Peace Now is grim about the election. It says that in all likelihood four parties will poll between 15 and 25 seats in Knesset, with Lieberman's racist Yisroel Beitenu party outpolling Labor.
Peace Now: How do Tuesday's Knesset elections shape up in terms of prospects for a stable, peace-oriented government?
Yossi Alpher (political consultant, friend to J Street):
Yossi Alpher (political consultant, friend to J Street):
All of these scenarios are virtually dictated by the grim prospect that the four leading parties–Likud, Kadima, Yisrael Beitenu and Labor–will end up with somewhere between (in descending order) 25 and 15 mandates. Four medium-sized parties whose philosophies encompass nearly the entire spectrum of secular Zionist views are a recipe for lack of governability, to say nothing of lack of a viable peace process…
Once again we are reminded that the Israeli political system, while offering ultra-democratic representation to the most isolated minority and sectarian views, is ill-suited for the task of governance, and particularly for dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…
Throughout this period, an additional factor strengthening the Israeli political right has been the growing radicalization of the Arab citizens of Israel, whose political and intellectual leaders increasingly call for Israel to cease to be a Jewish state in order to accommodate them. This Israeli Arab ideological trend is in many ways an outgrowth of the failed Oslo process…
Once again we are reminded that the Israeli political system, while offering ultra-democratic representation to the most isolated minority and sectarian views, is ill-suited for the task of governance, and particularly for dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict…
Throughout this period, an additional factor strengthening the Israeli political right has been the growing radicalization of the Arab citizens of Israel, whose political and intellectual leaders increasingly call for Israel to cease to be a Jewish state in order to accommodate them. This Israeli Arab ideological trend is in many ways an outgrowth of the failed Oslo process…
