Figthing for the “Russian” vote

Sooner than in any other election cycle I remember, the Russian-speaking community came to the center of attention in the Israeli election campaign.  According to this article, 40% of Russian speakers in Israel are still indecisive, and indeed recent Livni’s comment is viewed as an important step for Kadima towards the “Russian street”.  Traditionally, the Russian-speaking community is leaning to the right with “Yisrael Beiteinu” as the most popular party.  Currently “Likud” and “Ysrael Beteinu” are sharing 50% of the “Russian” vote.  At the same time, the Russian-speaking community has traditionally had issues with the orthodox religious establishment (and vice versa), yet right wing in Israel is usually associated with religious conservatism.  So the parties are now in this complex situation where they have to navigate between picturing them as right enough to attract the “Russian” vote, but not too religious in order not to scare them.

Being part of a number of election cycles, I wonder what will be the role of Russian-speakers in the parties running for Knesset.  In the past, the major parties would have a “Russian placeholder” – almost artificially created politician, who speaks Russian and who would campaign on the “Russian street”.  The only different party in this grotescian show was “Yisrael Beitenu”, whose head, Avigdor Liberman, is in fact an Immigrant, whose family came to Israel in the 1970’s.  I wonder if this election will bring anything new in the role “Russians” will actually play in the election and beyond.  Despite its electoral weight, this community is usually neglected within the political system and is looked at only during the election.  I wonder if there will be an upcoming promising politician, who is an immigrant (from Russia, Ethiopia, or elsewhere), revealed in any of the parties.

P.S. If you do read the HE version of the article I site in this post, it starts with a really weird scetch of a supposedly very popoular on the “Russian” street numerologist and her supposedly influential role on the political opinion of this sector.  Lili Galili, is a rather veteran reporter covering the Russian-speaking community for Haaretz.  I am surprised to see her starting her item with such a grotesc and rediculous example, which paints the “Russians” as weird outsiders in the Israeli community.  It is really sad that after almost two decades since the beginning of the large immigration wave, even in supposedly the most progressive large newspaper in Israel, there is need for such useless, and again rediculous, framing in order to talk about this sector.

Marking the territory

Another brief observation on the Israeli election.

As I wrote before, in current polls Netanyahu has a lead on Livni as a potential Prime Minister.  However, I wonder if he is not missing the point by taking it party further to the right.  Recently, a number of prominent figures on the Israeli right, such as Benny Begin and Effi Eitam, announced that they are joining Likud (HE1, HE2, HE3).  Having these people on the ballot may help Likud (HE), but it also paints the party in more radical colors than a ruling party in Israel usually is.  This gets me thinking whether or not I am missing how far to the right the Israeli society has moved in the last few years, or these are advisers of Mr. Netanyahu who are missing the goal?  After all, allowing all the new people to compete in the primaries, requires an effort from Netanyahu to change some of the party regulations.

At the same time, other parties are also regrouping.  On the right, a number of religious-national parties has formed a new block in order to gain more weight in political decision making and perhaps influence the formation of the next Israeli government (HE1, HE2).  They don’t have a name for the new party yet, but it will focus on education and Jewish tradition, but not limited only to those “who wear yarmulkes”.  Interestingly, they have explicitly mentioned that there are going to be women in their list of candidates to the Knesset.

On the left, a number of prominent figures, such as Yossi Beilin and Ran Cohen, have left Meretz as well as politics (HE1, HE2, HE3, HE4) thus opening up an opportunity to redraw the public face of their party.  In the last decade or so, Meretz has been loosing its clear identity and as a result its voters.  Now it appears to be an opportunity for this party to re-invent itself (HE).  Also on the left, the Arab members of the Knesset have announced talks for formation of a united block for the upcoming election, also in an attempt to gain more wight in the next government (HE).  Not much is going on in Avoda with an exception of Yariv Oppenheimer, the GS of Shalom Ahshav movement, announcing that he will compete in party’s primaries (HE).  If Openhaimer actually makes it to a realistic place on the party’s ballot, this will move Avoda further to the left.

