too close to call. However, so far Barak is doing everything right.
One Israel is a new electoral coalition of Labor, the Gesher party associated with former Likud Foreign Minister David Levy, and Meimad, a party that marries a religiously observant supporter base and dovish views on the peace process. Under agreements signed between the three, the combined One Israel list will see the Labor party list of candidates, established in party primaries last month, modified to include a number of candidates from the two other parties. Gesher is to get three safe positions for its candidates, including the Number 3 spot (behind Barak and former party leader Shimon Peres) for Levy, and a promise that Levy can have a senior ministerial position in any Barak government. Meimad receives one safe slot, one doubtful slot, and a promise that a Meimad leader who is not a Knesset member will be a cabinet minister. (Changes to Israeli electoral laws in 1992 make it permissible for up to half the Cabinet to non-elected.)
The One Israel concept has been pursued by Barak since last year as a way to make his candidacy more acceptable to the large number of Israelis who would never vote for Labor. For many Israelis, Labor has been seen as elitist, leftist, snobbish and dominated by European secular Jews (Ashkenazi) to the exclusion of both the large number of Israelis who hail from the Middle East and North Africa (Sephardi) and the religiously observant. One Israel has been Barak’s attempt to cure that stigma. It is an idea that is modelled on several forebears; one is Tony Blair’s transformation of the British Labour Party into "New Labour," another is the "One Jerusalem" coalition developed by the long-serving Labor-aligned Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kolleck, which kept him in power for more than 20 years despite the unpopularity of the Labor party in the city generally.
The specific parties that One Israel brings into the Labor fold theoretically represent precisely those political sectors which have been most suspicious of Labor, and which Labor most needs to reach out to if it is to have any chance of securing government.
Levy and his Gesher movement offer Labor the opportunity to obtain greater support among Jews hailing from the Middle East and North Africa. Sephardim are generally poorer on average than Ashkenazim, often live in outlying areas with high unemployment, and generally resent what they see as the condescending attitude of the Ashkenazim who largely dominate the country’s elites. They also frequently blame Labor, in power from 1948 to 1977, for the poor economic conditions and social discrimination they experienced during the early years of the state.
Levy is of Moroccan origin, and himself the product of one of the poorer Sephardi neighbourhoods. He was originally a protege of Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin, but after Begin’s departure from the political scene, came into conflict with his successors, Shamir and Netanyahu, over social welfare for his constituents and his own ambitions within the Likud party. This eventually led to the formation of his Gesher party, first as a faction within the Likud and later as an independent party. Conflicts over Netanyahu’s failure to implement promised social spending led Levy to leave the governing coalition last year. Barak has been reaching out to Sephardi voters since his selection as Labor leader, for instance, by offering a public apology for Labor’s past policies, and clearly hopes that the addition of Levy and Gesher can win him some votes in the Sephardi sector.
One Israel faces significant competition for Sephardi votes from the Centre Party leader Yitzhak Mordechai, a Kurdish Sephardi, and the religious Shas party, which is able to garner almost all the religious Sephardi vote.
Meimad, it is also hoped, can attract some religious voters to Labor. Religious voters, who are about 20% of the Israeli population, are even less likely to vote for Labor than Sephardi voters. In many religious neighbourhoods in 1996, votes were 98% for Netanyahu, and only 2% for Labor leader Peres.
For its future political survival Labor must increase its vote among religious and Sephardi Israelis because demographics are against the Labor party. Political analysts say that changes in Israeli population demographics have made the right-left divide in the Israel population approximately 55%-45% since the late 1970s. And since this period, the Likud has come out ahead in most of the elections. Furthermore, the faster population growth in the religious and Sephardi communities, as well as the influx of immigrants from the Soviet Union, is making matters worse for Labor as time passes. Unless Labor can re-position itself to capture larger segments of these three communities, it may gradually drift into perpetual opposition and political irrelevance.
This is one reason that, unusually for Israel and despite being Israel’s most decorated General, Barak has chosen to focus on social issues as the centrepiece of his campaign. While Netanyahu hammers his ability to protect Israel’s security in radio and television interviews, Barak has used many election appearances as opportunities to tell stories about elderly women unable to get hospital treatment, and about the effects of unemployment on families, and to promise remedies. His hope is to gain a "hip-pocket vote" from some segments of the Sephardi community, and as part of this process he needs to overcome the stigma against voting Labor to do it.
