Limor Simhony Philpott

Is time up for King Bibi?

A defaced campaign billboard for Benjamin Netanyahu (Getty images)

In the run-up to its fourth election in two years, Israel is enjoying its vaccine success story. The number of seriously ill Covid patients is in decline, the R rate is slowly falling and the economy has started to reopen. But prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not reaping the rewards.

Support for Netanyahu’s party, Likud, although still the largest, has shrunk significantly since the last elections where it won 36 seats. Blue and White, which won 33 seats, has since crashed and burnt due to brilliant political manoeuvring by Bibi (and a staggering lack of political sophistication by leader Benny Gantz). Yet Likud is expected to only win 30 seats in this week’s snap election.

For Bibi, the vaccination programme has been a double-edged sword. It has been rapid and widespread, but uptake among the ultra-Orthodox and Israeli Arab communities has been much lower than in the general population. Combined with looser rule keeping, these groups still have higher infections rates relative to the rest of the population. For Israelis, this risks a hold-up in the long-awaited return to normality.

It’s a major problem for Bibi

As a result, tensions are mounting between the ultra-Orthodox (Haredi), and everyone else, including traditional (Masorti) and secular Jews, who are resentful of what they view as an ongoing favourable treatment given to Haredi communities. Some Israelis think that Bibi’s reliance on ultra-Orthodox parties for his coalition’s integrity has allowed Haredis to systematically break lockdown rules, travel more freely and largely continue with their daily lives. Meanwhile, so these fed-up voters say, everyone else has been making huge sacrifices.

Relations between the ultra-Orthodox, who make up about 12 per cent of the population, and the secular population have been tense for decades. Secular and traditional Jews have seen the ultra-Orthodox receive preferential conditions in government funding of Yeshiva students who do not work and are not drafted to the military like everyone else over the age of eighteen.

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