And supposedly in the center (maybe slightly left of it), Nachman Shai, another prominent figure in the Israeli “contemporary folklore” announced that he is joining Kadima (HE).  Shai’s claim to glory comes from his acting as the head of the army spokesman unit during the first Gulf War in 1990-1.  During that time he gained a title of the “national calmer” (my very bad translation) and looks like a strong addition to Kadima, which is trying to maintain an image of party that does politics differently.  Having Shai on the ballot will definitely strengthen Kadima and Livni, who are struggling with image problems resulting from Ehud Olmert being accused in a number of corruption cases and a fiasco of the last war in Lebanon.  At the same time, Israel Hason, who used to be number 2 in Yisrael Beitenu pary, has also announced that he joins Kadima (HE1, HE2).  I think this helps Kadima to paint itself as a more centrist party, as Zipi Livni’s opinions are being portraited as leftist in the media.  Having said that, I fail to understand Hason’s motives of leaving his home-party – I have not seen anything that signaled disagreements in Yisrael Beitenu.

The semi-bottom line is that it really looks like a battlefield in preparation.  Each party is marking its territory through the new people who are joining their lines.  This is true to all the major parties with the exception of maybe Avoda, which is not doing really well in this election and I wonder how much longer Ehud Barak will be mentioned in the same fashion as Netanyahu and Livni, who have much better chances to form the next government.  So, as the right parties are getting righter, the left parties are trying to re-shape themselves, and Kadima is trying to claim the center, the political map in Israel is getting more contrasted and dare i say even more polarised.  Interestingly, you can already start hearing voices in Israel comparing Livni to Obama, even if implicitly.  She is getting advice (she never asked for) to act as the leader (mening neglecting the offence of her opponents) and to focus on “new” media for her campaign (HE). I am still debating with myself whether or not she can be the Israeli Obama, but that is to another post.

I feel inspired

Slowly by slowly I start realizing that last night, watching the US election results coming in and then listening to the speeches I witnessed history in making.  Whether or not you agree with political view of Barak Obama, last night was a really good example of how democracy can work.  Until you live here for a some time, it is difficult to realize the depth of racial and cultural cleavages in the US society.  Being able to bridge over those with a lead in both electoral college and popular vote, is quite an achievement.  Last night was indeed another way of demonstrating the power of the American dream – a country where anything seems to be possible, not just in business, but also in politics. This election campaign is already being studied (for example for its use of information technology), but I believe there will be more of it making to the books of political campaigning.  If Barak Obama is going to govern the same way he ran his campaign, there may definitely be reasons for hope.

The US was like a computer running Windows for a very long time – it needed a reboot.  After eight years of Republican government, it seemed like the system became slower and buggier.  Spending the last summer in Washington DC, I have not met a single republican who would be happy with the President Bush’s government, not to mention a democrat.  And last night the people rebooted the system.  As with rebooting Windows, you can be sure that it will feel better at the beginning, but you can never know how it will behave in the long run.  It can work better, but it can also work worse with new bugs and glitches may come out as you go.  It will be now up to Barak Obama to demonstrate that “he can” and in his speech last night, you could also sense him being more cautious.

Regardless of how it will eventually work out, it seems like the USA is now in sort of an euphoria.  It is in an euphoria not only because if the election of the first black president, but also (and maybe mostly) because they see that the democratic system still works.  Following the election even closer in the last few days and talking to people around me, it is amazing to see how inspired and hopeful most of them are.  Being chronically skeptic, I do hope that there will be no hangover following this excitement, but right now it feels good for most people I meet.  In fact, watching the election results last night and listening to the speeches, I felt inspired.  If he and his team made it against the odds, many other things seem suddenly possible.

Inevitably I couldn’t help, but thinking about the upcoming Israeli election in February.  I wonder, if such a reboot is possible in Israel, which seems to run that Windows system for even longer than the US.  Even though in the last decade and a half, Israel had election practically every two years, there was no real change.  All the leaders who came and left, arrived from the same apparatus, held very similar views, and more so acted more in a reactionary way instead of taking active leadership positions (with an exception of a few stand-alone cases).  As a result, it is more like running on the same boot of Windows for a while and only keep on logging in with different users.  There is no real difference in performance, but the bugs keep on piling.

Unfortunately, it seems to me that even if a young politician starts in the Israeli political system with drive, energy, ideology, and leadership aspiration, by the time they get to a position where they can actually make a difference, they are too much socialized into that culture of impotent party-based politics.  In order to make it to any change-enabling position, they need to navigate party politics for such a long time, that they become part of these ideologically-corrupt systems. By the time they get to any role that can make a difference, they are alraedy not that young and are deeply indepted to their respective parties internal “acocunting” of favors, that they cannot do anything substantively bold.

