CHICKEN wings, onion rings and lager served in plastic glasses: a Super Bowl-themed campaign rally held in a chic bar in Tel Aviv last week was just one attempt to court the elusive “Anglo vote” ahead of Israel’s general election on March 17.
The 300,000 native English speakers who live in Israel make up about 4% of the population but they could swing the outcome of what is a neck-and-neck contest.
With nine days to go before the election, the latest polls show a difference of only a couple of seats between the centre-right Likud party of Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, and the Zionist Union, a centre-left coalition of the Labour party and the liberal Hatnua.
Jay Shultz, who runs events to encourage political participation by new arrivals to Israel, says the focus of the parties on the English-speaking electorate is a reflection of the increasing participation by young western Jewish immigrants.
“Politicians are really waking up and paying attention to the great potential of English-speaking olim [immigrant] voters, not just Americans but also Brits and South Africans,” said Shultz.
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Rabbi Dov Lipman, elected in 2013 as an MP for the secular centrist Yesh Atid party and who is the brains behind the Super Bowl gimmick, was early to spot the potential of the English-speaking vote.
As the first American-born politician to sit in the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, in more than three decades, Lipman says he realised during the last election campaign in 2013 that insufficient attention was being paid to “Anglo” voters.
So he “ran up and down the country giving talks in English with virtually no budget”. It paid off. Not only did he win a seat, but he also built up a strong rapport with English-speaking voters.
“There just wasn’t information out there for English speakers,” said Lipman.
“For people that have made aliyah [immigration to Israel] recently it can be hard for them to follow everything in Hebrew.”
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Other parties are now clamouring to follow his example. This year more campaign materials and events are in English than ever before.
“Nearly every party is releasing adverts with English subtitles. That’s something that wasn’t happening two years ago,” said Shultz.
Even the Zionist Union’s co-leader, Isaac Herzog, has been playing up his English and Irish roots, describing himself as a “true Anglo”.
At an event in Tel Aviv last week he spoke of his education at Cornell and New York University, telling the crowd: “I come from you.”
Another aspect of the Anglo electorate that appeals to politicians is that would-be voters are often still undecided and hail from a range of political persuasions, unlike Israel’s 1m-plus Russian voters. The latter typically vote for the Yisrael Beiteinu party founded by Avigdor Lieberman. He was born in Moldova when it was part of the Soviet Union.
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“Lots of people vote the way their parents did. But with English-speaking immigrants that’s not the case, so there’s a genuine chance to win the hearts and minds of voters,” Yair Zivan, international media adviser to Yesh Atid, said.
Shultz hopes the younger voters will change Israel’s political system for the better: “These are young pioneers that have experience of countries with a stronger civil society than Israel right now, so it’s not a one-way street — they also have a lot to offer politicians and this country.”
The latest polls gave Herzog’s Zionist Union 24 seats to Likud’s 22 — little changed from the previous week.
This suggested that a controversial speech by Netanyahu to the US Congress last week, in which he warned America of the perils of doing a nuclear deal with Iran, had done little to bolster his support at home.
Israeli politics is all about coalition building, however, so the winner is not necessarily the largest party but the largest block.
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Given that Likud has a longer list of potential coalition partners, this means Netanyahu could still return as prime minister even if his party does not get the most seats.
If there is a stalemate President Reuven Rivlin will have to find a solution — which could involve obliging Netanyahu and Herzog to form a national unity government.