Do Israelis care about settler violence enough to change their vote?

Allison Kaplan Sommer (0:06)

Hello, and welcome to the Haaretz Election Podcast. I'm Allison Kaplan Sommer.

So August is coming to an end. September, the Jewish New Year, the High Holidays are soon upon us. And it is exactly two months until the Israeli elections. I think it is fair to say now that the election campaign has now officially emerged from the slow, sleepy ramp up in the summer. And it is now getting into full swing. Most of the summer, we were focused on the centrist and center-left opposition charting the rise of Gadi Eisenkot as the front runner in the bloc, rivaling Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government coalition parties, bringing the bloc, Eisenkot's bloc, to the brink of the 61 seats needed to form a coalition. And what was crucial then was the question of whether the Arab parties would then be invited after the election to join the Eisenkot coalition.

But over the past week, the action and most of the attention has been focused instead on the rivalries on the right, the far right, and I guess we can call it the extreme, extreme far fringe right, if you want to use polite language, and that effect on Netanyahu's fortunes and what he's doing about it. And of course, since it's impossible to ignore the recent horrific behavior of members of that camp in the West Bank, including their own kinescent members and how that might affect the voting public. So that's just what I'm going to discuss with this week's panel, columnist Dr. Dahlia Scheindlin. Dahlia, always an honor to have you on the podcast.

Dahlia Scheindlin (1:43)

Thank you for having me as always.

Allison Kaplan Sommer (1:45)

And our intrepid correspondent, Judy Maltz, who's always crossing the country and reporting from various cities in Israel as to what the public is thinking, feeling and how it may vote. Hi, Judy.

Judy Maltz (1:55)

Hi, Allison.

Allison Kaplan Sommer (1:57)

First, a quick look at the polls on the Haaretz election tracker that aggregates all of the polls across the Israeli media. The anti-Netanyahu bloc led by Eisenkot dropped to 57 seats after reaching 60 for several weeks in a row. The pro-Netanyahu bloc, the government coalition parties remains in fairly dire straights at 48 seats. Now, what has changed in the calculation over the past week? The number of the seats that are supposedly not aligned with either Netanyahu or not Netanyahu.

They have not declared unequivocally whether or not they will back him from prime minister. Well, last week that was 10 seats and this week it's 15 seats. So also both Eisenkotz and Netanyahu's individual parties have taken a dive. Both dropped over the past week, Likud by four seats and Yashar, Eisenkotz party by two.

In a moment, I'm going to ask resident poll expert Dahlia about this. But first, I'm going to ask Judy to paint a picture for us of the man who seems to have thrown a real wild card into the race overall and specifically the dynamics of the right, a man named Ofer Winter. His name has inspired, I think, for the clever and geeky, the most interesting campaign tagline of the season. He had his premiere campaign event and everyone was wearing t-shirts that said winter is coming. Now, anyone who's a devoted Game of Thrones fan knows that winter is coming is not necessarily a positive thing. So Judy, tell us about Ofer Winter and what we should think about winter coming to the Israeli election scene.

Judy Maltz (3:34)

I guess most of us would love winter right now in August. We were all planning actually this weekend to see rain for the first time. There were all these reports that we were going to have a thunderstorm this past weekend. Didn't come, so let's hope also this winter is not coming, the one you just referred to. There's been speculation, I think, for many months now that Ofer Winter would throw his hat in. Some thought that Netanyahu would give him a safe seat on the Likud list. Some thought that he would join Bezalel Smotrich's religious Zionism party, but he's decided he's going to set up his own party. It's called Amcha Yisrael, Your Nation Israel, I guess is the best translation of it.

What do we know about him? He is part of the religious Zionist community. He wears a knitted kippah. He is very much like Smotrich and very much part of the community that supports Smotrich and his party. I think he first came into the public eye in 2014, the 2014 Gaza War, where he drew a lot of criticism at the time because he was supposedly subjugating his soldiers to religious indoctrination. He put out some letter then making them feel they were part of the Army of God, out to fight the enemy, and this sort of stuff is unacceptable in the Army.