One of potential reasons for that may lie in the Israeli electoral system.  In Israel we vote for parties, not for leaders.  The head of the largest party in Knesset is usually assigned with a task of assembling the coalition and forming the govenrment.  We do not directly elect the head of the state.  The result is what i described before – by the time you reach a position in your party that allows you to realistically run for Knesset or more so compete for the post of the Prime Minsiter, you are deeply embeded into the micro-party politics and is lacking the drive, the energy, the vision, the optimisim, and the ability to dare in order to make a substative change.

There was an attempt to try and directly elect the head of the state in the past, but that failed.  I think it failed because in the quickly changing Israeli realities, we didn’t have time to mentally adjust to that change.  Even more so, the political system didn’t have the time to adjust to that change.  People who ran for election during that trial period, were the same people whom we see running today through their parties.  So, although there was a nominal change, there was no really substantive change in the way people think or the way people function.  Hence the failure.

Watching the American people celebating their reboot and their democracy, makes me wonder what would it take to reboot the Israeli politics.  Some of their enthusiasm is definietly rubbing off, but I still wonder if “we also can”…?

Election parallels – gender issues

As the US voters are lining up to vote, I can’t help but think about some parallels between the dynamics of the US and the Israeli elections already.

Similarly to what happened in the US, the current Israeli election is also ‘historical’. Although Israel has a record of female Prime Minister (PM), Tzipi Livni’s candidacy is still quite unique.  Not only she is female, but she is also young and has limited military experience, which is traditionally important for the Israeli PMs.  She is also heading a really “young” and quite controversial party, which emerged in the center of political map and is lacking the long histories of both “Likud” and “Avoda”.  To a degree this is similar to Obama’s appearance as a young and relatively inexperienced candidate, who started basically with nothing and in about a year became one of the most popular politicians in the US and beyond.  If Livni is smart, she could capitalize on that experience.

Nevertheless, we can already see reactions in the Israeli political sphere.  Gender is suddenly really important.  Soon after Livni declared that she prefers the election blaming the failure to build a coalition on Shas’s excessive demands, the spiritual leader of Shas, Ovadia Yossef, issued a halakha ruling stating that it is Ok for women to govern.  Prior to that, one of the critiques of Shas was that they blew the colatition talks because it is against their tradition to have women in positions of power (indeed, there is and there was not a single woman among Shas’s mebers of Knesset).  It is difficult to interpret such a progressive ruling from an orthodox spiritual leader, other than a gesture towards female voters.

Later, Netanyahu has widely publicised the fact that former army spokeswoman, Miri Regev, has joined Likud.  During the press confernce he was quoted saying: “We are witenessing a wave of people who join or come back to Likud and I am glad that many women are joining our movement” (my translation of the original in HE).  Does it ring the McCain-Palin bell to anyone?

Let the polling begin!

As Israel (IL) is picking up the election baton, the polling industry in the country is also shifts its focus on the election.  Recently “Haaretz” published results of a national poll speculating about political options if the election would take place now (HE).  According to those results, Likud and Kadima would gain 31 mandates each out of total 120.  Next in line is Ysrael Beiteinu, led by Avigdor Liberman, with 11 mandates.  Avoda, traditionally a ruling party, is fighting with Shas, orthodox religious party, for the fourth place.  Based on that poll, Netanyahu would be in a better position to form the government.

The right wing block would account for 61 mandates and the left-center block would account only for 59.  Also, Netanyahu is viewed as more suitable for the role of Prime Minister (PM) compared to Barak and Livni, particularly when it comes to issues of security.

Of course this is just first one.  I assume there are more polls to come…

Passing the election baton

It looks like a real political relay.  As the US electoral battle is nearing its end, Israel (IL) is gearing up to start a new election campaign.  As you probably know, the last Prime Minister (PM) of Israel was finally forced to resign as he is facing pretty serious corruption charges, and the newly elected head of Kadima party, Tzipi Livni, chose to dismiss the Knesset and go for an election.  Some frame this move as a failure and an example of Livni’s lacking leadership skills.  Others frame it as a refusal to follow a bitten path of PMs literally paying parties to stay in the coalition.  Whatever the true reason is, the public opinion seems to be split, at least as it is reflected in online media and comments people leave on news websites.

For whatever reason, this particular election cycle really fascinates me, so I may now occasionally blog about it.  On the one hand, it is going to be a tool for myself to organize some thoughts.  On the other hand, I hope it will be interesting at least for those of you who are not in IL, but are interested in the region.  I cannot promse how sustainable this will be between now and February, but l will try.  Here is what the last few days look like to me.

