Abiding Rifts Within Israel Threaten to Widen With Netanyahu Win

By ISABEL KERSHNER




Stores in the rundown center of Sderot, a working-class Israeli border town plagued by years of rocket fire from Gaza, were still festooned with blue-and-white Likud banners at the end of this week.

Largely populated by Israelis of Middle Eastern and North African descent and some more recent immigrants from the former Soviet Union, nearly half of the residents who cast ballots in Tuesday’s national elections voted for Likud, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative party. A full 80 percent voted for right-wing and strictly Orthodox parties, including those likely to be in Mr. Netanyahu’s new coalition government.

A seven-minute drive away in Nahal Oz, a pastoral kibbutz abutting the border with Gaza, the mood was more somber. Founded in the 1950s as a communal farm by socialist pioneers of European origin and now partly privatized, Nahal Oz was equally traumatized during the war in Gaza last summer, when a 4-year-old boy was killed by shrapnel from a Palestinian mortar attack. Yet 57 percent of its residents voted for the center-left Zionist Union — and less than 5 percent for Likud.

As Israelis digested the outcome of the elections in which Mr. Netanyahu, seeking a fourth term, won a decisive victory, they also began to confront the sharp social, religious and political fissures that crisscross the country. While Likud dominated in many northern and southern towns and cities, the Zionist Union, an alliance between the Labor Party and a small centrist faction, triumphed in largely secular, liberal Tel Aviv and its prosperous suburbs. The results exposed the widening gap between the “state of Tel Aviv” and the right-leaning “periphery,” meaning the poorer areas beyond Israel’s commercial center.

The results also underscored the abiding divisions between the Ashkenazi Israelis of European descent, who dominated politics for decades after the founding of the state in 1948, and the Mizrahim, a term commonly used to refer to Sephardic Jews from Middle Eastern and North African backgrounds — although more than 70 percent of Israel’s Jews now are born in Israel.

Playing on a term that usually refers to a solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israeli commentators spoke wryly about “two states for two peoples.”

“I have always voted Likud,” said Sasson Sara, 61, a Sderot shopkeeper and local pundit whose parents came from Iraq, and whose dark, cramped grocery store does not appear to have been altered much since it opened in 1958.

Like many in Sderot, Mr. Sara said he had been critical of Mr. Netanyahu during the last Gaza war for not doing enough. “They should have flattened all of Gaza into a soccer field,” he said. Still, he added, Mr. Netanyahu was the only leader who could be relied on for security.

Dismissing criticism that Likud, in power for the last six years, has been weak on more mundane, socioeconomic issues, including addressing the dearth of affordable housing, and has done little to improve the lot of Israeli workers, Mr. Sara pointed to the introduction of free dental care for children and a new train connecting Sderot to Tel Aviv.

“If I wanted to go to a show in Tel Aviv, it used to take all afternoon to get there on a bus that stopped all along the way,” he said. “Now I get on a train that leaves at 6:23 p.m. on the dot.”

Many here trace the almost visceral bond between many Mizrahim and the Likud back to the days of Menachem Begin, the Polish-born leader who led Likud to its first electoral victory in 1977. Mr. Begin capitalized on the Mizrahim’s feelings of resentment, and the unlikely alliance managed to unseat the entrenched socialist establishment.

Before that, Mr. Sara said, a “Bolshevik tyranny” reigned in the area. “The kibbutzim around here controlled everything,” he recalled. “They were the managers of the factories. The workers were from Sderot.”

Historically, the more traditional Mizrahim who immigrated en masse in the 1950s viewed the Ashkenazi founders as elitists who looked down on their culture. Mr. Begin was seen as having restored their dignity.

Yehuda Ben Meir, a public opinion expert at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, said an analysis of the election results did not reveal a shift to the right among the electorate. Instead, he said, Mr. Netanyahu’s new strength came largely from within the right-wing bloc, the Likud having poached seats in Parliament from the hard-line Jewish Home and Yisrael Beiteinu parties.

But Mr. Ben Meir said the ethnic factor continued to play a part, particularly in the development towns, like Sderot, built in the 1950s to absorb immigrants from Muslim countries.

There, he said, “You still get the traditional voters who vote like their parents.”

Likud supporters said that many of the party faithful who had tired of Mr. Netanyahu and were considering staying home turned out to vote in protest after a leftist artist, Yair Garbuz, caused an uproar by deriding traditional Israelis as “amulet kissers” at a pre-election opposition rally in Tel Aviv.

But in the other Israel, across the social and political divide, there were few votes for the right. At Kibbutz Nirim, where two residents were killed by a mortar round from Gaza in the final hours of the war, more than 87 percent voted for the center-left Zionist Union or the leftist Meretz party.

Two residents voted for Mr. Netanyahu.

In Nahal Oz, another liberal enclave, Nitza Shelhav, 78, whose small home has been hit twice by mortar shells, was critical of Mr. Netanyahu’s dealing with the Palestinians, saying that doing nothing and waiting for the next round of fighting was “an ostrich policy, like burying your head in the sand.”

“I don’t know if peace with our neighbors is realistic, but we have to try,” she said, describing herself as a die-hard Labor voter.

Neri Katzav, 38, was spraying against weeds in baggy work clothes. Married to a teacher, the father of four said the family could not make ends meet and had “no economic future.” He said he had voted for Meretz.

Mr. Katzav said he had taken the election results hard. “It could and should be so much better here,” he said. “I really wanted change.”