A traditional African safari has its “Big Five” of iconic animals to see and photograph, ideally with your kids smiling in the background: Elephant, rhinoceros, lion, leopard, and buffalo.
Visiting Israel has its own wild experiences. Foreign correspondents and diplomats, who typically come for four to five years, have told me that their checklist for their posting here includes a war, a peace agreement, and an election.
The correspondents and diplomats who came in 2019 were especially fortunate. They got to enjoy five elections, three wars, Abraham Accords signings with three Muslim countries, and one global pandemic.
Those who are here now have gotten more than their share of wars and a surprise peace agreement with Lebanon last weekend. But they have been waiting with impressive patience to finally see Israelis go to the polls.
No one thought Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government would last four years, but in our flawed parliamentary system, the longevity of a coalition is often the result of its unpopularity. If a prime minister was doing well in the polls, he may be tempted to initiate an early election to obtain another four-year mandate. Since Oct. 7, the current coalition had its fear of polls to keep it more or less cohesive.
Technically, our election has not really started yet. It will only officially kick off when the Knesset adjourns on Wednesday night, July 15, or more likely, some time the following day, after our outgoing MKs pull their last all-nighter in parliament, passing their final bills.
But for me, the election starts when the foreign media start paying attention, and that has already happened this past week, for better or for worse.
International media coverage of the Israeli election
“Israel’s Netanyahu faces election challenge from hawkish ex-general,” Reuters told the world, in a headline that is a bad omen for the headlines in the months to come.
The world’s largest international multimedia news agency has already decided our election: Israelis are too right-wing, no matter who we choose. None of our prime ministerial candidates is legitimate.
If Yashar candidate Gadi Eisenkot is “hawkish,” does that make Netanyahu “snakish,“ former prime minister Naftali Bennett “crocodilish,” and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir “Tyrannosaurus rexish?”
There actually could not have been a better headline from Eisenkot’s perspective. He must woo right-wing and centrist voters who cast ballots for current coalition parties last time to obtain the 61-mandate blocking majority he needs.
To that end, Eisenkot attacked Netanyahu from the Right this week, following the signing of the agreement with Lebanon, and he intends to do that a lot more.
When I sent the Reuters headline to a Yashar candidate, he responded “Wonderful!!!” with three exclamation points. Netanyahu’s associates, who have a storehouse of clips aimed at making Eisenkot look dovish, were less amused.
A source close to Netanyahu complained that the Reuters news agency is “not the only one” when it comes to media outlets working for Eisenkot.
CNN’s headline this week was more accurate: “Netanyahu’s emerging challenger represents his polar opposite, and that may be his appeal.”
Get ready for headlines like these that portray this election with the overused Shakespearean cliché of “To Bibi or not to Bibi.”
The foreign media will once again miss the nuance of an Israeli public that is a lot more complex than personality politics. They need to understand the Israeli psyche, which is suffering from the trauma of Oct. 7 in many different ways.
This election will be waged over complex issues like accountability, new understandings of security strategy, and resentment over the lack of equal service for Israelis when there are manpower shortages during war. This week’s haredi and anti-haredi protests and the heckling of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich by a bereaved father in the Gaza periphery are just a taste of what will heat up before Israelis go to the polls in October.
And even if the election does end up being yet another verdict about Netanyahu, CNN should know better than to quote two analysts who are both known to dislike the prime minister in Anshel Pfeffer and Nahum Barnea, without balancing them with a right-wing or apolitical analyst.
Sounding like Reuters, Pfeffer painted Eisenkot as not much different from Netanyahu when it comes to using “overwhelming force against civilian infrastructure,” while Barnea was quoted by CNN as calling Eisenkot “someone people want to hug.”
The Christian Science Monitor printed an analysis whose headline was also a service to the Eisenkot campaign: “Gadi Eisenkot, the straight-talking Israeli former general taking on Netanyahu.”
Like CNN, two analysts quoted in the article are on the Left: Haaretz’s Amos Harel and former Labor Knesset member Ronen Tzur, along with Tal Schneider, political correspondent for The Times of Israel, a colleague I respect and prefer not to judge.
The analyses in the article are probably not wrong. Schneider called Eisenkot “unpolished and down to earth.” Tzur said Israelis were “looking for a healer... someone who will calm things down, put on a bandage, put on ointment. Someone who will lower the tones of hatred, of rift, of division.”
But the perspective of the other side in the race is blatantly missing.
Thankfully, there is always Al Jazeera to offer perspective, in its analysis titled “Could Israel’s coming election see an end to Netanyahu’s political career?”
“Following its subsequent genocidal war in Gaza, Israel has faced growing international scrutiny over its actions, sliding into pariah status with some countries and more vocal criticism within the US political establishment,” the article says.
It quotes political analyst Ori Goldberg, who has accused Israel of “carpet bombing Gaza,” saying that Netanyahu “promised [Israelis] a morning when they could wake up, look out of their window and never have to see an Arab.”
What Netanyahu actually promised was peace accords with Arab countries, which were moving forward until Hamas’s genocidal attack on Israeli civilians from Gaza, but Al Jazeera left that out.
All these articles are a harbinger for an election in a political jungle that is bound to be misunderstood and reported wrongly by the international media at a very sensitive time.
The writer served as the chief political correspondent and analyst of The Jerusalem Post and executive director of HonestReporting and has lectured about Israel in all 50 US states.