TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Whether a Kingmaker or King-Slayer, Liberman Still Holds the Cards: World Israel News, Feb. 23, 2020
Analysis: These 50,000 Israelis Can Send Netanyahu Packing: Anshel Pfeffer, Haaretz, Feb. 24, 2020
Investigation of Gantz’s Former Company Further Muddies Election’s Swampy Waters: Raoul Wootliff, Times of Israel, Feb. 23, 2020
Personal Data of all 6.5 Million Israeli Voters is Exposed: Daniel Victor, Sheera Frenkel and Isabel Kershner, NYTimes, Feb. 10, 2020
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Whether a Kingmaker or King-Slayer, Liberman Still Holds the Cards
World Israel News, Feb. 23, 2020
Israel finds itself in a familiar place after a tumultuous election campaign — with maverick politician Avigdor Liberman still seemingly in control of the country’s fate.
The run-up to Israel’s third election in less than a year saw criminal charges filed against the prime minister, an American Mideast plan unveiled and various party mergers and machinations. Yet once again, opinion polls suggest that neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor his chief challenger Benny Gantz will be able to form a coalition without Liberman.
Liberman remains cagey about his intentions, raising the possibility his brinkmanship could end up forcing yet another election.
Liberman’s nationalist Israel Beiteinu party bolted from Netanyahu’s right-wing camp last year to spark the unprecedented stalemate in Israeli politics. Though Liberman has all but ruled out sitting in a government led by his one-time mentor Netanyahu, saying his “era is over,” he has also driven a hard bargain with Gantz and has taken out campaign ads against the former military chief.
Liberman insists a future coalition cannot include Arab-led parties, whose lawmakers he considers terrorist sympathizers because several have sided with Israel’s adversaries and refused to condemn attackers.
He has also ruled out governing jointly with ultra-Orthodox Jewish parties that he says have long wielded disproportionate power that has harmed Israel’s secular majority and, in particular, his base of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Liberman himself immigrated to Israel in the 1970s from the former Soviet republic of Moldova.
His preferred solution after the last election was to play matchmaker between Gantz’s centrist Blue and White party and Netanyahu’s Likud and coax them into a unity government.
But that option appears off the table even if the numbers don’t seem to add up to any other realistic alternative. Gantz refuses to partner with the indicted Netanyahu and Likud appears unwilling to part ways with its longtime leader, even as he goes on trial next month. Still, Liberman, who declined interview requests, insists this vote will produce a breakthrough and he’ll be the one to dictate how it all plays out. “The reality is different. There won’t be another election. This time we will pick a side,” said Eli Avidar, a lawmaker from Liberman’s party who often serves as his voice to foreign audiences.
Avidar, a former diplomat, said that with Netanyahu heading to trial on March 17, other options have emerged across Israel’s fractured political landscape. For starters, Liberman has indicated a newfound openness to sitting in government with left-wing parties he once shunned and has hinted that other nationalists could follow suit to give Gantz the edge he needs.
Either way, Avidar said that with Iran believed to be pursuing nuclear weapons and a huge deficit to overcome, there was simply too much at stake to risk dragging on the government paralysis any longer. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Analysis: These 50,000 Israelis Can Send Netanyahu Packing
Anshel Pfeffer
Haaretz, Feb. 24, 2020
Israelis are returning to vote a week from today. The final result will almost certainly be the same as in last year’s two elections. The parties supporting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will not have a majority in the 23rd Knesset, and the parties opposing him will not be able to create a coalition capable of winning the vote of confidence to approve the proposed government. Virtually every single election poll conducted in the past few months has confirmed this.
There is not one poll in which the four parties in Netanyahu’s potential coalition – Likud, Shas, United Torah Judaism and Yamina – have more than 58 seats, leaving them three seats short of the necessary Knesset majority.
Benny Gantz doesn’t need 61 seats to depose Netanyahu and become Israel’s new prime minister within weeks. Since Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party and the right-wing flank of his own Kahol Lavan party won’t sit in the same coalition as the Joint List, or even in a coalition supported by the Joint List from the outside, Gantz’s likeliest path to governing is if Kahol Lavan, the Labor-Gesher-Meretz alliance and Yisrael Beiteinu win more seats than Netanyahu’s bloc and the Joint List abstains on the vote of confidence (which the predominantly Arab alliance probably will do – even though Kahol Lavan politicians have taken to calling this option “the Jewish majority”).
Gantz’s problem is that he also lacks three seats to make this scenario a reality. The polling averages over the past month have the three parties of Gantz’s notional minority government totaling 51 seats, while Netanyahu’s four-party bloc is averaging 56 seats.
Last September, the number of votes needed per seat was 35,917; last April, it was 32,860. Assuming next week’s turnout will be similar to the last two elections (69.8 percent in September; 68.5 percent in April), three seats are worth about 100,000 votes – or about 2.3 percent of the total vote. On paper, that means Gantz’s path to victory is shorter than Netanyahu’s right now: The latter needs five extra seats, or about 160,000 votes, to make it to the necessary 61. But even Gantz’s task seems insurmountable.