Meet the players

Having Sharon as its head and pulling out of Gaza, Kadima was originally claiming the center of the political map.  However, in a recent article in “Haaretz” (HE) Aluf Ben suggests that there is no longer “center” party in this election in Israel.  He predicts that the battle will be between those who support talks with Palestinians (Avoda and Kadima) and those who oppose them (Likud and Shas).

It looks like we are back to square one, only with an additional player, Kadima, which sort of fits the old game, but is still less predictable than the others.  Indeed, Netanyahu and Barak have both been in the PM chair and none of them did a great job in that position.  Although each one has their own broadly agreed achievement in the past (Barak as the Chief of General Staff and Netanyahu as a minister of Finance), none of the proved himself as a good national leader.  Livni at the same time, has less a colorful record (for better and for worth), but she is young, ambitious and is pushing the “different politics” agenda in her rhetoric.  I can’t help, but think sometimes whether or not she can be the Barak Obama of Israel – young, supposedly idealistic, and supposedly different from the old and known crowd of politicians.  I wonder, if she will be able to be as inspiring to so many people as Obama appears to be here.

The question of education

In the meantime, the electoral battle has began.  For example, Livni proclaimed that she will suggest a law to legalize civil marriage before Knesset is disassembled towards the election in February (HE).  Analysts suggest that she is trying to attract more non-religious voters as well as Russian-speaking community.  While that may be true (with an emphasis on “may”), what certain is that by making that move she is annihilating the religious voters.  To a degree it looks like she is trying to take over a niche left by Shinui – a party who was built on anti-religious agenda, but didn’t make it to Knesset in the last election.

On the right side of the map, which is more optimistic regarding their prospects of taking over the PM chair, parties started dividing the governemnt.  Eli Ishai, the head of Shas, an orthodox, religious party, is openly stating that his party wants that office so they could push for a more conservative school curricula (HE).  Even though the current Israeli Minister of Education is a Professor and is not doing a very good job, having a Minister of Education who has barely a high-school education, does not put me at ease.  Netaniahu, who sees himself as the next PM (HE) “rebuffs Shas bid to control Education Ministry” (HE), while turning a memorial session of Knesset dedicated to Rehevam Zeevi into an election rally.  I have not read about reactions from other parties/politicians to Shas’s aspirations.  The only other responce I saw was from Yossi Sarid (HE), the former head of Meretz and fomrer Minister of Education.  His social-democratic views and long-standing opposition to religious orthodoxy are known and he casts a loud worning against Shas’s aspirations (as well as implicitly showing support for Livni as the PM).

Affordible technology

Recently i blogged about some number of mobile penetration in Africa.  Now i came across this rather old article (HE) about an Israeli company that develops under $25 mobile phones.  The great part of this story is that these seem to be not just simpler (and thus cheaper) phones, but handhelds that have internet and multimedia capabilities.  Neat…

Selling zucchini as a cucumber

I would like to follow up on the internet censorship law proposal pending in Israel.  You can read my previous posts about the proposal and the fact that it passed in the first hearing in Knesset.  A few days ago the law proposal was up for a hearing in the financial committee – one more step on the way of this proposal becoming a law.  Naturally, this hearing attracted quite a lot of attention, particularly by the activists who care about this medium.

Unfortunately, it looks like not much progress was achieved at that hearing.  On the semi-positive side, the authority to decide what content is appropriate and what content is not, was taken from the sole ownership of the minister of communication.  It will now be determined by a committee consisting of 3 government representatives and 4 representatives of the various sectors of the society (it is not clear how exactly all this is supposed to work).

On the ironic, or should I say sarcastic, side, it was decided that the current clients of the ISPs will not be automatically shifted to the censored internet.  However all the new clients, incluing those whose plan ended and they are renewing it, will have to state whether they want or not to use the government filter.  The punch line of this (not so funny) joke is that if you will not provide an answer, the ISP will not be able to provide you internet services.  In other words, there is no change, since within a span of few years everybody will have to be classified in a government database as porn wachers or not (my exhaggeration).

On the annoying side, the newspapers seem to misinterpret the conclusions of this hearing calling them “significant changes” to the original proposal (HE1, HE2).  Moreover, the continuous use of children safety as an excuse for promoting this law, is particulary annoying because it shows lack of willingness to really deal with the substantive issue creating visibality of control, but not addressing the proposed problem.  From reading the opinoins presented in the news articles, it seems that people who has the least interaction with this medium tend to support the filtering solution, while those who have more interaction tend to criticise it.  Unfortunately, it seem that the former group has more impact on shaping this law and moving it forward.

