The polling is in from both sides and it’s clear.
This Jerusalem Post report on Israeli polling says that Naftali Bennett the champion of annexing West Bank lands is the most popular Israeli politician on the right:
[A] Panels Politics poll taken Monday for the Knesset Channel… asked who best represents the views of the Right, giving Netanyahu, Bennett and Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman as choices.
Thirty-nine percent said Bennett, 28% said Netanyahu, and 20% Liberman….
The poll shows that rightwing and settler parties have a clear majority of the Knesset, of 68 seats:
The poll found that if elections were held now, Likud would win 26 seats, Bayit Yehudi 19, Labor 18, Yesh Atid and Meretz 10, and Yisrael Beytenu eight….
The Panels’ poll predicted United Torah Judaism would win eight seats, Shas seven..
Meantime, Kahlil Shikaki has polled Palestinians, and Hamas is skyrocketing. Daniel Estrin reports:
The popularity of Hamas among Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip has spiked significantly following the 50-day war with Israel, according to an opinion poll released Tuesday.
The poll, conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research and headed by leading Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki, indicates that 61 percent of Palestinians would choose Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas prime minister in Gaza, for president if Palestinian presidential elections were held today.
Only 32 percent would vote for current President Mahmoud Abbas, Hamas’ rival, the survey suggested.
The support for Haniyeh marks a stark increase from a poll in June, conducted by the same pollster, which found only 41 percent of Palestinians backed the Hamas figure. At the time, Abbas had 53 percent support.
The poll also suggests a majority of Palestinians – 72 percent – support adopting Hamas’ armed approach in the West Bank.
So Gaza has only accelerated and solidified the polarization of the two communities, the powerful one and the oppressed, and thereby cemented the realistic political view in the west that this is an intractable conflict on which John Kerry sought to apply bandages that did not work. “There is no peaceful resolution of the conflict” — the understanding conveyed to me by a Spanish friend in Jerusalem — gains force. So does the prayer that the Obama administration might have to develop a strategy that does not entail support for the rightwing Jewish state.
Was/is the US intentionally stupid or just blindly stupid in our never-ending support for the actions of the Israeli state?
If these were the election results, it seems Netanyahu would be able to form a similar right-wing government giving more power to both himself and Bennett and less to Lapid and Liberman.
Palestinians increasingly support armed resistance to over 60 years of occupation and oppression, while Israelis increasingly support land theft, occupation, colonialism and Jewish supremacism in a “Greater” supremacist “Jewish State”.
Non violent or non punitive protest against Israel will not work.
What do you do with a psychopath who has gotten away with his crimes for 65 years?
No chance of any correction of his psychopathy except lock him up.
The biggest favor the Beebs could have done for Hamas. Heh. He intended to smash Hamas to bits, and break up the Unity government that the rest of the world seemed okay with but he was sore about, and what do you know, it backfired on the war criminal. I think a thank you note from Hamas to the Beebs would be appropriate, after all they were supposed to be losing favorability among the people of Gaza, and it took a vindictive act by Israel to remedy that.
Beebs has blundered yet again.