Liberman
LibermanFlash 90

Once Israel’s third largest party and a political king-maker with 15 seats, the Yisrael Beytenu (Israel Is Our Home) faction of Avidgor Liberman is now teetering on the brink of the electoral abyss.

Liberman, Israel’s Defense Minister up until his resignation this past November, was polling at between seven to eight seats just a few months ago, comfortably above the 3.25% electoral threshold – which translates roughly into four mandates – and above his party’s performance in the 2015 election, when they won just six mandates.

In recent weeks, Yisrael Beytenu’s fortunes have declined, however, with the faction failing to cross the electoral threshold in all but three of the last dozen polls.

Failure to receive at least 3.25% of all valid votes in next month’s election would not only prevent the party from receiving any seats in the next Knesset, it could spell the end for the faction.

Founded twenty years ago as a party for right-wing immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries, Yisrael Beytenu slowly expanded its base of support to include secular rightists.

Advocating use of the death penalty for terrorists – the law has been on the books since Israel’s founding but never used for Palestinian Arab terrorists – as well as civil marriages, the party filled a niche, appealing to staunch nationalists who felt put-off by the Orthodoxy of traditional rightist parties.

Originally a marginal faction which ran as a partner of the National Union, Yisrael Beytenu surged to a stunning 15 seats ten years ago, becoming the Knesset’s third-largest faction, and a key ally of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Hoping to create a massive right-wing ruling party with 45 to 50 seats, the Likud and Yisrael Beytenu merged for the 2013 election, on the advice of American-Jewish campaign strategist Arthur Finkelstein, known from his work with the Republican party in the US.

The Likud Beytenu ticket flopped, however, hemorrhaging a total of 11 seats.

While the Likud soared in the following election to 30 mandates, Yisrael Beytenu emerged a weakened shadow of its former self, winning just six seats.

With the latest poll, carried out by Maagar Mohot, showing the party with just one seat’s-worth of votes, some political observers say Yisrael Beytenu may be on its last legs.

But in an interview with Maariv published on Friday, Avidgor Liberman said he was optimistic, citing internal polls showing the party with six to seven seats.

“We made a telephone poll, with a sample of 650 people, landlines and cell phones, without internet respondents. I think that all of these internet-based polls are flawed. People who register for them are paid, so they have a reason to sign up. It isn’t a random sample. And when you do an internet poll, it oversamples young people…it also oversamples Hebrew speakers,” Liberman continued, suggesting that his base of Russian speakers were under sampled in polls.

When confronted with the fact that even telephone-based polls found his party under the threshold, Liberman dismissed the polls, noting that based on polls, pundits in the 2016 US presidential election had predicted Hillary Clinton would easily defeat Donald Trump.

“I see the [polls] as a form of psychological warfare, manipulation. Look, on November 7th 2016, all the media outlets – CNN, Politico, Washington Post, New York Times – all said without exception the prediction: Hillary Clinton would be the president of the US. And on November 8th they got Trump. In 2015, Boogie [Itzhak] Herzog was predicted to become the prime minister, and we all know how that turned out.”