"Only the Likud, only Netanyahu" reads the slogan that the party of the prime minister in functions, placed in the city buses in Rishon Lezion, a city on the coast next to Tel Aviv. A slogan written in cyrillic alphabet, not in Hebrew, addressed to the 50,000 migrants from the former USSR who live here and have become the urban center in what is known as "Little Moscow". Benjamin Netanyahu expected to win tomorrow's election and form a government, something that he could not do after the election of April by the lack of support from his former Defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman , the israeli political support among the electorate immigrant jewish ancestry Russian.
the leader of The ultra-conservative source Moldavian, leader of Israel, our home, precipitated the dissolution of the previous coalition Government, prevented the formation of a new Executive following the elections of April and now, according to the polls, will be crucial because you can bend the results obtained for five months and achieve ten seats. These polls, past Channel 13, will produce a tie back to 32 seats between Netanyahu and the coalition Blue and White , the former chief of the Army, Benny Gantz, which returns to complicate the game of alliances in a chamber of 120 seats. Lieberman has emerged an advocate of an Israel that is secular and has reopened the debate about the role that the religious parties should have in the country with issues such as mandatory military service for young ultra-orthodox.
In the streets of the "Little Moscow" does not see haredíes (ultra-orthodox), the language that is heard at the bus stops is Russian and the butchers announce the sale of ham and pork chops, the animal most despised of all the that are not kosher (a term to refer to what is suitable from the point of view of the jewish law). " Vote to Lieberman because he is the only one capable of stopping a few parties religious who are destroying Israel and they want to bring to the past", says Sofia Meirovich, migrant Polish that came to this country when he was ten months and that she works as a professor. At her side, Larisa Leivobitz nods and hugs her friend with excitement. "You have to take to Bibi (nickname for Netanyahu) as is. In my case I'm going to vote to Gantz and I hope to form a Government with Lieberman," says Larisa, who left St. Petersburg in 1990 and he confesses that "it is the first electoral campaign in which the jews arrived from the former USSR we feel important".
The failure to win the support of Lieberman to reach the majority in the parliament led the Likud to create a kind of "operations centre" Russian to try to convince this group that exceeds a million people in the country. Netanyahu commissioned Michael Raif as the management of this organ has been assigned the manage the advertising in cyrillic or interviews of the prime minister with israeli media of the Russian-speaking community. "We have detected that the main problems are the lack of public housing, payment of pensions and the regulation of mixed marriages, and Netanyahu has pledged to fix them", says Raif. This member of the Likud emigrated from Siberia to Rishon Lezion, where he is scratching all of the votes that may be to a Lieberman that "it takes more than a decade of promises that will fix the problems of the russians and has done nothing. Only a big party can do so and that party is the Likud".
Of all the countries of the former USSR, only Russia granted pensions to jewish emigrants, reports Raif. At the heart of this community, that three decades after the fall of the iron curtain, continues to be that more jewish emigration brings to Israel -10.500 in 2018, according to data from the Jewish Agency, there are 200.000 affected by the problem of mixed marriages in which only one of the members is jewish, and "are necessary at least four years of process regularizarlo, is something that we need to accelerate not to live in a kind of limbo", pointing to the responsible of the Likud.
A few meters from the office of Raif, in the central park of Rishon Lezion, a group of elders playing chess in a pergola that protects them from the sun. Measure the time of each movement and positioned with strength, the wooden figures on the boards. If you closed your eyes you might think that it is in a park any of Russia in the middle of summer, but no, it is on the mediterranean coast and in the "Little Moscow" that jewish emigration has risen in the heart of the Middle East.
Date Of Update: 16 September 2019, 03:00