Levy, in part, gives Barak this opportunity and he was quick to exploit it. Within days of the signing of the One Israel agreement, Levy and Barak were out campaigning together in several poor towns with a heavily Sephardi population, normally Likud heartland.
However, there are some positive signs. Barak’s success in getting his One Israel project off the ground seems to be reflected in improved poll numbers. Polls in late February had placed Barak barely neck and neck in a one-on-one contest with Netanyahu. A poll on March 13 showed Barak ahead on two party preferred by 5%. And Barak also continues to increase his lead over the third major candidate, former Defence Minister Yitzhak Mordechai of the new Centre Party.
On top of the One Israel success and the positive polls, Barak seemed particularly pleased with the results of report by Israel’s State Comptroller, an independent auditing and investigation body, into the 1992 Tzeelim II training accident. Barak was accused by some of the families of the 5 soldiers killed at Tzeelim of having fled the scene in his helicopter without seeing to wounded soldiers or taking one severely wound man, who later died, with him, and in newspapers reports of possibly having orchestrated an army cover-up of the circumstances behind the incident. When the report was released on March 15, Barak told the media "The blood libel to which I fell victim for several years, as a man and as chief of staff, comes to an end today." The report exonerates him of both charges: it found that he did not leave until after all the wounded had been evacuated, and that there had been no cover-up.
Still, despite the gains of the past two weeks, there are almost two months until polling day, and likely, a further run-off poll to decide the Prime Ministership will be required two weeks after that. Despite his current poll lead, Israeli political experts do not rate Barak’s chances as more than even because there is still a large undecided segment, and the majority of undecided voters are aligned with the Israeli right and most likely to vote as they have in previous elections. Both these facts indicate that most of these votes will go to Netanyahu.
It is also the case that Prime Minister Netanyahu has been a much better media performer than Barak. It remains unclear whether Barak can overcome this clear disadvantage in the long run, especially as the fight for undecided voters heats up.
Furthermore, other parties have been moving to form alliances to counter Barak’s One Israel. The small right-wing Herut party of Benny Begin, the son of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, has set up a joint electoral list with two other small right-wing parties, Moledet and Tkuma. Likud is talking to the right-wing Tsomet party, led by another former IDF Chief-of-Staff Raful Eitan, which is also likely to include some defectors from Gesher who did not follow Levy into the One Israel combination.
Barak has had a couple of good weeks, and the truth is, he badly needed them. Whether he can sustain his current momentum into an election victory on May 17 is still very much an open question.
http://www.aijac.org.au/review/1999/244/oneisrael.html
Ingin membantu menggerakkan blog ini? sila klik di sini setiap kali anda membaca. Setiap klik amat membantu saya.Terima kasih!
One Israel was formed by Labor leader Ehud Barak in the run-up to the 1999 elections with the aim of making Labor appear more centrist and to reduce its secularist and elitist reputation amongst Mizrahi voters (Gesher was led by prominent Mizrahi politician and former Likud MK David Levy whilst Meimad is a religious party) modelled on Tony Blair's transformation of the British Labour Party into New Labour.[1] The coalition agreement gave Gesher the number three spot on the list (behind Barak and Shimon Peres), two other safe positions and a promise that Levy would get a ministerial position. Meimad were promised one safe spot on the list and a ministerial position for a member who did not make it into the Knesset.
In the run-up to the election, surveys predicted the party would win 33 seats. However, although One Israel did emerge as the largest faction in the Knesset, its 26 seats was the lowest ever by a winning party (Labor's 34 in the 1996 elections whilst running alone had been the previous low). Of the 26 seats, Labor took 22, Gesher 3 and Meimad one. As per the pre-election agreement, Levy was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Meimad's Michael Melchior was made Minister of Social and Diaspora Affairs.
Barak, who had beaten Binyamin Netanyahu in the election for Prime Minister, had to form an unstable coalition government with six other parties: Shas, Meretz, Yisrael BaAliyah, the Centre Party, the National Religious Party and United Torah Judaism.
Barak's participation in the Camp David Summit with Yasser Arafat in summer 2000 led to Gesher pulling out of the alliance on 7 March 2001. On 7 May the alliance was joined by the single member New Way faction, but on 15 May 2001 it ceased to exist, as the parliamentary group was renamed Labor-Meimad.
