The Israeli government has called for a second general election to take place on September 17, 2019. Accordingly, I’ve decided to continue my series on Israeli politics. It is available as a video below, but if you can’t watch or would prefer not to, a summary has been provided further down. Additionally, feel free to discuss or ask questions in the comments, being mindful of site rules regarding hate speech, threats, or personal attacks.

Disclosure: I am a volunteer for the Stav Shaffir campaign. However, my views stated herein are purely my own.

The Labor Party1Mifleget HaAvoda is the mainstream left-wing party in Israel, and the current incarnation of the Land of Israel Worker’s Party, which essentially ran the country continuously for the first 29 years after independence. However, its share of the vote has declined significantly since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin– often this is credited to demographic shifts among Israeli Jews, but as much if not more credit is due to a lot of simple tactical mistakes and plain old complacency. A lot of the campaign infrastructure you’d associate with a major political party in a country of 9 million people is simply nonexistent.

The Labor Party has not been included in the government since 2013, has not led a government since 2001, and has not led a truly center-left government since 1996. As a result, whoever is leading the Labor Party tends to be blamed when the Likud wins each election, resulting in a revolving door of figureheads culminating in the current leader Avi Gabbay.
Surprise winner of the 2017 leadership election, Gabbay was a former CEO and a former member of the center-right Kulanu Party, and once in charge basically burned every bridge he crossed, culminating in his ousting of his more popular coalition partner Tzipi Livni.

Ultimately, Gabbay ended both their careers, because when Labor received an all-time low of six seats in the short-lived April Knesset, Gabbay announced his retirement from politics entirely. So a new leadership election has been called to take place on July 2, and there are basically three candidates that matter.

Amir Peretz has been a member of the Knesset on and off since 1988. He previously led the Labor Party from 2005-2007 and he was my personal choice to become leader in 2017, which obviously didn’t work out. For some of that time he was simultaneously chairman of the Histadrut, Israel’s federation of labor unions. Peretz remains relatively popular with the party as a whole, but his star has begun to descend. I think this is partly because while he is certainly a more likable and trustworthy leader than Gabbai, he also very much represents the old third-way pro-business approach that has only hurt the party as a whole. I’d say the real contest for the labor leadership is between these two people who I have alluded to in the past.

In 2011, a pair of up-and-coming student politicians named Itzik Shmuli and Stav Shaffir organized a huge protest against the rising cost of living in Tel Aviv which ultimately succeeded in procuring some policy changes from the government. Pretty soon after that, both of them entered the Labor Party and became ridiculously popular, to the embarrassment of the actual leader Isaac Herzog, who you may remember from this incident:

Both Shmuli and Shaffir broke a lot of barriers just by entering politics. Shmuli was the first openly gay member of the Knesset while Shaffir was the youngest member in Israeli history up to that point. It is actually these two who lobbied for the party to elect a new leader through a primary election rather than through the party committee, so they’re already protecting Israeli democracy. And they have a very devoted following of young people in a party with a severe shortage of youth support.

Previous to his political career, Shmuli was president of the National Student Union, and I would say that he is the favorite to win. As long as I have been active in Israeli politics, he has been the most popular person in the room. He received the most votes of any candidate for the party list back in February. And I’ve met a weirdly large number of people all around the country who’ve told me they would vote for Labor if Shmuli was the candidate for Prime Minister. He really just has the Obama charisma where he’s pretty unapologetically on the left but he also brings in a lot of people in who are more moderate.

I would say Shmuli’s biggest flaw is that despite his qualities on stage, he is actually a very private person to a degree that’s unusual in Israeli culture and which a lot of people find standoffish. But it’s a testament to his skills that he’s still the most popular Labor politician in spite of that.

Despite having very similar politics, I would say Shaffir is much more of a base candidate than Shmuli. She has been called the AOC of Israel. For someone who’s only been in the Knesset for six years, and only as a member of the opposition, she’s been astonishingly effective as both a political lightning rod and as a policymaker. The biggest example is probably that she introduced parliamentary hearings to Israel. And as you might suspect from that, she’s been a big champion for reining in corruption, highlighting economic inequality, rights for the disabled, the environment, and the peace process.

However, Shaffir is currently 34 years old in a country where potential Prime Ministers tend to skew even older than US Presidents. At the same time, she’s clearly a very effective politician, but she’s also very emphatically representative of Tel Aviv in a way that is very unusual in Israeli politics.

Overall, Shaffir carries herself very much in the vein of an American politician, through her advertising and her penchant for giving speeches in English that has no obvious appeal here. So you may be even more surprised to learn that this is a deliberate strategy. Part of the reason Likud has done so well in recent decades is that Israeli election laws allow foreign campaign donations, and the Israeli right has had a very steady stream of revenue from evangelical Christians in the United States. Shaffir, as someone very conscious of Israel’s image abroad and the almost total lack of interest within Israel of promoting Israeli progressivism on the global stage.

Voting takes place on 2 July and is open to all current dues-paying members of the Labor Party. If no candidate receives at least 40% of the vote, a runoff will take place on 9 July. Most polls have shown Amir Peretz leading the field, though the most recent surveys have shown him below that 40% threshold. Most polls show Shmuli in second place, but some have shown Shaffir. And with a voter pool of fewer than 200,000 party members, it’s anyone’s race.

Other News in the Israeli Election:

Avigdor Lieberman, the man arguably responsible for causing this election, has stated that his newly-revitalized Yisrael Beitenu party will only sit in a national unity government led by both Blue & White and Likud– the implication being that he will hold the government hostage until Netanyahu resigns. Ideologically, this suits Lieberman’s desire for a fully secular government.

The center-right party Kulanu has merged with Likud. However, even as a combination they are now polling worse than Likud did on its own in the April election. News for the right has worsened as certified terrorist group Otzma Yisrael has withdrawn from the United Right bloc, imperiling the religious right’s ability to hold any seats at all.

Meanwhile, the Arab blocs Hadash-Ta’al and Ra’am-Balad have announced that they are reuniting to form the Joint List. Additionally, Nitzan Horowitz has replaced Tamar Zandberg as

Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak (1999-2001) has announced his return to politics at the head of a new center-left party. Barak is a deeply problematic figure both politically and personally, but remarkably his new party does not appear to be spoiling the chances of other left-wing blocs– and he’s looking to make a deal with either Labor or Blue & White.

If it sounds like the left is coming together while the right comes apart, nobody would agree more than the Prime Minister himself. As his wife Sara Netanyahu pleads guilty to misuse of public funds, and his own trial looms, Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein (Likud) has floated a proposal to cancel the election. The Knesset’s legal advisor and the Attorney General agree that such a move would not merely be illegal but impossible– having dissolved itself, the Knesset is only allowed to vote on procedural issues during an election cycle, and even ignoring that canceling elections would require a 2/3 majority.

At this point, however, that is the best Netanyahu can hope for. At this point, his chance of holding office through the end of this year grows narrower by the hour.