At the end of the day, it looks like the cencorship law still has its momentum.  I think one of the comments on Ynet summarized this hearing in the following way (my unprofessional translation): “It looks like they took a zucchini, painted it green, and are now selling it to us as a cucumber.”  Couldn’t agree more.

Framing eco-friendliness

Once, I was told that advertisement is a mirror of the society, but one that exaggerates some features.  This probably explains that when the social reality is surreal, the advertisement is heading in the same direction.  Here are some viral advertisement clips promoting eco-friendliness made by the Israeli branch of Mccann. Some of the clips are usually in Hebrew (HE) and some are in English (EN), however they are being sometimes removed from YouTube.  In the current batch, all clips are in EN:

Ride a bicycle (EN):

Walk more (EN):

Buy a hybrid (EN):

Last updated: 7 July, 2008

Puzzled

I read about a website called Compete.  It provides comparative analysis of website traffic.  After trying the obvious Google vs. Yahoo vs. MSN and seeing Google and Yahoo as very close competitors (which was a little bit surprising), i thought about trying something less obvious.

Usually, websites in foreign languages are not tracked by this kind of websites, but I decided to try.  My comparison was the three major Israeli newspapers: Ynet vs. NRG (Maariv’s website) vs. Haaretz.  I know that at least Ynet and Haaretz have separate URLs for HE and EN versions, so what i compared were the HE URLs.  Also, Ynet is considered to be by far the leading online outlet in Israel, though i am not sure who holds the second place (in print that would Maariv).  Now, imagine my surprise when i got this:

According to this graph, Haaretz is by far the most visited (in terms of unique visitors) online outlet, Ynet is only second, and NRG (not surprisingly) the third.  But that is not all.  Here is the ranking comparison:

Again, Haaretz is in the lead, followed by Ynet (closer this time), followed by NRG.  Though i am not sure how to read this metric.  On the one hand it ranks sites based on the unique visitors metric, but the frame of reference is “the top one million websites in the U.S.”

Where it is getting more intuitive is in the comparison of the number of visits:

But even in that case, the gap between Ynet and Haaretz is not that significant, yet it is growing. Same goes with the length of stay (in minutes):

It looks like people tend to spend more time on Ynet and NRG, but not on Haaretz.  That is, again, counter-intuitive, because Haaretz usually has longer and more complex articles as opposed to sound bites on Ynet and NRG.  One explanation to that metric can be that people arrive to Haaretz’s homepage, but do not actually read.  Or, alternatively, there may be more content on the homepages of Ynet and NRG, compared to that of Haaretz.  So, people navigate away from the homepage to read the articles quicker on Haaretz.

In fact that is one of the more confusing parts for me in these metrics.  Do they account only for activity on the exact domain or on all its sub-domains as well?  Also, it is quite possible that many people have domains of their favorite newspaper saved as a bookmark or they choose it from the auto-complete line in the address bar.  In that case, some of the confusion with Ynet can be explained, as its homepage URL in auto-complete looks something like that: http://www.ynet.co.il/home/0,7340,L-8,00.html instead of a simple www.ynet.co.il (even though i just saw that this is not really the case with the new Firefox).

However we are not done with surprises yet. Here is a comparison of monthly attention each on the of website was getting in the last year:

This one is, again, a relative metric of time spent on a given domain with the refernce frame of “the total time spent online by all U.S. internet users,” which i find quite a confusing one.

Number of pages per visit is yet another surprise:

It seems that people tend to browse through NRG more than through Ynet.  However, this metric implies that they track not just the homepage, but also the rest of the inner pages, which highlights the puzzling aspect of previous results.

All in all, i found this excersise interesting, yet very confusing as it contrudicted the common wisdom i held so far.  This is why i kept on reading in order to find out how exactly they are getting their data.  So, i think my confusion was partly resolved when i read that they derive their information from a “sample of 2,000,000+ U.S. internet users” who gave them “permission to analyze the web pages they visit and ask them questions via surveys.”  So, on the other hand, that may explain the difference in popularity of the various outlets, but on the other hand, i am surprised that the Israeli websites in HE actually made it into their analysis (ranked among the first 60K out of a million websites).  So, i am still puzzled.

« Previous Page — Next Page »