“New Labor ad: Netanyahu didn’t hit Gaza strongly enough, early enough,” reports Dimi Reider.
And you thought Isaac Herzog was running to Netanyahu’s left on the occupied territories. Guess again. Here’s the ad, and here’s the news in the Jerusalem Post:
Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog sharply criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of Operation Protective Edge Sunday in a campaign video he released.
Herzog attacked Netanyahu from the Right in the video, which is entitled “Netanyahu – weak against Hamas.”
“You had to hit them on the head and on time,” Herzog said, speaking to Netanyahu in the video. “You failed. What accomplishment did you have in the war? Did you destroy Hamas? You strengthened Hamas.”
Larry Derfner says, “That’s it – Mighty Mouse Herzog just crossed over to the dark side.”
Remember that 95 percent of Jewish Israelis supported the Gaza slaughter of last summer. The Gaza onslaught killed more than 2100 Palestinians, including about 500 children. More than 70 Israelis died, almost all soldiers. This is a rightwing polity.
The only way anyone can get into power in israel is to appeal to the Right. The majority, the very vast majority now sit very much to the Right. The fake face of the Zionist camp didn’t work so far and they are lagging behind in the polls so they’ve had to take off the fake mask and actually criticise Netanyahu for not being a big enough war monger!
They probably just had a strategy meeting and realised that the nice words weren’t working so they’ve reverted to the tried and tested winning formula of ‘we will kill more Palestinians than you’
Works every time. Oh and they’ve already said they will never divide Jerusalem and will continue building in the settlement blocks.
I disagree with Derfner. They didn’t cross over to the dark side. They already live there, that’s their natural home
“From 2000 until 2003, he served as chairman of the Israel Anti-Drug Authority.”
No doubt he defended the widespread use of ziocaine in Israeli society and in the disapora .So much for being an anti drug czar.
The sad part is that the people of Gaza are again being used as political fodder by Israel,s politicians.Will war criminal Livni up the ante .Evil incorrigible b——s .
Mr. Herzog is a hateful and immoral Zio-supremacist. Guys like him say stuff like “I cannot consistently say that ‘ethnic cleansing is never necessary’.” It appears that Mr. Herzog is unable to consistently say that mass murder is never necessary.
It is a collective fear, mongered to by political leaders of all stripes, self-justifying, that paints anyone who would diminish it as naive, suicidal, or “denying Israel’s right to exist.”
Ironically, it has become a threat to Israel’s good standing in the world.
It takes a charismatic leader willing to speak truth, then withstand the withering contempt of those dead certain the leader is wrong. Perhaps Obama can be that leader, laying down unwelcome lines in the sand for the Israelis, demonstrating the world does not end when those lines are lived within.
Perhaps Livni and Herzog are false war-mongers, saying what they do not mean, in order to curry favor in the political race. After all, look at what Lincoln promised the South in his first inaugural: that he would not free the slaves, and that the North that would continue to return runaway slaves.
It is no easy or simple task to turn a fearful body politic away from one path and onto another. It requires first understanding that body and its collective mood. That mood is one of acute fear, which has been steadily mongered to for decades. The last political leader to seek to defy that fear and make peace was assassinated.
It was Clinton and Rabin then, and they proved inadequate to steer Israel to peace. Twenty years later, it is Obama, and Herzog-Livni (or perhaps some dark horse).
What is perhaps different is that twenty years of Netanyahu-Likud-Neocon leadership have completely worn down Israel’s luster and brand in the US and Europe. Beneath polite courtesy to Israel’s stupid, corrupt and obnoxious leadership lies seething contempt for the leader, his party and the Neocons in the US. The courtiers to Netanyahu-Likud-Neocon seek to equate discomfort with that policy as weakness within Israel, and seek to equate that contempt in Europe and the US with Anti-Semitism.
But the vision and the actions to implement that vision of Likud and the Neocons, under Netanyahu, have increasingly been exposed as completely corrupt and intolerable, to discerning minds everywhere, who cannot bear another episode of “mowing the grass,” of naked, race-based violence against oppressed innocents, or of another Neocon-inspired war against another Islamic state, today Iran, sold as US patriotism, but in reality part of Likud-Neocon policy to destroy all Islamic and Arabic states that cannot be corrupted by Israel and the CIA, acting in secret.
If anyone has any illusions about the coming elections and the aftermath, Gideon Levy on the End of the Israeli Left (Palestine Chronicle Feb 5) is a must.