January 14, 2013

Pay attention to the numbers when buying Health Insurance

Leave a Comment / Blogs, Health, Mobile, Mobile Sections, News / Shmully Schwartz

In our previous post we spoke about Obamacare, the Pros and the Cons. As we prepare for the insurance exchange and the employer mandate, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect what would be the best position for our clients. As I was thinking about how to best help our clients, both group clients and individuals, my thoughts began to drift to the balancing act of folks who were self-insured versus folks with high deductible plans versus folks with “Cadillac Plans”. Each one of these groups can make a strong argument for why they believe they are in the right for their current situation. Today, I’d like to focus on the numbers when buying health insurance.

We should first focus on what a deductible is; it’s the out of pocket amount of money you must put towards a claim before your insurance company puts in a dime. I think of it as the amount of risk you are willing to put into the game before your insurance company covers the risk. As you can imagine, the more skin you are willing to put in the game, the more reward. Most people only focus on deductibles with their car insurance and think $1,000.00 dollars is a high deductible. With health insurance, most high deductible plans reach $5,000 with some as high as $8,000 or $16,000 for a family. That makes $1,000 laughable!
In addition to deductibles, many plans expose patients to Annual out of Pocket Maximums. What is this extra money? It is money a patient must pay in co-pays and/or co-insurances. So once you’ve hit your deductible, you now must pay these extra charges until you’ve hit your max. Once that happens, your insurance company goes to work!

So why would someone of sound state and mind want to put $5,000 of their hard earned dollars at risk? The answer: the difference in premiums between a Cadillac plan and a high deductible plan. A very popular high deductible plan is the Anthem Tonik plan. It’s one a lot of younger folks buy as the premiums are not so high, it covers dental and vision and allows a patient 4 doctors office visits throughout the year. For a healthy 35 year old, single male, the monthly premiums are going to be around $220 a month. The deductible with this plan is $5000 and the annual out of pocket maximum is $0. Let’s then look at a PPO plan with a $1,000 deductible from the same company. This plan is going to run that same healthy 35 year old, single man, $403 a month. The biggest strength of this plan is unlimited office visits at $30 and $50 co-pays. The price difference reflects the deductible difference. However, the plan also exposes the patient to an annual out of pocket maximum of $4,500 bucks. The client is now exposed, if something were to happen, to 403 x 12 + 1000 + 4500 = $10,336. This is versus a client being exposed to 220 x 12 + 5000 = 7,640.

In addition to the numbers there are also some very important points one must consider when looking at their health insurance options. First, what insurance plans do your physicians accept? Do you want an HMO or a PPO? One important point, many HMO’s have zero deductible, but you pay for that $0 deductible in the premium difference! Are there well-being assessments available to reduce my premiums? What companies seem to raise their premiums versus a level premium history?

Remember, you only have one heart, two lungs and one brain! Take care of these over time and they’ll take care of you! Until next time, be well.

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Women head three major parties in Israel’s elections

Leave a Comment / Israel, Live from the Arab Spring, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News / Jewish Journal

For the first time in Israel’s history, three of the major parties are headed by women. The Labor party headed by Shelly Yacimovich is expected to become Israel’s second-largest party, Hatnuah headed by former Foreign Minister Tzippi Livni is set to win seven seats, and the dovish Meretz and Zahava Gal-On is projected at five seats in the 120-seat parliament.

Because the front-runner, the joint slate of the Likud and Yisrael Beytenu ((Israel is Our Home), is only expected to get about 35 seats, Prime Minister Netanyahu will be turning to all of these parties as potential coalition partners.

“It’s an amazing advancement,” Dr. Galit Desheh, the executive director of the Israel Women’s Network told The Media Line. “Two of these women have an amazing record promoting women’s rights and issues.”

The two she was referring to are Yacimovich and Gal-On. Livni is not seen as focusing on women’s issues, although she has begun to do so more of late.

