Beit Shemesh, Israel - Eli Cohen, who lost his bid to unseat
Beit Shemesh’s haredi mayor Moshe Abutbul on Tuesday, may take legal action due
to allegations of voter fraud, sources within his campaign have told The
Jerusalem Post on Thursday.
Cohen lost to Abutbul by fewer than a thousand votes in an
election that some have described as less a political conflict than a religious
war.
A line of hundreds of cars filled with Cohen supporters
stretching for blocks wound its way around Beit Shemesh on Thursday evening, on
its way to a rally in front of the municipality. When it passed through the
Ramat Beit Shemesh Alef neighborhood, haredim try to stop traffic, and hundreds
of ultra-Orthodox Jews lined the road, held back by the police.
As the haredim chanted “Moshe Abutbul” and played his
campaign song over loudspeakers, one Cohen supporter announced over speakers
bolted to his car roof that Beit Shemesh would “not be haredi” and that if the
ultra- Orthodox wanted an exclusively religious area, they should go to
Jerusalem’s Mea She’arim neighborhood.
“Beit Shemesh will be multicultural” he declared.
Likewise in Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet, a more hardline haredi
neighborhood, haredim lined the streets throwing ballots at vehicles, knocking
on car windows, blocking traffic and holding up political banners.
Hundreds of unsupervised haredi children wandered through
the streets as their parents held impromptu counter-protests against the
convoy.
Outside the municipality, thousands of residents
demonstrated against what they saw as electoral fraud, according to protest
organizer Miri Shalem. She told the Post that they had taken to the streets in
response to Wednesday’s arrests and confiscations of state-issued
identification cards.
Police estimated the crowd at 1,000, although it appeared to
be somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 people.
“We are not giving up on Beit Shemesh,” the protesters
chanted after Cohen, who stood on a stage across the street from the
municipality with secular politicians from across the political spectrum,
before breaking into the national anthem.
“There was no religious war,” Cohen told reporters during an
impromptu press conference at a coffee shop near the protest. “There were only
politicians who were using religion for their own ends. That, I cannot
forgive.”
Police raided two apartments in Beit Shemesh during the
municipal elections on Tuesday, arresting eight ultra- Orthodox people and
confiscating more than 200 identification cards.
The Cohen campaign said that 30 people will be called in for
questioning in connection with possible fraud on Friday.
The Post was unable to corroborate the claim.
Cohen told the Post that to his sorrow, “we know about more
than 850 ballots they declared invalid,” and “many people came and were told
they had already voted.
“We have a legal team checking this,” he said, noting that
he would act according to whatever evidence he manages to gather, either
ceasing his efforts or pursuing legal action.
Rumors abounded in Beit Shemesh on Thursday that Cohen had already
petitioned the courts to have the election’s results thrown out, but a source
close to the candidate denied this.
The source did say, however, that such action was being
considered by residents, but he did not want to discuss it, as “they are still
collecting information” regarding suspicious incidents.
Another source close to Cohen created an email account to
receive complaints from voters regarding suspicious incidents. The source said
she had received reports of people saying that they were turned away at the
polls after being told that they had already voted.
“We’ve been getting all sorts of stories,” the source said,
declining to provide more information before a decision was made on how to
proceed.
“I support all efforts to investigate election fraud through
the courts in order to make sure that the democratic outcome of the election is
accurate,” MK Dov Lipman, a local resident and political opponent of the mayor,
told the Post.
The elections were “a vote of confidence for me,” Abutbul
said, calling on his opponents to respect the “rules of democracy.”
Lipman’s comments came after many national-religious
residents turned to Facebook and blogs to vent their displeasure with the
election’s results.
David Morris, founder of Lema’an Achai, a local charitable
organization, typified the anger when he wrote that “Beit Shemesh should also
be required to rerun the election, this time under close supervision by the
national government and law enforcement forces.”
More than 4,000 residents signed a petition on Wednesday for
the publication of election results to be delayed until the police investigated
the election for additional fraud.
Another petition, calling for Beit Shemesh to be divided
into a haredi city composed of Ramat Beit Shemesh Alef, Ramat Beit Shemesh Bet
and the soon to be completed Ramat Beit Shemesh Gimmel, and a
secular/national-religious old Beit Shemesh, garnered more than 1,600
signatures.
Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar said he was considering the
idea, which his predecessor Eli Yishai rejected as economically unfeasible.
Abutbul addressed calls for a split in the city by noting
that he had enjoyed significant support in old Beit Shemesh and that Cohen had
gathered significant support in Ramat Beit Shemesh, showing that the “city is
actually multifaceted” and cannot be divided so easily.
The mayor panned the idea of “land swaps” or a “Berlin wall”
in Beit Shemesh.
Abutbul said that he intended on bringing all parties,
including Cohen’s, into his coalition.
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