Israel at the Polls 2003 by M. Ben Mollov Jonathan Rynhold Shmuel Sandler

Author:M. Ben Mollov, Jonathan Rynhold, Shmuel Sandler [M. Ben Mollov, Jonathan Rynhold, Shmuel Sandler]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Middle East, Israel, Military
ISBN: 9781136828140
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2013-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

The Israeli ‘Russian’ Community and Immigrants Party Politics in the 2003 Elections

VLADIMIR KHANIN

Since the beginning of mass immigration from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, ‘Russian’ Jews and their non-Jewish family members (altogether about 1,000,000 people)1 became an important and sometimes decisive factor in Israeli electoral politics.2 The two series of elections in the early years of this decade were not an exception. Thus, during the 2001 elections of the prime minister, as stated in Ha'aretz: ‘The working assumption at [Labour candidate] Barak's campaign headquarters was that the ultra-Orthodox will vote overwhelmingly for Sharon [the candidate of right-wing party Likud]… Voters among the Arab population… having gone to the polls will vote against Sharon, i.e. for Barak. The key will lie with the Russian-speaking population’.3

The ‘Russian’ vote also undoubtedly played a crucial role during recent Knesset elections. However, contrary to the election campaigns of the 1990s, the 2003 elections showed an enormously high diversity in the Russian immigrant support of various political parties. That also includes an unexpected drop in the influence of the immigrant parties, which ran so successfully in 1996 and 1999, and whose cooperation was so important for Sharon's victory in the 2001 direct election of the prime minister. In 2003, three leading ‘Russian’ parties became a part of all-Israeli lists either before the elections or shortly after it.

It is quite obvious that the Israeli ‘Russian’ community is not a single unit, but rather is a politically and socially diverse body. However, it is still unclear whether these divisions coincide with the traditional cleavages in Israeli society, or if the community remains a politically self-sufficient entity that is still separate from the rest of the society, despite these cleavages. Furthermore, does the fact that the majority of Israeli ‘Russians’ voted in 2003 for all-national parties mean that the community has left the niche of ‘sectarian’ politics, or is it just searching for more appropriate ways of further political institutionalization?

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