The Elections in Israel 1999

7. The “Russian” Revolution in Israeli Politics

7 The “Russian” Revolution in Israeli Politics Zvi Gitelman and Ken Goldstein Introduction Between 1989 and 1999, more than three quarters of a million people from lands that comprised the former Soviet Union (FSU) immigrated to Israel. This is the single largest aliyah in Israeli history. Ironically, it comes from a state that consistently opposed Zionism, armed and supported the Arab states and Palestinian military organizations, broke relations with Israel in 1967, and refused to allow Zionist and Hebrew education. Over the last three Israeli national elections, the introduction of such a large bloc of voters—with no previous political ties or partisan allegiances—into a highly competitive and evenly balanced political landscape has attracted the interest of both political strategists and scholarly observers.1 In all three elections (1992, 1996, and 1999), most of the immigrants from the FSU voted against the party in power and the incumbent prime minister. Their votes were probably decisive in the 1992 and 1996 elections, though not in 1999. Still, the behavior of the immigrants in the most recent contest is significant because it may portend a long-term trend of ethnic voting and the emergence of what may be an important swing party, and hence a key player in coalition politics. Furthermore, it is unlikely that future Israeli elections will be decided by such a large margin, and this large bloc of immigrant voters (16 percent of the electorate in 1999) is likely to remain a key constituency for those seeking to lead Israel. 141 We would like to thank Prof. Jack Kugelmass, chair of the Jewish Studies Department at Arizona State University, and the Frankel Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Michigan for providing the funds necessary to conduct the exit poll. We would also like to thank Prof. Zach Levy, of Haifa University, Maia Aksakalova, Tel Aviv University, and Rita Margolina , Yad Vashem Institute, for helping us deal with some of the logistic hurdles that were involved in fielding our study. Accordingly, our goal in this chapter is to explain systematically why “Russians”2 voted the way they did in the 1999 contest. Why did a majority of immigrant voters choose Ehud Barak for prime minister and one of their own ethnic parties in the Knesset? What attitudes and beliefs were most important in determining their vote for the two offices? What demographic characteristics are correlated with immigrants’ votes? What happened in the campaign that enabled Barak to turn the “Russian” vote around? What, if anything, differentiates those who voted for the Israel b’Aliya Party, led by Natan Sharansky, from those who voted for the other “Russian” party, Israel Beiteinu, headed by Avigdor Lieberman? We answer these questions by merging qualitative assessments from the campaign, taken from our observations and press accounts (in Hebrew, Russian , and English), with the results of an exit poll of close to 1,800 immigrant voters (see the appendix). We begin by providing an overview of the nature and influence of “Russian” immigrant voting over the past three Israeli electoral contests. We then use the exit poll to describe briefly the demographic characteristics and basic issue attitudes of the immigrants. After examining the course and content of the campaign in the immigrant community, we return to the exit poll data to explain voting patterns in the elections for prime minister and for the Knesset. In the final section, we summarize our principal findings and discuss longer-term consequences of the entry into the electorate of the massive wave of immigrants from the FSU. The Consistent Oppositionists: Patterns of “Russian” Voting In the 1992 election, the last one contested under the old system of a single vote cast for a party (rather than separate voting for the Knesset and prime minister), approximately 250,000 recent immigrants from the FSU were eligible to vote and they comprised 8% of the electorate. Most accounts of the 1992 contest identify immigrant dissatisfaction with the absorption process as their major concern and credit Labor’s victory to the support it gained from these new immigrants (Fein 1995; Gitelman 1995; Reich, Dropkin, and Wurmser 1993). Although the Labor Party headed by Yitzhak Rabin won 12 more seats and 250,000 more votes than the Likud list headed by Yitzhak Shamir, the balance between the left and the right/religious bloc in the final Knesset results was only slightly in the left’s favor (61 mandates to 59 mandates). Exit polls indicated that 58% of...