Pro- and anti-Netanyahu blocs in the Knesset, 2015 and 2019
Talk to the pollsters and they will tell you there is a reason the polls all show political deadlock: At the end of three election campaigns in the space of a year, there are very few floating voters left. Those who do exist are “undecided within the blocs” – deliberating between Kahol Lavan and Labor-Gesher-Meretz; or between Likud and Yamina. If there really are 100,000 voters floating between the Netanyahu and anti-Netanyahu blocs, the pollsters haven’t detected them. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Investigation of Gantz’s Former Company Further Muddies Election’s Swampy Waters
Raoul Wootliff
Times of Israel, Feb. 23, 2020
Following a 38-year career in the army, former chief of staff Benny Gantz in 2015 became the chairman of a Tel Aviv-based cybersecurity company called Fifth Dimension, which developed artificial intelligence solutions for law enforcement agencies. In December 2018, after just three years, the company went bankrupt, having burned through millions of dollars from investors.
“I can’t consider the Fifth Dimension to be a success story,” Gantz admitted in an interview last year, in the face of harsh criticism from Benjamin Netanyahu. The prime minister sniped that the Blue and White chairman, his chief political rival, could not be trusted to manage the State of Israel, having failed in his very first business venture.
“It was only one of eight or nine business activities I had. I’m not some tycoon and I don’t consider myself a businessman,” Gantz said in the interview, to the Ynet news site. “I propose we remember that this happens to nine out of 10 high-tech companies. So let’s look at this with the proper perspective.”
On Thursday, the question of the appropriate perspective with which to look at Gantz’s failed company became one of the most pressing of the current election campaign — the third in a year — when Acting State Attorney Dan Eldad ordered a criminal probe into Fifth Dimension over allegations of impropriety in its efforts to secure a lucrative contract with the Israel Police.
Netanyahu, who is due to appear in court as a criminal defendant over charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust just two weeks after the national vote, said in response to the announcement, “The public must know the truth, here and now, and before the elections.”
Announced just 11 days before the election, the investigation further muddies the already swampy political waters, with the timing blurring a clear view of the company, the allegations against it, and the “truth” that Netanyahu is demanding.
The mud
The suspicions against Fifth Dimension focus, first, on a NIS 4 million ($1.1 million) grant given to the firm by the police for a pilot project using the firm’s ostensible tech capabilities, after company executives allegedly provided law enforcement officials with misleading information. The preliminary grant was intended to become part of a NIS 50 million ($14.6 million) contract. That contract was not finalized. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Personal Data of All 6.5 Million Israeli Voters Is Exposed
Daniel Victor, Sheera Frenkel and Isabel Kershner
NYTimes, Feb. 10, 2020
A software flaw exposed the personal data of every eligible voter in Israel — including full names, addresses and identity card numbers for 6.5 million people — raising concerns about identity theft and electoral manipulation, three weeks before the country’s national election.
The security lapse was tied to a mobile app used by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud party to communicate with voters, offering news and information about the March 2 election. Until it was fixed, the flaw made it possible, without advanced technical skills, to view and download the government’s entire voter registry, though it was unclear how many people did so.
How the breach occurred remains uncertain, but Israel’s Privacy Protection Authority, a unit of the Justice Ministry, said it was looking into the matter — though it stopped short of announcing a full-fledged investigation. The app’s maker, in a statement, played down the potential consequences, describing the leak as a “one-off incident that was immediately dealt with” and saying it had since bolstered the site’s security.
The flaw, first reported on Sunday by the newspaper Haaretz, was the latest in a long string of large-scale software failures and data breaches that demonstrated the inability of governments and corporations around the world to safeguard people’s private information, protect vital systems against cyberattacks and ensure the integrity of electoral systems.
It came less than a week after another app helped make a fiasco of the Democratic presidential caucuses in Iowa, casting serious doubts on the figures that were belatedly reported. That app had been privately developed for the party, had not been tested by independent experts, and had been kept secret by the party until weeks before the caucuses.
The personal information of almost every adult in Bulgaria was stolen last year from a government database by hackers suspected of being Russian, and there were cyberattacks in 2017 on Britain’s health care system and the government of Bangladesh that the United States and others have blamed on North Korea. Cyberattacks on companies like the credit agency Equifax, the Marriott International hotel company and Yahoo have exposed the personal data of vast numbers of people.
Those were sophisticated, often government-backed hacking operations, but exploiting the Israeli flaw, linked to an app called Elector, did not require a hacker’s skills. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:
A Week to Election, Polls Show Netanyahu Pulls Ahead of Gantz for First Time: Haaretz, Feb. 23, 2020 — Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party is projected to win a narrow lead over Benny Gantz’s Kahol Lavan in next week’s election, according to two polls published Sunday by Channel 12 and Kan public broadcaster.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s Corruption Trial Will Start Two Weeks After Israel’s Elections: Oren Liebermann, CNN, Feb. 18, 2020 — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s criminal trial is set to begin March 17, just two weeks after Israel’s elections, the Justice Ministry announced Tuesday.
Netanyahu Blasts Rival Benny Gantz, Cites Two Advisers Who Likened Trump to Hitler: Charles Creitz, Fox News, Feb. 22, 2020 — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat down with Mark Levin for an interview airing on “Life, Liberty & Levin” Sunday, days before Israelis go to the polls for the country’s third general election in fewer than 11 months.
Israel’s Gantz Vows to Form Govt Without Netanyahu, Arab Parties: TRT, Feb. 16, 2020 — Israeli opposition leader Benny Gantz has vowing to form a government that will include neither the indicted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor the predominantly Arab parties in parliament.
Israel’s ‘Most Vulnerable’ Hit by Political Stalemate: Alexandra Vardi and Ben Simon, Yahoo News, Feb. 22, 2020 –– Israel’s grinding political deadlock has squeezed funding for programs helping troubled youths, disadvantaged communities and the disabled, forcing state-backed social organizations to rely on crowd-funding to get by.
