Rosner's Domain: Blogging election day, waiting for the exit polls

9:05pm

See you right after 10pm, with an analysis of the first exit polls. 

 20:20pm

How tired is this argument (in this case, penned by Gideon Rachman of FT). He says that only Obama offers hope for Israel:

The Israelis are understandably nervous about the prospect of pressure from the US. But if the Obama administration does push Israel much harder to move towards a peace agreement with the Palestinians, it will in fact be doing the country a favour.

19:43pm 

Marc Lynch was watching Arab networks, hoping to understand what the arab world thinks about Israeli elections:

I'd like to be able to say that Arabs are on the edge of their seats awaiting the outcome.  But that's not what I'm seeing. For the most part, the elections are seen as a choice between bad (Livni) and worse (Netanyahu) with Lieberman the "real" emerging face of Israel.  This isn't like 1996, when the choice between Peres and Netanyahu seemed stark and urgent.   Today, they survey the wreckage of Gaza and see little reason for hope regardless of the outcome.   Whoever wins the election, argues the journalist Mustafa Zayn in al-Hayat, the true winner will be Ze'ev Jabotinski and his doctrine of the "Iron Wall."  

19:22pm

Always good to know department:

A new survey of seven countries across Europe shows millions continue to believe the classical anti-Semitic canards that have persistently pursued Jews through the centuries.  The findings released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today revealed that nearly half of the Europeans surveyed believe Jews are not loyal to their country and more than one-third believe they have “too much power” in business and finance. 

16:58pm

Back from Jerusalem, heavy rain, but people are voting. This is good news for Livni and Kadima.

12:55pm

How can someone, anyone, become "Israel's Kingmaker" before the vote was cast and counted? 

He can't - but this Time article suffers from a tendency for premature predictions. Like this one: "Lieberman will swap his support for key cabinet posts for himself and his party leaders, perhaps including the all-important job of defense minister". 

12:22pm

President Shimon Peres was never a great article writer. But his WPost article from today is not bad - for a politician:

Dissenters from the two-state solution contend -- not without some reason -- that Gaza and the West Bank are too small to absorb the Palestinian refugees. Yet this would also be the case under the one-state formula; it would result in a state that is merely 24,000 square kilometers and that already overflows with a population exceeding 10 million (5.5 million Jews and 4.5 million Arabs). While cynics might question the size of the West Bank and Gaza, optimists should look no further than Singapore for reassurance. 

11:29am

Two days ago I wrote for contentions about the new BBC World Survey and its implications on the battle against nuclear Iran. In the Daily Beast, Katty Kay writes about this same poll:

According to a new BBC poll, those ungrateful foreigners have embraced America's new president without really changing their opinion of the United States as a whole. The poll of 21 countries (including Ghana, where, incidentally, views of the US have improved, so that's a big relief) was conducted after the US election. It suggests the world is optimistic that Obama will improve international relations but there has been no corresponding surge in pro-American sentiment. Views of the US have improved, modestly, but are still predominantly negative.

Kay, though, is quite optimistic and believes this will change with time. 

11:28am 

No lines, 10 minutes at the voting place. Not an easy decision, but an easy one to execute. 

9:50am 

Going to vote, and later to Jerusalem. Will be back later... 

9:38am

Carnegie has a new report on Iran. Not very optimistic:

the reality is as long as Khamenei remains Supreme Leader, a fundamental shift in Iranian domestic and foreign policy is unlikely. Given that his selection as Leader was based on his fealty to revolutionary ideals and the vision of Ayatollah Khomeini - whose political views crystallized in the 1970s during the time of the shah - the chances of Khamenei being willing, or able, to reinvent himself at the age of 68 do not appear strong.

9:27am

TNR's Marty Peretz would vote for the Netanyahu-Barak ticket. Does it mean Labor or Likud? - he doesn't say.

9:15am

From Huffpost:

The question of the night at President Obama's first televised press conference focused not on economics but foreign policy. Helen Thomas asked the president if he knew of any countries in the Middle East that have nuclear weapons. The President said that he didn't want to "speculate" about such an issue, but that preventing a regional nuclear arms race, as well as reducing nuclear arsenals internationally, was an important goal. 

8:35am

I told you this was going to happen:

If in today's election but a hair's breadth separates Netanyahu and Livni, we can once again try the rotation system, which worked quite successfully between Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres (they reduced inflation by hundreds of percentage points and brought the war in Lebanon to an end). But rotation is a one-time solution, and the attempt to move to a system of directly electing the prime minister also failed. One of the first tasks of the new government and Knesset is to establish a state commission to effect a profound change in the election system, and, firstly, an increase of the entry threshold.  

JPost editorial says similar things.

I think that's an over-analysis. Obama has said many times in the past that he'd do whatever necessary to stop Iran's nuclear program, and that a nuclearized Iran is not a tolerable idea. In the first presidential debate Obama declared "We cannot tolerate a nuclear Iran".  In the second debate he said: "We cannot allow Iran to get a nuclear weapon". 

7:44am

Not a bad article by Jonathan Freedland at the Guardian.

Freedland understands - as few outsiders do that "in the words of one senior Israeli official, 'Whoever wins, it will be more of the same: convergence on the pragmatic centre'."

One who didn't quite understand is Jackson Diehl of the WPost, on which I wrote yesterday:

But Diehl fails to differentiate between wars. He compares Netanyahu to Kadima’s Tzipi Livni, “who is promising to continue peace talks.” The comparison doesn’t stand up to scrutiny: Netanyahu talks about war with Hamas — Livni talks about peace with Palestinian moderates from the Palestinian Authority — namely Fatah. He also treats Netanyahu as the only Israeli leader wanting to topple Hamas. Wrong again: Livni was as vehement in demanding the removal of Hamas as Netanyahu. This is no secret; Livni has said so publicly.

7:36am

I wrote in Contentions about the tendency of Israelis to vote "strategically":

Strategic voting has it's weaknesses. It makes people vote for someone they don’t agree with on policy issues - thus rendering politics in general "dirtier" and less ideological. No wonder Israelis are so quickly disillusioned with their politicians: First they vote for someone they don’t care for - then they feign disappointment.