Israeli Jews Vote by Economic Status, Even Though Elections Turn on Other Issues

A fascinating chart from Yedioth Aharanot newspaper shows the voting breakdown of the Jewish electorate in the Israeli election.

People the pollsters deem to be in the bottom 10% in socio-economic status voted 96.7% for Netanyahu’s Likud and parties aligned with it. Those in the top 10% voted 80.9% for opposition parties.

What makes this particularly interesting is that the election turned almost entirely on issues that are not economic in the ordinary sense, such as conscripting Haredi Jews, which factions would best resist outside pressure for a Palestinian state, who is best-positioned to finish the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, and who is to blame for 10/7. Many voters expressed concern to pollsters about the cost of living, but none of the major parties talked much about it.

So to a large and often unappreciated (at least outside Israel) extent, Israeli politics is culture-war politics. Netanyahu and his allies represent voters who are more religiously traditional, less-educated, live on “the periphery,” poorer, and, importantly, of recent North African or Middle Eastern descent–Israelis who were treated as outsiders by the Ashkenazi socialists who ran the country until Menahem Begin broke their stranglehold on elections in 1977. Netanyahu’s opponents rely on voters who are disproportionately Ashkenazi, better-educated, wealthier, live in Tel Aviv or Haifa, and more secular-minded.

Another interesting aspect of this is that while the religious/secular divide comes up in politicking all the time, Israeli politics mostly avoid explicit ethnic or wealth-based appeals. The de facto leader of the opposition, Gadi Eisenkot, is the son of Moroccan immigrants. Moroccans are a huge part of Netanyahu’s base, but Eisenkot’s potential to be the first Moroccan (and first non-Ashkenazi) prime minister barely played a role in the campaign, and he did not try to give it one.

I will leave it to those more expert than I on Israeli politics to analyze this further, but it sure seems like a big factor in the election was a visceral fear among groups that feel historically marginalized in Israel that victory by the anti-Netanyahu faction would amount to a loss in status.

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