Yacimovich, 52, was a popular journalist before entering politics in 2005. She has reinvigorated the Labor party by focusing on social and economic issues, and gotten tens of thousands of young people to join. Of the first 22 candidates on Labor’s list, seven are women.

Gal-On, 56, of the dovish Meretz party, has been especially active on women’s rights issues. A Knesset member since 1999, she has led the committee that fights the trafficking of women. Desheh ays she is the single most active Knesset member on women’s issues.

In contrast, Livni, 54, is not seen as a major advocate of women’s rights. She has started a new party called Hatnuah, the Movement, after she lost the leadership of Kadima, a centrist party, in recent primaries. Livni, a former intelligence official, has focused on foreign policy.

In addition to these women, Asma Agbarieh – Zahalka, 39, heads the Da’am Workers Party, a socialist party that focuses on employment issues in the Arab sector of Israel. It is doubtful that it will receive enough votes to enter the Parliament.

There are currently 24 women in the current Knesset and that number is expected to rise substantially. Even parties headed by men have placed women in prominent slots. Netanyahu’s Likud which is running on a joint slate with Yisrael Beytenu, has put seven women in the top 30 slots. Yesh Atid, a centrist secular party headed by popular journalist Yair Lapid, has three women in the top 10.

In the past, the quickest route to politics in Israel was the army. Generals were revered and most of Israel’s prime ministers (with the notable exception of the sole woman, Golda Meir) had illustrious military careers. Now that is changing.

“We are seeing that some generals are not even getting elected, and yet journalists are having great success,” Dr. Gideon Rahat of the Israel Democracy Institute told The Media Line. “This opens the door for women because there are more women journalists.”

Women are active in Israel’s labor force. While only 28 percent of Arab women in Israel work outside the home, (due to cultural factors which encourage women to stay at home with their children), about 80 percent of Jewish women have paying jobs. Israel has good day care and laws that encourage women to work. That said, women still earn between 17 and 30 percent less than men.

The Israel Women’s Network's Desheh says the three priorities for women are personal security, improving conditions for female workers and women’s health. As more women serve in the Knesset, it is likely that women’s issues will come to the fore.

“Research shows that men and women in the Knesset have different legislative behavior,” Rahat said. “This is a new stage in Israeli politics.”

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Israel’s political cycle not stuck on the right

Leave a Comment / Opinion / Jewish Journal

With Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu poised to win re-election later this month, some critics of Israel’s peace and security policies worry out loud that Israel’s political cycle — its pattern of cycling alternately between the political left and right — is stuck on the right.

“This is the Israeli reality of 2013, enabled in part by American politicians and staunch supporters in this country … as the two-state solution slips through our fingers,” asserts J Street Executive Director Jeremy Ben-Ami in the Washington Post.

Anyone who has ever taken a course in economics is familiar with the concept of the business cycle, the observation that our economic fortunes expand and contract in distinct phases. Politics, similarly, has its own natural cycle. One political party becomes strong, thinks it has a lock on the electorate, purges its own ranks of political moderates, enunciates policy positions at odds with mainstream sensibilities and alienates the very middle-of-the-road voters that brought it to power. Republicans and Democrats have been vulnerable to its vicissitudes.

Israel, to be sure, is no stranger to the political cycle. Just like Americans, Israelis tend to lean left or right for a period until the ideological camp in power overreaches or external conditions dictate otherwise, sending the pendulum swinging in the opposite direction. Since the onset of the peace process with the Palestinians in the early 1990s, the Israeli public has ousted Israeli prime ministers whenever the prime minister has appeared resistant to opportunities for peace or appeared too eager for peace in the face of intransigence on the other side.

In 1992, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir lost the election for being perceived as inflexible in the Madrid peace talks; in 1996, Shimon Peres lost for being too forthcoming in the Oslo process; in 1999, Netanyahu lost for being too hawkish; and in 2001, Ehud Barak lost for being too dovish. Since that time, two prime ministers — Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert — left office for reasons other than their stances on peace and security. Elected for a second time in the spring of 2009, Netanyahu is on track to win another term in office.

