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Notes -
What's the tribal landscape like? It it Ashkenazi vote one way while Mizrahi vote another way, or do things split in some other way?
Complex. I’ll try to simplify as much as possible, and keep in mind these are general statements that obviously won’t apply to every individual voter.
First order: Jewish or Arab. Arabs vote for Arab lists (or the Arab list when they unify). Other groups are slightly represented in Jewish parties, but are very minor blocs anyway.
Second order: Jewish religiosity. There are several factions, but in general various Mizrahi-Haredi vote Shas, various Ashkenazi-Haredi vote Yehadut HaTorah (or don’t vote at all, if they’re anti-Zionist), Zionist Religious vote whatever current flavor of Zionist Religious list in this cycle or Likud. Secular and Traditional are the remaining majority.
Third order: Left-Right. This is almost meaningless in terms of policy, and doesn’t conform well to the American Left-Right dynamic, despite that influence continuously seeping in. For example, the right-coded government just implemented food stamps, and the left-coded Meretz stated they’d lower taxes last cycle (they didn’t get in). In broad strokes, ‘right’ leans slightly Mizrahi, slightly poor, rural-but-not-farming, urban poor, and a hawkish rhetoric. Left is the opposite: urban middle-class, rural-farmer and kibbutzim, slightly Ashkenazi, rhetoric can be anything re: Arabs. There are more flavors of left and centre to choose from than right, since Likud ate up most of the right (and is now being eaten from the inside by various pressure groups).
Cool!
If i can bother you for more info - what tribal allegiances have shifted as Israel has moved to the right? E.g. who do all the people who used to vote Labour vote for now?
I don’t know if I’m qualified enough to give you a good answer, to be honest. Labour was strongest before I was born, I wasn’t there to see it.
As far as I can tell, the Israeli left gradually lost power both due to demographic changes and because socialism in Israel failed economically. The biggest turning point was in the late ‘70s when labour lost the plurality vote for the first time, following… a whole bunch of stuff, really. Wiki has a long list under ‘history’ on the 1977 election. As I understand it, and again I wasn’t there, hyper-inflation was one of the biggest factors here. Older people tell of going back to a barter system for some items.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Israeli_legislative_election
I’d say the second biggest inflection point was the stabilization program in the mid 80’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_Israel_Economic_Stabilization_Plan
After the Labour-led government distanced itself from socialism in practice, it lost the ideology it was previously offering. Today Labour is less socialist than Shas, and mostly serves as a vehicle for whoever wins leadership there to enter politics. Case in point, Yair Golan just won leadership of Labour - two years ago he lost when trying to gain leadership in Meretz. He just won because he’s perceived as a hero (rightly, I think) due to his actions on October 7.
The same tribe who used to vote Labour today vote for Yesh Atid (Yair Lapid) or Benny Gantz (I don’t even remember his party’s bame off the top of my head). They’re both kinda generic ‘centre’ parties, saying they like good things and dislike bad things. It’s not a good time for Israeli politics, honestly. The tribe’s biggest issue is that they (we?) don’t have as many children as everyone else, so over time the left-urban section of the population has lost a lot of electoral power.
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