Israel\'s right-wing on course as Arabs avoid the polls

Right-winger Naftali Bennett has repeatedly refused to recognise Palestine Israelis trickled into polling stations on Tuesday to vote in elections expected to return Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to power at the head of a government of hardline right-wing and religious parties .
A handful of voters were already queuing up as stations opened at 0500 hrs GMT, waiting to mark their ballots in blue voting booths.
Netanyahu was out early, casting his ballot with his wife Sara and their two sons at a polling station in the upscale Rehavia neighbourhood of Jerusalem, where the Prime Minister's official residence is located.
The Prime Minister, after casting his ballot said he hoped for "a flood of votes" for his right-wing joint Likud-Beitenu bloc, Israeli media reported.
Polling ahead of the vote has consistently projected an easy win for the joint list of Netanyahu's Likud faction and the secular nationalist Yisrael Beitenu of former Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
By 1200 hrs local time, 26.7 percent of the Israeli population had already voted across approximately 10,000 polling stations nationwide. This compares with 21.6 percent at the same time in the 2006 elections.
At 1240 hrs, Arab-Israeli politician Hanin Zoabi cast her vote in Nazareth.
In the run-up to the elections, a right-wing-led election committee attempted to ban Zoabi from standing in Israel’s general election due to her involvement in the 2010 Mavi Marmara flotilla which aimed to break Israel’s naval blockade on the Gaza Strip.
The committee was successful but Israel’s Supreme Court later repealed the ban.
Zoabi told reporters at the Nazareth polling station that she expected her party, Balad, to pass the minimum threshold to gain entry to the Knesset.
Prime Minister Netanyahu is expected to preside over a sharply right-wing government that is considered less likely to achieve a comprehensive peace deal with the Palestinians and could increase Israel's diplomatic isolation.
The government will face key diplomatic and foreign policy questions, including Iran's nuclear programme and a Middle East profoundly changed by the Arab uprisings.
But domestic challenges will be no less pressing, with a major budget crisis and austerity cuts on the horizon, even as Israelis express widespread discontent over spiralling prices.
The joint Likud-Beitenu list may be confident of leading those competing for the Knesset's 120 seats, but polls show that the two parties will lose around 10 of the seats they hold now, garnering around 32 seats in total.
The centre-left Labour [Kadima] party is projected to trail in second place with around 17 seats. Its chief, Shelly Yachimovich, is expected to become leader of the opposition after pledging she would not join a Netanyahu government.
Despite the right-wing surge, some Israeli politicians were rattled by contrary voting patterns. Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced: “It is definitely troubling that voter turnout rates are high in areas where left-wingers are the majority, as of right now we are working to raise the voter turnout among Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu voters."
However, the campaign's big surprise is still Naftali Bennett, the young, charismatic new leader of the hardline national religious Jewish Home. He took over the party in November and has quickly become a rising star among settlers.
The party, which firmly opposes even the existence of a Palestinian state and won just three seats in 2009, is on course to win 15, making it the third faction in parliament and a likely partner in any future coalition government.
Bennett's success has rattled Netanyahu, pundits say, with the premier pushing to stem the defection of voters to Jewish Home by burnishing his own credentials as a defender of Israeli settlement in the occupied territories.
Both candidates have vowed not to remove a single settlement from the Occupied Territories should they finish the elections victorious.
Overall, according to final polls, the rightwing-religious bloc will take between 61 and 67 seats, compared with 53 to 57 for the centre-left and Arab parties.
Meanwhile, reports of electoral irregularities also began to emerge.
Netanyahu’s party, Likud, reported suspicions of fake ballot slips in stations in Hadera, Rishon Letzion and Beit Ezra because ballots did not contain the phrase “lead by Benjamin Netanyahu for Prime Minister.”
Some users on social networking site Twitter also claimed activists from the ultra-orthodox Shas party had attempted to cast fake ballots in Hadera for Habayit Hayehudi, Am Shalem and Koach Lehashpia. Israeli’s Central Elections Committee later confirmed the reports, calling on election officials to be “on alert.”
Some 5.65 million Israelis are eligible to vote in Tuesday's parliamentary elections, including Arab citizens of the Jewish state, who are expected to stay away from the polls in record numbers.
Security has been tightened across the country and more than 20,000 police officers have been deployed to secure the vote.
Meanwhile, less than half of Israel's Arabs, who represent a fifth of the population, are expected to vote in Tuesday's election, in what pundits say could be their lowest-ever turnout.
Despite calls from all sides for them to get out and vote, many feel disenfranchised in reality, and are increasingly fed up with being excluded from political decision-making, which has for four years been dominated by right-wing nationalist and ultra-Orthodox parties.
In Nazareth, the city with the largest Arab population in the country, the election campaign has been largely discreet.
"The Arab parties don't represent us well," says Samih Taha, a 23-year-old student who voted in the last legislative election for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality, a Jewish-Arab socialist alliance better known as Hadash.
"I don't believe in elections. Even if [the Arab parties] get 18 seats in the Knesset, what can they do or influence? What can we do to change Israeli decisions?" he asked.
Voter turnout in Arab communities across Israel was reported at around the 10 percent mark by noon local time.
Those involved in piecing together Israel's multiple coalition governments have systematically excluded the Arab factions from executive power, often accusing them of having an anti-Zionist agenda.
In a first, the Arab League joined those calls on Monday, urging "Arab citizens of Israel to turn out in droves for the elections so they are represented [in parliament] and can oppose racist laws."

Source: AFP