If the political cycle holds true, sooner or later there will be a perceived opening for peace, at which time either the right-leaning government will move to the center (e.g. Begin’s peace with Egypt or Sharon’s disengagement from Gaza) or will be defeated by a left-leaning challenger.

Some critics of current Israeli government policy are troubled that Israelis haven’t punished Netanyahu for a lack of progress in the peace process. They surmise that the growth of the Israeli religious nationalist camp and right-leaning Jews from the former Soviet Union has moved the electorate decidedly to the right. Israelis, they fulminate, may permanently forsake the possibility of a two-state solution.

But in a recent poll of Israeli attitudes toward peace, a full two-thirds of the respondents said they would support a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders, with land swaps and a demilitarized Palestinian state. Even a majority of Likud voters supported such a deal.

The issue, then, is not that Israeli attitudes have hardened against making painful compromises for peace — quite the contrary — it’s that most Israelis don’t believe that peace is a realistic option at the moment.

It’s not hard to see why. Given the massive unrest sweeping through the Arab world and the ascendance of the Muslim Brotherhood, many wonder how a fledgling Palestinian state could stave off such radical forces or survive a Hamas onslaught.

The results of Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas’ subsequent takeover and the unremitting rocket fire aimed at Israeli population centers do not inspire confidence. Rather than setting a precedent for neighborly relations and sound governance, it gave Israelis a glimpse into a possible mess on its eastern border in the event of a peace deal in the West Bank.

“There will be those who say, “If you didn’t like the book [in Gaza], why would you see the movie [in the West Bank]?” observed Middle East analyst David Makovsky.

And while some critics of Israel’s peace policies point to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ recent statements indicating that he would be willing to come to terms with a Jewish state, fresh on the mind of many Israelis is Abbas’ refusal to negotiate for 10 months during Israel’s 2010 settlement freeze, the recent unilateral move for statehood at the United Nations and various statements denying the Jewish connection to the land.

Most Israelis don’t believe enough has changed in the Palestinian camp or in regional conditions to justify a shift in approach.

Do critics of Israeli policy expect that no matter what the Arab world dishes out, Israelis will continue to elect governments with a predilection for making comprehensive peace offers to the Palestinians? Do they expect Israel to be on a permanent peace footing?

If so, then they want Israel to be a country not made up of diverse people with diverse attitudes subject to political swings, but of people just like them who will make concessions at any time and at all costs. They want Israel to be a country like no other — that cannot exist — because all democratic polities are, in their own way, beholden to the inexorable logic of the political cycle.

David Bernstein is the executive director of the David Project.

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Security guard arrested for vandalizing Memphis yeshiva’s Torahs at hotel

Leave a Comment / United States / Jewish Journal

A Memphis yeshiva’s Shabbat retreat was disrupted when a hotel security guard was arrested for vandalizing Torah scrolls and other property belonging to the school.

Justin Shawn Baker, 24, an Iraqi War veteran living in Jackson, Tenn., was arrested and charged with vandalism between $60 and $250,000 — a Class B felony. His bail was set Monday at $100,000. Baker is an armed guard working for the Maxxguard security firm.

On Saturday morning, local police and later federal law enforcement were called to the DoubleTree Motel in Jackson to investigate damaged Torah scrolls, siddurs and music equipment belonging to the Margolin Hebrew Academy's Cooper Yeshiva High School.

Approximately 50 high school students and faculty from the school were spending Shabbat at the motel on their way to a ski trip in the Smoky Mountains.

A MySpace profile page belonging to Baker and one belonging to a woman who identifies herself as Baker’s wife both make references to Satan, though neither page has been in use for at least three years.

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Tolkien b’Shvat: Looking to the Middle-earth folk to save our planet

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What lore does Bilbo Baggins have to share with us about Tu b’Shvat?

