I noticed a confused soul on Twitter today claim the following:
Assuming "Beitanu (sic)" refers to Yisrael Beitenu, that's simply not true. Beitenu came in 3rd overall, with 11.7% of the vote in the most recent elections, those to 18th Knesset which took place February 10, 2009.But they came in 6th in the West Bank, according to my calculations. While Israel's election site doesn't provide that information explicitly, it was easy to calculate.@matanlurey Beitanu is fringe because the source of their support is the West Bank, numberwise that makes them fringe like Shas.
— Roei Eisenberg (@roeberg) November 18, 2012
I began with the precinct-level results, a comma-separated value file available from the Knesset website. Then under, קובץ הישובים here, I got a file containing the names of each locality in Israel, as well as the official "symbol number" for the locality (which also appears in the precinct-level results file), and importantly which מחוז (region/district) each locality is in. Region 7 is the West Bank. From there it was some easy spreadsheet calculations.
The details of the calculation can be found online here in a Google Doc. However, I'll reproduce the results in the West Bank here (all other parties, including Hadash and the Arab parties, got less than 0.5%, unsurprisingly)
- Likud-31,406 (26.42%)
- National Union-23,664 (19.91%)
- United Torah Judaism-16,021 (13.48%)
- Shas-13,285 (11.18%)
- Kadima-10,195 (8.58%)
- Yisrael Beitenu-9,624 (8.10%)
- Habayit Hayehudi-9,262 (7.79%)
- Labour-2,784 (2.34%)
- Green Movement-Meimad-661 (.56%)
- Meretz 626 (.53%)
