|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
Aryeh Deri declared the elections a referendum on his trial - and in this referendum he did supremely well. But 17 seats couldn't save Deri politically. (May 20) - 'He is innocent," Benny Elbaz sang in one of the more memorable Shas television campaign ads, pointing to Aryeh Deri. "He is innocent," a crowd of thousands thundered back, with feeling in their voices and tears dripping down their cheeks, overturning - at least in their hearts and minds - the Jerusalem District Court's verdict in the Deri case. "Is anybody really buying this?" countless people undoubtedly asked themselves, astounded by the ad that all but beatified Deri. The unequivocal answer came back early Tuesday morning in the form of 17 Knesset seats. Seventeen Knesset seats. That's seven more seats than the party had before the court convicted Deri of accepting bribes, and sentenced him to a jail term. It's almost three times as many seats as were won by the Center Party, which entered the race in January amid great expectations that it would easily become the third-largest party in the country. It's just two seats less than the number garnered by the Likud, for so long the country's ruling party. The jubilation evident at Shas's Jerusalem headquarters when the election results were broadcast Monday night is, therefore, quite understandable. Deri declared the elections a referendum on his trial - and in this referendum he did very well. But 17 seats were not enough to save Deri politically. His resignation from the Knesset seemed a foregone conclusion following Ehud Barak's victory, since Shas's strength is dependent on the services it provides supporters at the grassroots level, and without being in the coalition it won't be able to get the funds to provide those services. Barak made it clear that he would not negotiate with Deri, although he never ruled out forming a coalition with a Deri-less Shas. Deri's resignation paves the way for that possibility. "Shas is a party that, if it is not in the coalition, will have difficulty maintaining its social, welfare and educational institutions," said Bar-Ilan University political science lecturer Asher Cohen. "Without being close to governmental power, its situation will be very difficult." Cohen, who specializes in church-state relations, said Shas's celebration of its 17 seats is misplaced. Sometimes, he said, a party's success or failure in the elections is not judged solely by the number of its mandates. "It is very easy to take the number of mandates, see the party's gone up, and then claim a victory. But the number of mandates needs to be viewed within the context of the whole election. "I think Shas failed in the elections, and when I say this, I mean that their 17 seats today are not worth - in bargaining power - what their six seats were worth 10 years ago; certainly not what their 10 seats were worth to Netanyahu. "Even if they join a coalition, it will not be with the same bargaining strength they enjoyed before." Prime Minister-elect Barak, said Cohen, has a wide range of coalition options, so the power of any one party - even a party with 17 seats - is limited. And according to Cohen, Shas bears a large part of the responsibility for Netanyahu's defeat and the collapse of the Right. In other words, the party is "to blame" for the fact that Barak has so many coalition options. "Shas contributed a great deal to the fall of the Likud and the right-wing camp, for one reason: it let the secular genie out of the bottle. "Shas did not win 17 seats," Cohen said. "It won 23 - its 17, and six seats for Shinui. [Shinui head] Tommy Lapid should send Shas flowers." According to Cohen, Shinui's meteoric rise can be attributed to a backlash against Shas and its political culture. But more than that, Cohen argues, Shas also led to Netanyahu's downfall, since the party's high-profile feud with Yisrael Ba'aliya over the Interior Ministry pushed tens of thousands of Russian-speaking immigrants into Barak's warm embrace. "Shas is the party that pushed the immigrants to Barak," he said. "The immigrants are naturally on the Right, and they easily could have voted for Netanyahu if they did not perceive Netanyahu as so closely connected to Shas." In addition, Cohen said, Netanyahu's embrace of Shas also led a number of Likud voters into the political center, because they were fed up with Shas's lack of respect for the rule of law, and the way the Likud seemed to accept it. "When the Likud writes its report on why it lost the elections," Cohen said, "a chapter entitled 'We lost because of Shas' will form a major part of that report." BUT THE Likud, said Aryeh Dayan, author of a recently published book on Shas entitled Hama'ayan Hamitgaber (The Overwhelming Stream), did not lose only because of Shas, it also lost to Shas. According to Dayan, the bulk of the additional seven seats the party won came at the Likud's expense. "What we saw this time was merely a continuation of a process that has accompanied Shas since its founding, and especially since 1990," he said. "The idea is to get close to the Likud, hug the Likud, become part of the national camp and then transfer edot hamizrah voters from the Likud to Shas. "This is happening to such a degree that the secular Right is vacating its place on the political stage, being replaced by the religious Right." This is a long-term process that helps explain the steady growth of Shas, which has gone from four seats in 1984 to 17 this week. But there are also more immediate causes. "There are one or two immediate causes that can explain the jump in strength," Dayan said. "The first is Netanyahu's social and economic policies. Although they were not that different from Labor's, they were a bit more radical. "The policy of privatization led to a cut in budgets for health, education and welfare. This created a vacuum in areas populated by Likud and Shas supporters, and Shas - naturally - entered the breach with its education and welfare services." More people received these services, Dayan said, and as a result there were more people who felt a sense of obligation to vote for the party. The other immediate cause for the jump in support, he said, was the Deri trial. "Secular Ashkenazim have difficulty grasping just how many people out there don't feel that they are fairly represented in the country, who don't feel at home in the state, or with the state's institutions. "When something like the Deri trial takes place, it only enhances this feeling, because they feel that the country is oppressing the person they view as their leader." ACCORDING to Cohen, that so many people hold the court in disregard is indeed frightening. "I don't know if with this vote they were saying that Deri is innocent," he said, "or rather that the system is going after him for ethnic and religious reasons." What Cohen said he does know about the Shas voter is that thousands of them carry with them a feeling of disenfranchisement that they used to express through a vote for the Likud. "We are talking about Likudniks who voted Shas. It is a core group of people in Likud who don't feel that the party represents their antiestablishment sentiments like it used to. The only party now with a clearly antiestablishment message is Shas." Although to the casual consumer of campaign propaganda, anger at Deri's verdict seemed to be the prime message of Shas's campaign, Shas MK Nissim Dahan, who oversaw the party's campaign election apparatus, said there was a deeper message than that. "Our message was received well by the public," Dahan said. "The message was that everything the system is doing to Deri is merely intended to shut up and sweep under the rug all the wrongs that were done to the edot hamizrah in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. "One of the ways to sweep this under the rug is to silence Deri. They want to bury Deri in order to quiet him down." This is a message, Dahan said, that fell on the fertile ears of people who "feel discriminated against daily. We are now talking about the second generation of underprivileged, the offspring of those who came in the '50s and '60s. "They see the big gaps between them and their neighbors. They see where their neighbors are after 40 years, and where they are, and they understand that the discrimination is real. Then they vote Shas."
Links in this section:
Links to other sections: | |
|
Click here for feedback and comments. © 1999, The Jerusalem Post - All rights reserved 
| |