While viewing “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” and hearing the Middle-earth characters talking about threats to the forests, more than a seed or two of connection between the increasingly popular Jewish holiday dedicated to trees and the fruit of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work popped out to me.

With my 3-D glasses, I watched as Bilbo, Thorin, Gandalf and Elrond — the representatives of Tolkien’s Middle-earth races — mostly lived hand in hand with the natural world. Concerning Jewish attitudes toward trees and environmentalism, I wondered which group we should strive to emulate.

Would it be the hobbits, the dwarves, the elves, the wizards? Or do we secretly identify with the goblin-like orcs, who tear through the environment wherever they go?

Upon leaving the theater, I mulled which Middle-earth group would be best to have over for a seder on Tu b'Shvat, which begins this year on the evening of Jan. 25 and ends the next night. Not that I was planning a role-playing party — that could wait till Purim — but who would best get into the seder’s singing and drinking and connections to nature?

Who loves to feast and toast more than the dwarves? The seder’s four cups of wine — meant to show the progression of the season through different colored wines — certainly would be much to their pleasure. And with their singing and dancing in the film, one could almost hear the dwarves harmonizing and stomping to a rendition of “Uvshatem mayim,” a song we sang last year at our seder.

The dwarves, miners of the earth, no doubt would identify with the song’s lyric: “Draw water joyously from the wells of salvation.”

Exiled from their mountain home, Tolkien himself likened the dwarves to Jews. According to a transcription of a 1971 BBC interview with the English author found on Tolkienlibrary.com, “The dwarves of course are quite obviously, couldn't you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic,” he said.

Besides, Tolkien’s dwarves are stubborn and bound to tradition. They even have beards like the rabbis of yore.

The dwarves might be fine for a festive seder of wine and song, but which group seemed the best protectors of the forest?

As shown in “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, Lothlorien is the forest refuge that protects the sylvan elves and allows them to flourish. Known as “tree folk,” the elves are most protective of huge, golden mallorn trees, and are willing to fight for them.

Seeing that a portion of the Tu b’Shvat seder representing “Briyah,” or “Creation,” calls for one to commune with nature, the elves with their woodsy “ruach,” or spirit, seem Middle-earth’s group most suited to answer the call.

Yet the hobbits appear to be the best overall model for living in harmony with the earth. Gardeners and farmers, with the earth between their toes, and their homes built into hillsides, Bilbo and the rest of the inhabitants of the Shire seem the most at home in nature. A giant Party Tree is even at the center of many hobbit community events.

Who but a hobbit chowing down on four meals a day could be more appreciate of the fruits of the earth represented by Tu b’Shvat?

Hobbits even seem closest to the seder’s concept of “Assiyah,” of “doing.” Consider that from a Jewish point of view, Bilbo Baggins, who is at the center of the film, is tasked with repairing the world and keeping it whole.

What do the wizards have to tell us about Tu b’Shvat?

On our earth, the Torah places man as the steward of nature. On Middle-earth that role falls to Gandalf and the wizards in his order. Watching over the land, they are the “Fixers,” the gray geschreiers and exhorters to action.

The wizard, Radagast the Brown, is the film’s best poster boy for Tu b’Shvat, which is derived from the Torah and Mishnah, and marks the Jewish New Year for trees, Rosh Hashanah La’Yanot? Drawn by a sled of speedster rabbits and outfitted with a bird’s nest in his hat, he is the first to report that evil is falling upon the forest, changing it from Greenwood to Mirkwood. His furry-looking hat even resembles a shtreimel.

The oddball of the film, Radagast is like our sincerely nutty environmentalist aunt, uncle or cousin who has berated us for not washing and reusing our plastic utensils. Like that green relative, he’s the one who can make us squirm by painting a picture of impending environmental disaster.

On today’s earth, sensing the coming of our own environmental Mirk, the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life has pledged “To carry to our homes, communities, congregations and workplaces the urgent message that air, land, water and living creatures are endangered.”

