The inside baseball of Israeli politics: Always keep to your base

As the Major League Baseball season draws to a close, what the Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers, Cleveland Indians, Houston Astros, Benjamin Netanyahu, Naftali Bennett, Arye Deri and Yair Lapid have in common is that they are all running to their bases.

The best teams in baseball soon will be intensifying their efforts when the playoffs begin. But their runners know it is dangerous to veer too far away from their base, or they could get thrown out.

Similarly, Israeli politicians know that the key to prevent them from getting thrown out is to keep to their base. In politics, that means shoring up the most reliable political supporters before venturing out to sectors that are harder to win over.

The political developments of the past two weeks underscore how seriously the leaders of Israel’s political parties take the concept of maintaining their base.

One of the main reasons the Likud has been so successful lately is that its political base of center-right working-class Israelis is growing, and Netanyahu is an expert at speaking to them and rallying them to his side. Whenever times get tough for the prime minister, he moves back to the Right and makes sure his base is intact. The more his criminal investigations intensify, the more he will speak about the dangers from Iran.

By contrast, the Labor Party’s traditional base in the Center-Left and agricultural communities is dying so Avi Gabbay has had no choice but to try to appeal to new sectors. That explains why he is going on a tour of slihot services at Sephardi synagogues in Jerusalem’s Old City on Monday night.

Perhaps Gabbay believes he can woo traditional Sephardi voters away from Shas. There are plenty of Shas voters who are not ultra-Orthodox and could be turned off by the way the party’s Council of Torah Sages has shunned MK Avi Gueta and forced him to quit for attending the wedding of his gay nephew.

But one cannot blame Shas for insisting on its platform being maintained. After all, it has been 18 years since Deri led Shas to 17 seats thanks to traditional Sephardi voters who drive to soccer games on Shabbat after attending services. Shas now has only seven seats, which come primarily from the party’s haredi (ultra-Orthodox) base, which Deri must maintain.

That is why Deri will insist on leading the parliamentary struggle ahead to prevent the drafting of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students, alongside the heads of United Torah Judaism. An emergency meeting of UTJ and Shas MKs at the Knesset last week following a Supreme Court ruling requiring haredi conscription started half an hour late while UTJ MKs waited for Deri to lead the meeting.

Last week also saw the renaissance of Yesh Atid leader Lapid, who looked unnatural putting on a kippa at the Western Wall as his wife, Lihi, performed the ritual of hafrashat halla (separating bread).

Now Lapid is back in his element, threatening to fill the streets with protesters if yeshiva students are permitted to avoid army service. Lapid tried outreach to Likud voters but, when he fell in the polls, he realized he had to return to his political base, which is not fond of the haredim.

On the issue of haredi service, Bennett has been careful not to ruffle feathers because his religious Zionist base has a wide range of opinion. Such a sensitive issue could lead to some of his voters leaving for Yesh Atid and others for Shas or UTJ.

Bennett needed to refocus the public’s attention on an issue that unites his camp: The Supreme Court overstepping its bounds and taking power away from the Knesset and the people the parliament represents. Bennett smartly announced his counterrevolution plan to limit the power of the Court on a Thursday night at 9 p.m. on a slow news day, guaranteeing him lead headlines in the well-read Friday papers.

Chances are the plan will not pass, at least not in its current form, but the headlines are already an achievement. Not only did those headlines shore up Bennett’s political base, it appealed to those of Netanyahu, Deri and UTJ, as well, making the plan the political equivalent of a home run.

Now the other heavy hitters in the Israeli political game have to step up to the plate and swing for the fences.