After the party's collapse, Barak was investigated following allegations that the One Israel had broken the party funding law by allowing money from abroad to be directed into campaign funds through non-profit groups in order to get around spending limits. State Comptroller Eliezer Goldberg had already fined the party 13 million shekels for breaking fund-raising laws.[2] It later became known as the "Barak Organisation Affair".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Israel
Barak’s ‘One Israel’
By Tzvi Fleischer
Israeli Opposition Leader Ehud Barak has had a good couple of weeks. First, on March 4, he managed to put together the "One Israel" bloc, the linchpin of his plans to re-position his Labor party to gain more swing votes and deliver him government in the Israeli elections scheduled for May 17. Then, the results of an inquiry by the Israeli State Comptroller, released on March 15, cleared Barak of any improper conduct during the 1992 Tzeelim training accident, hopefully clearing him of allegations which have dogged his political career since he retired as IDF Chief of Staff to eventually become Foreign Minister under Shimon Peres in 1996. And finally, opinion polls have taken a turn for the better for Barak, moving him from a position where he was at best neck and neck with Prime Minister Netanyahu to a position where he seems to have opened up a lead over Netanyahu of at least five percentage points (although Israeli opinion polling is notoriously inaccurate).
Israeli political analysts have begun to rethink their political wisdom. A few weeks ago, the majority view was that, barring a major scandal or political shake-up, Netanyahu was more likely than not to retain government. Today, the majority view is that election results are at this point too close to call. However, so far Barak is doing everything right.
One Israel is a new electoral coalition of Labor, the Gesher party associated with former Likud Foreign Minister David Levy, and Meimad, a party that marries a religiously observant supporter base and dovish views on the peace process. Under agreements signed between the three, the combined One Israel list will see the Labor party list of candidates, established in party primaries last month, modified to include a number of candidates from the two other parties. Gesher is to get three safe positions for its candidates, including the Number 3 spot (behind Barak and former party leader Shimon Peres) for Levy, and a promise that Levy can have a senior ministerial position in any Barak government. Meimad receives one safe slot, one doubtful slot, and a promise that a Meimad leader who is not a Knesset member will be a cabinet minister. (Changes to Israeli electoral laws in 1992 make it permissible for up to half the Cabinet to non-elected.)
The One Israel concept has been pursued by Barak since last year as a way to make his candidacy more acceptable to the large number of Israelis who would never vote for Labor. For many Israelis, Labor has been seen as elitist, leftist, snobbish and dominated by European secular Jews (Ashkenazi) to the exclusion of both the large number of Israelis who hail from the Middle East and North Africa (Sephardi) and the religiously observant. One Israel has been Barak’s attempt to cure that stigma. It is an idea that is modelled on several forebears; one is Tony Blair’s transformation of the British Labour Party into "New Labour," another is the "One Jerusalem" coalition developed by the long-serving Labor-aligned Jerusalem Mayor Teddy Kolleck, which kept him in power for more than 20 years despite the unpopularity of the Labor party in the city generally.
The specific parties that One Israel brings into the Labor fold theoretically represent precisely those political sectors which have been most suspicious of Labor, and which Labor most needs to reach out to if it is to have any chance of securing government.
Levy and his Gesher movement offer Labor the opportunity to obtain greater support among Jews hailing from the Middle East and North Africa. Sephardim are generally poorer on average than Ashkenazim, often live in outlying areas with high unemployment, and generally resent what they see as the condescending attitude of the Ashkenazim who largely dominate the country’s elites. They also frequently blame Labor, in power from 1948 to 1977, for the poor economic conditions and social discrimination they experienced during the early years of the state.
Levy is of Moroccan origin, and himself the product of one of the poorer Sephardi neighbourhoods. He was originally a protege of Likud Prime Minister Menachem Begin, but after Begin’s departure from the political scene, came into conflict with his successors, Shamir and Netanyahu, over social welfare for his constituents and his own ambitions within the Likud party. This eventually led to the formation of his Gesher party, first as a faction within the Likud and later as an independent party. Conflicts over Netanyahu’s failure to implement promised social spending led Levy to leave the governing coalition last year. Barak has been reaching out to Sephardi voters since his selection as Labor leader, for instance, by offering a public apology for Labor’s past policies, and clearly hopes that the addition of Levy and Gesher can win him some votes in the Sephardi sector.