Though COEJL doesn’t seem to be working with swords or shields, or even wizards, perhaps the part of us that identifies with “The Hobbit’s” coalition of nature-loving Middle-earth inhabitants can see the adventure and mitzvah of saving our earth as well.

Edmon J. Rodman is a JTA columnist who writes on Jewish life from Los Angeles. Contact him at edmojace@gmail.com.

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Knesset elections: A reader’s guide

Leave a Comment / Israel, Mobile, Mobile-Homepage, News / Jewish Journal

Remember the second U.S. presidential debate in October, when the incumbent Barack Obama and challenger Mitt Romney stood about six inches from each other, with one interrupting the other at every turn?

Add about a dozen candidates, take away the formal rules of debate, switch to Hebrew and you’ve got a fairly good approximation of the tenor of Israel's current election campaign.

Israel's parliamentary system, in which voters choose a party instead of a candidate, makes for some narrowly focused parties and strange bedfellows, though factions do tend to fall in with their natural political allies. Parties submit lists of candidates and their top choices are seated in proportion to the party's total share of the vote.

This year, 34 parties are officially vying for the Knesset in the Jan. 22 elections, though only about a dozen are likely to actually cross the threshold necessary to win seats. They fall broadly into the following major blocs.

RIGHT WING

Major parties: Israel’s biggest political bloc, the right wing has led the polls throughout the campaign and almost definitely will lead the next coalition. Its flagship party is a merger of two factions: the right-wing Likud and the hard-line Yisrael Beiteinu. Likud favors a tough foreign policy and has presided over an expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. On economic policy, the party tacks conservative, promoting free markets, privatization of state industries and reduced regulation.

Yisrael Beiteinu, originally founded as a party for Russian immigrants, has attracted a broader base with hard-line nationalist rhetoric, a secularist agenda and calls for universal army or volunteer service.

An upstart challenger to Likud-Beiteinu is Jewish Home, a hawkish pro-settler party that also favors some progressive economic policies. Historically a religious Zionist party, Jewish Home has successfully broadened its base this cycle and has an excellent shot at a third-place finish.

People to watch: Benjamin Netanyahu, the Likud chairman and current prime minister, almost certainly will win another term. Netanyahu, 63, has relentlessly sounded the alarm on Iran’s nuclear program and shaped Israel’s supply-side economic policies. He was first elected prime minister in 1996, lost the 1999 election and made a comeback in 2009, winning his second term.

Avigdor Liberman, Yisrael Beiteinu’s chairman, was Israel’s foreign minister until he resigned following his indictment in December for fraud and breach of trust. An immigrant from Moldova, Liberman, 54, advocates hard-line foreign and domestic policies.

Naftali Bennett, a high-tech entrepreneur and past leader of the settlement movement, is the charismatic new chairman of Jewish Home. Bennett, 40, has changed the image of the party from a sectarian religious Zionist faction to one that courts Jewish Israelis of all stripes.

Moshe Feiglin, 50, has led a revolution within Likud, driving a sharp turn to the right that has led to the rise of other hawkish politicians and nudging out of moderates. He is 14th on the Likud list and almost certain to gain a Knesset seat.

CENTER

Major parties: Israel’s most fragmented political bloc, likely headed for the opposition, the center has three major — and largely similar — parties. Labor, Israel’s founding party, has pushed progressive, socialist policies. Yesh Atid, a party of political neophytes, emphasizes middle-class tax cuts and mandatory army or volunteer service for all Israelis. Hatnua, also founded last year, supports Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and a two-state solution.

Kadima, the largest party in the Knesset and the ruling party from 2006 to 2009, has been largely discredited and may not cross the 2 percent vote threshold necessary to a win a seat in the Knesset.

