Nir Barkat made headlines around the world as he won this week’s mayoral elections in Jerusalem—perhaps a surprising level of attention for a city with a population of 800,000. Yet this election campaign, waged between incumbent Mayor Nir Barkat and challenger Moshe Leon, was a microcosm of the demographic, cultural, and religious conflicts that are rocking the entire Middle East. And Barkat’s reelection, by a margin of 6 percentage points, has been cause for optimism that religion and modernity can coexist in the city, that religious extremism has been rolled back, at least for a while.
These subtle but important trends can also be seen in Egypt: Only a year and a half ago many thought Egypt would be the new Iran, but now popular revolt has thrown out the oppressive religious right. The revolt in Egypt was not just a secular revolt. Religious people were the backbone of the push for a government that would provide for their basic needs. Here too, in Jerusalem, a third of the population is in the moderately religious camp, and while they care deeply about religious issues, they want more basic services from their municipal government. They know that in order to survive and thrive the city must increase its tax base, retain its professionals and young working class, improve schools, and attract businesses and tourists.
Barkat is a secular businessman who made a fortune in high tech and, like New York’s Mayor Bloomberg, does not take a salary for his job. During his first term he focused on making Jerusalem a more modern, clean, prosperous and lively city, part of an overall effort to stem the erosion of the secular constituents who fear the Haredization of the city. He developed entertainment centers and sports arenas, festivals and parks, bike paths and extended light rail transportation into Arab East Jerusalem. He brought Formula One racers to the streets of the Old City and high-tech jobs to the poorest city in the nation. Teddy Stadium now holds soccer games on the Jewish Sabbath, and restaurants have been allowed to open on Saturday.
Leon, who moved to Jerusalem only a few months ago to establish residency, was entered in the race by a strange “combina” of Avigdor Lieberman, the former Foreign Minister who founded a nationalist, mostly Russian-Israeli political party, and Aryeh Deri, a leader of the religious Shas party, whose constituents are mostly Jews of Sephardic origin. (Never mind that Lieberman is currently on trial for money laundering and Deri served a jail sentence for corruption and accepting bribes.) While they counted on getting out the Shas, Likud and National religious votes, they also hoped to draw in the ultra-religious vote. To that end they painted Barkat as the purveyor of non-kosher restaurants and Sabbath desecration, as a mayor who catered to the rich and middle class and neglected the poor, who wasted money on lavish festivals instead of dealing with the city’s housing crisis, failing education system and sanitation problems.
The demographics were not in Barkat’s favor. Jerusalem’s population is about one third Haredi, one third Arab and one third everyone else (secular, traditional and modern orthodox). The Arab population refuses to participate in municipal elections in Jerusalem in protest of what they see as Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem. That leaves the voting field numerically even except that Haredim vote as instructed by their religious leaders, and their voter turnout is double that of non-Haredi neighborhoods. So it should have been relatively easy for an Orthodox candidate for mayor to win handily by pulling in the ultra-orthodox and modern orthodox votes.
Initial reports on election day indicated that voter turnout was shockingly low. Voters came late to the polls, after work, and the final turnout, minus the Arab population that boycotted the elections, was a respectable 56 percent. But early in the afternoon, Barkat was worried. He had commercials, phone callers, volunteers on the street urging people to get out and vote. Everyone had been talking for days about how low voter turnout among the non-Haredim would tip the election right into Leon’s hands.
By the time my daughter arrived at the polls to vote for Mayor of Jerusalem, it was 8:00 in the evening. She presented her identity card to the volunteer at the table, who looked up her name on a huge alphabetical roster. “Where’s your sister?” she hissed. “She hasn’t voted yet, call her up and tell her it’s important!” The underlying message was clear. Every non-Haredi soul worth his salt had an obligation to stem the tide of religious extremists who would roll over the city like a tribe of Orcs, closing down the stadiums and theaters. A vote for Barkat was a vote against the parasitic population who refuse to work, refuse to serve in the army, live on welfare, study in seminaries all day, and have too many children.
But Barkat won the election precisely because he did not run a campaign based on fear of the Haredim. He won because he ran on a platform of inclusion, so that by election day he had a measure of support even among the ultra-Orthodox. He won 10 percent of Geula and Meah Shearim, the most extreme religious neighborhoods in the city. He managed to outmaneuver the Leiberman/Deri camp, and ended up with a sizeable portion of the Modern Orthodox, Likud, and Shas voters that Leon thought were his. He also benefited from a hoped for miracle: Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the charismatic religious leader of Shas whose funeral three weeks ago drew 800,000 mourners, did not endorse either candidate before his death. The two Hassidic Rebbes of Gur and Belz did not mandate that their followers vote for either candidate (though they did tell them to vote Haredi in the city council elections, where their candidates won the largest bloc of seats). Finally, Barkat was able to pull off a last-minute political coup by making a deal with Chaim Epstein, a Haredi candidate, to stay in the race in exchange for a job in Barkat’s coalition or a post as deputy mayor. (Jerusalem has eight deputy mayors; New York City, by contrast, has only one.) Epstein siphoned off enough of Leon’s votes to give Barkat the required margin of victory.
My other daughter did go to vote, an hour later, after she got off work at Barkat’s jewel in the crown, his new “First Station” complex. It’s a hub of culture, entertainment, restaurants and promenades in the restored Ottoman-era train station in Jerusalem. The First Station initially drew the fury of the ultra-religious and the dismay of the modern Orthodox because it is open on the Sabbath. But criticism has died out and the Station has become enormously popular with almost every segment of the population, from the very Orthodox, Arab, secular, young and old, with a bike path and running route bringing in an additional layer of visitors. The Station was built in an area that is quite well insulated from residential neighborhoods, so the noise and commerce on Saturday doesn’t intrude on the peacefulness of a Jerusalem Sabbath. Non-Orthodox residents finally have a place to go on Saturdays instead of feeling like they are in a kind of restrictive lockdown. And, surprisingly, many religious families come to enjoy the Station’s child-centered activities and kosher eateries.
The day after winning the election, Barkat did not head over to the First Station to raise a glass at one of the new bars. Instead he went to the Western Wall to offer a prayer of thanksgiving.