One Israel faces significant competition for Sephardi votes from the Centre Party leader Yitzhak Mordechai, a Kurdish Sephardi, and the religious Shas party, which is able to garner almost all the religious Sephardi vote.
Meimad, it is also hoped, can attract some religious voters to Labor. Religious voters, who are about 20% of the Israeli population, are even less likely to vote for Labor than Sephardi voters. In many religious neighbourhoods in 1996, votes were 98% for Netanyahu, and only 2% for Labor leader Peres.
For its future political survival Labor must increase its vote among religious and Sephardi Israelis because demographics are against the Labor party. Political analysts say that changes in Israeli population demographics have made the right-left divide in the Israel population approximately 55%-45% since the late 1970s. And since this period, the Likud has come out ahead in most of the elections. Furthermore, the faster population growth in the religious and Sephardi communities, as well as the influx of immigrants from the Soviet Union, is making matters worse for Labor as time passes. Unless Labor can re-position itself to capture larger segments of these three communities, it may gradually drift into perpetual opposition and political irrelevance.
This is one reason that, unusually for Israel and despite being Israel’s most decorated General, Barak has chosen to focus on social issues as the centrepiece of his campaign. While Netanyahu hammers his ability to protect Israel’s security in radio and television interviews, Barak has used many election appearances as opportunities to tell stories about elderly women unable to get hospital treatment, and about the effects of unemployment on families, and to promise remedies. His hope is to gain a "hip-pocket vote" from some segments of the Sephardi community, and as part of this process he needs to overcome the stigma against voting Labor to do it.
Levy, in part, gives Barak this opportunity and he was quick to exploit it. Within days of the signing of the One Israel agreement, Levy and Barak were out campaigning together in several poor towns with a heavily Sephardi population, normally Likud heartland.
However, there are some positive signs. Barak’s success in getting his One Israel project off the ground seems to be reflected in improved poll numbers. Polls in late February had placed Barak barely neck and neck in a one-on-one contest with Netanyahu. A poll on March 13 showed Barak ahead on two party preferred by 5%. And Barak also continues to increase his lead over the third major candidate, former Defence Minister Yitzhak Mordechai of the new Centre Party.
On top of the One Israel success and the positive polls, Barak seemed particularly pleased with the results of report by Israel’s State Comptroller, an independent auditing and investigation body, into the 1992 Tzeelim II training accident. Barak was accused by some of the families of the 5 soldiers killed at Tzeelim of having fled the scene in his helicopter without seeing to wounded soldiers or taking one severely wound man, who later died, with him, and in newspapers reports of possibly having orchestrated an army cover-up of the circumstances behind the incident. When the report was released on March 15, Barak told the media "The blood libel to which I fell victim for several years, as a man and as chief of staff, comes to an end today." The report exonerates him of both charges: it found that he did not leave until after all the wounded had been evacuated, and that there had been no cover-up.
Still, despite the gains of the past two weeks, there are almost two months until polling day, and likely, a further run-off poll to decide the Prime Ministership will be required two weeks after that. Despite his current poll lead, Israeli political experts do not rate Barak’s chances as more than even because there is still a large undecided segment, and the majority of undecided voters are aligned with the Israeli right and most likely to vote as they have in previous elections. Both these facts indicate that most of these votes will go to Netanyahu.
It is also the case that Prime Minister Netanyahu has been a much better media performer than Barak. It remains unclear whether Barak can overcome this clear disadvantage in the long run, especially as the fight for undecided voters heats up.
Furthermore, other parties have been moving to form alliances to counter Barak’s One Israel. The small right-wing Herut party of Benny Begin, the son of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, has set up a joint electoral list with two other small right-wing parties, Moledet and Tkuma. Likud is talking to the right-wing Tsomet party, led by another former IDF Chief-of-Staff Raful Eitan, which is also likely to include some defectors from Gesher who did not follow Levy into the One Israel combination.
Barak has had a couple of good weeks, and the truth is, he badly needed them. Whether he can sustain his current momentum into an election victory on May 17 is still very much an open question.
http://www.aijac.org.au/review/1999/244/oneisrael.html
Ingin membantu menggerakkan blog ini? sila klik di sini setiap kali anda membaca. Setiap klik amat membantu saya.Terima kasih!
No comments
Post a Comment