People to watch: Shelly Yachimovich, 52, a former television journalist, is the Labor chair and has shifted the party's focus from a two-state solution back to the progressive socioeconomic policies that once defined it. She has been criticized for barely addressing diplomatic policy, though she recently vowed not to join a Likud-Beiteinu coalition.

Yair Lapid, 49, another former TV journalist and the head of Yesh Atid, announced his entrance into politics early last year amid hype that his party could rival Likud. Lapid is the son of former journalist and politician Tommy Lapid.

Tzipi Livni, 54, chairwoman of Hatnua, has shifted from right to center-left during a lengthy political career. Originally a senior politician in Likud, Livni followed former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Kadima in 2005 and served as foreign minister from 2006 to 2009. She resigned from Kadima last year after losing the chairmanship in the party primaries.

LEFT WING

Major parties: As Labor has tacked to the center, the standard-bearer of the Zionist left has become Meretz, a party that advocates Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, equal rights for all Israeli citizens, far greater separation of religion and state, and progressive economic policies. To Meretz’s left is the non-Zionist, communist, Arab-Jewish Hadash, which also advocates equal rights and progressive economics but does not prioritize Israel remaining a Jewish state.

People to watch: Zahava Gal-on, Meretz’s chairwoman, immigrated to Israel from Russia as a child and has been an outspoken supporter of civil liberties since she first entered the Knesset in 1999. Hadash’s chairman, Mohammed Barakeh, has been indicted for alleged violence at protests, but also has earned praise for visiting Auschwitz in 2010. Hadash’s third in line, Dov Khenin, is a well-known leftist activist who ran for mayor of Tel Aviv.

CHAREDI ORTHODOX

Major parties: The two main haredi parties are the Sephardic Shas and United Torah Judaism, a merger of a few Ashkenazi haredi parties. UTJ’s main issues are government support for yeshivot (including stipends for full-time students), continued Charedi control of the chief rabbinate, social services for their often low-income haredi constituents and continued exemption of full-time yeshiva students from military service. Shas advocates a more moderate versions of those policies as well as social services for Israel’s poor families, many of whom are Sephardic and vote for Shas even though they are not Charedi.

Am Shalem, a new breakaway party from Shas, was founded last year and opposes much of the Charedi agenda, advocating military or volunteer service and the elimination of subsidies for most full-time yeshiva students. It is considered a long shot to win any Knesset seats.

People to watch: Aryeh Deri, one of the three leaders of Shas, won 17 seats for the party in 1999’s Knesset elections only to wind up in prison on charges of bribery a year later. Now, the charismatic Deri is free to run again and has retaken the helm at Shas along with Eli Yishai, the current interior minister, whose policies are decidedly right wing.

Haim Amsalem, a former member of Shas, is now a thorn in that party’s side with his new faction, Am Shalem. Amsalem hasn’t pulled his punches, relentlessly criticizing Shas and claiming in his ads that Maimonides would vote for him.

ISRAELI ARABS

Major parties: Arab parties have never served in a coalition government and historically have underrepresented the Israeli Arab population, which is about a quarter of the country. The two Arab slates in this election are the secular Balad, which is explicitly anti-Zionist and believes that Israel should be a state of all its citizens, and Ra’am-Ta’al, an alliance of the religious Ra’am and the secular Ta’al that is not as explicitly anti-Zionist.

All of the parties favor better treatment of Israel’s Arab minority, a two-state solution and peace with neighboring Arab countries.

People to watch: As no Israeli government has included Arab parties, their main purpose is to speak up for Arab-Israeli rights and against what they see as Jewish discrimination. Two of the most outspoken Israeli Arab members of Knesset have been Ta’al leader Ahmad Tibi, a former adviser to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, and Hanin Zouabi of Balad. Both at times have been disqualified from running for Knesset due to anti-Zionist statements, but the bans have been overturned by Israel’s Supreme Court.

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‘Jew’ is the new ‘cool’ in Dutch, linguist says

Leave a Comment / Culture / Jewish Journal

Dutch teenagers are using “Jew” akin to “cool” or “awesome” in English, according to a linguist from Leiden University.

Professor Marc van Oostendorp wrote Monday on his blog that he heard the new usage of the word “jood” (pronounced yode) at a high school in Leiden shortly after learning about the phenomenon from an online forum about the Dutch language.

“One is at first unsettled by it. The word Jew is still a slightly sensitive issue if used improperly,” van Oostendorp wrote, adding an example of how soccer fans use it as a pejorative.

Van Oostendorp notes that Dutch already has one positive exclamation connected to Judaism in “tof,” which was borrowed from Yiddish and means “good,” but he writes that “it’s not clear if those two are connected. I don’t believe too many people are aware of the etymology.”

He notes that “the ideal word to express teenage enthusiasm would make parents raise their eyebrows” but would not invoke disciplinary intervention.

“The word ‘Jew’ is apparently suitable in that regard,” van Oostendorp wrote.

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Netanyahu, right-wing coalition seen likely to prevail in Israeli elections

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Uncertainty is an inherent condition of democratic politics, but one outcome is all but certain in next week’s Israeli elections: the right wing will win and the left wing will lose.

Almost every party acknowledges that the merged Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu factions will take the most seats and be the standard-bearer of the next coalition government. For the fifth straight election, the center-left Labor will likely lose as Likud or an offshoot runs the state.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Likud prime minister, almost definitely will win another term. Likud-Beiteinu is expected to amass 33 to 38 seats in the 120-seat Knesset, nearly twice as many as the likely runner-up, Labor, which should receive 17 to 20.

The virtual certainty of this outcome, and the right-wing's bold self-assurance in the face of it, has reduced a fragmented center-left to shambles. Labor and two new parties, Yesh Atid and Hatnua, have similar agendas focused largely on socioeconomic issues, yet every unification effort has ended in recriminations. And only Hatnua among the three parties has anything to say about the diplomatic future of the state, and it's led by a former rising star of the right.

Netanyahu’s biggest challenge leading up to the Jan. 22 election has come not from his traditional sparring partners on the left but from the right, where the hawkish Jewish Home Party has enjoyed a meteoric rise in the polls.

The ascent of Jewish Home has been the biggest story of the campaign. When elections were called in October, pundits expected the religious Zionist party to win seven or eight seats. Now most polls have the number at 14 or 15 — on track to be the Knesset’s third-largest party.

Jewish Home Chairman Naftali Bennett, a newcomer to politics following a high-tech career and leadership positions in the settler movement, has engineered the gain by courting secular right-wing voters and adopting some progressive economic policies.

But Bennett is no moderate. He opposes the creation of a Palestinian state under any conditions and has said he would disobey a military command to dismantle settlements, though he later walked back from that position.

The party’s fortunes will depend on whether voters trust Bennett’s promises of tighter security and cheaper housing, or remain wary of a party that skews far right on certain national security and religious questions.

As the fortunes of Jewish Home have risen, those of Yesh Atid have declined. Expected to be a major story of the campaign when it launched in April, Yesh Atid was founded by Yair Lapid, a former television journalist and son of the late secularist politician Tommy Lapid. But its poll numbers have fallen due to infighting in the centrist camp and Lapid's unwillingness to discuss diplomatic and security issues.

Polls now show the party taking about 10 seats, but if Yesh Atid gains 12 or 13, it will mean that Lapid’s economic message has struck a chord as Israel confronts a budget deficit of more than $10 billion.

If voters perceive Lapid as unprincipled or inexperienced, especially on matters of diplomacy and security, they may turn to the one centrist party focused on Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations: Hatnua, which was founded and is led by Tzipi Livni, a former Kadima head and ex-Likud minister.

Livni has spent the entire campaign bashing Netanyahu for his alarmist and isolating rhetoric on national security. But she has not vowed to oppose his coalition and could give him cover to move forward on negotiating a peace agreement with the Palestinians if he chooses.

Hatnua has polled similar numbers to Yesh Atid. If it reaches the teens, it could indicate that a constituency still exists that supports peace negotiations. A mediocre Hatnua showing would confirm the perception of many Israelis that the conflict will not be resolved in the coming years.

What Livni really wants is a coalition without Netanyahu led by her or Labor chair Shelly Yachimovich. Seeking to harness the energy of 2011’s social protests here, Labor has presented itself as the alternative to Likud-Beiteinu. Yachimovich said recently that she would not join a Netanyahu-led coalition in a move that would seem to consign Labor to the opposition.

Labor has avoided discussing Israel’s diplomatic future, which seems to have disaffected some voters, and almost certainly will take fewer than 25 seats. That would be an improvement on last election’s 13 but still a decline for a party that once dominated Israeli politics.

As Livni, Lapid, Yachimovich and Bennett jockey for potential spots in a Likud-led Cabinet, one political bloc's numbers will likely remain fairly stable: Haredi Orthodox parties have 15 seats now, a number that is expected to slightly increase. The haredi platform, however, has become increasingly unpopular, as more and more Israelis oppose full-time yeshiva students receiving government stipends while avoiding the nation's mandatory military conscription — concerns that have animated Yesh Atid’s campaign, among others.

A sliver of hope does exist for a centrist victory, with Livni and Yachimovich still campaigning as if they have a shot at the premiership. According to two polls, approximately 20 percent of voters remain undecided. If they all go to centrist parties, the centrists may be able to cobble together a governing coalition.

At this point, though, it looks like a fantasy for Labor, which leaves it in the same place it’s been since 2001: figuring out how to fit into a Knesset where the right runs the show.

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Israel’s budget deficit soars

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Israel’s budget deficit for 2012 was more than double the government target, coming in at 4.2 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). In addition, debt is 74 percent of GDP, making economic growth in Israel difficult.

“I think the average Israeli should be very concerned,” Professor Omer Moav, an economist at the University of Warwick in London and Hebrew University, told The Media Line. “The deficit is about $10 billion, which means more than $5,000 per Israeli household. We will have to pay it back – we, our children and our grandchildren.”

The announcement of the deficit came just over a week before Israel’s national election and quickly became a campaign issue.

“Over and over again Netanyahu sets deficit targets that he is unable to meet,” sniped Labor party leader Shelly Yacimovich, who hopes to lead her party to the number two slot after Netanyahu. “In the meantime he is digging a deep hole that he plans to fill with the decreasing funds of the poor and middle class.”

Moav says that Israel’s cost of maintaining its debt is relatively high because Israel pays higher interest rates.

“Israel is a risk economy,” he said. “The political risks and security risks translate into higher interest rates.”

Israel also spends an estimated 6.5 percent of GDP on defense, one of the highest percentages in the Western world. Combine that with the fact that large sectors of Israel’s population – the ultra-Orthodox and the Arab citizens of Israel – have significantly lower employment rates. Those who do work often have low salaries and do not pay taxes, meaning that those who do pay taxes pay more.

Economists here say Israel must cut its spending and increase its tax collection to pare down the debt burden. They say that the Israeli economy is not yet in crisis but it is moving in that direction.

“We are losing our flexibility,” Eyal Kimhi, the Deputy Director of the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel and a professor at Hebrew University, told the Media Line. “Unemployment here is pretty good, and the economy is still growing although slowly. But Israel will have to increase spending to counter the slowdown and then the deficit will increase even more.”

As that happens, Kimhi says, Israel will find it harder to raise the credit to cover the deficit, and the country will have to spend even more on interest payments.

The 2013 budget will be the first item on the new government’s table after the elections. Current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to form the next government with a series of coalition partners. The problem, many say, is that each partner comes with its own set of political and economic demands. Perhaps for this reason Netanyahu may prefer a coalition with centrist parties, rather than the ultra-Orthodox, who make financial demands that could increase the deficit even further.

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