I must admit I never had as much fun watching Israeli politics as I did this week. I spent the week glued to i24 News television for the Israeli election and was laughing a lot of the time.
I’ve never seen such a display of out-and-out racism on TV, and all parading as the democratic process.
The display was so blatant that (I want to believe) it can’t be very long before Israel’s shadow catches up with its shining American image. I know I’m biased, but I felt I was watching the disintegration of Zionism, right before my eyes.
You see, the Palestinian parties were big winners Tuesday night, getting 13 seats, third behind Blue/White at 33 and Likud at 31, and no one in Israeli politics knows how to deal with this, except to say We don’t want anything to do with the Arabs!
Kingmaker Avigdor Lieberman, who came in fifth, with 8 seats, well behind the Palestinian parties, said it the night of the election, No way will I make a coalition with Arabs.
The sonofabitch got five seats less than the Palestinians, and came in two places behind them in the race, but he gets to condescend to them!
Netanyahu issued the same racist pronouncement at 3 a.m. on election night. A beaten man, Netanyahu pivoted from his call for a rightwing government to a call for a “strong, Zionist… government that is committed to Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.” No Arabs, Netanyahu said explicitly– no “anti-Zionist Arab parties that oppose the very existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.”
Former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren echoed Netanyahu on i24. The new government should be a coalition of parliamentarians from the two main parties along with some parliamentarians from the religious parties Shas and UTJ.
The religious parties finished fourth and sixth, well behind the Palestinian parties. But Palestinians don’t count for Oren.
While another former ambassador, Daniel Shek, said Netanyahu had brought the Arab problem on himself by his ugly race-baiting during the campaign, but: “Honestly, no one wants them [Arabs] as part of a coalition.”
And today on i24, the messianic Islamophobic rightwinger Yehuda Glick called for a government that solidifies Israel’s hold on Jerusalem and strengthens the “unity” of Israeli society, i.e., its Jewishness.
Glick speaks with an American accent. Just like rightwing Israeli pundit Jeremy Saltan, who was using NFL analogies in the i24 studio today to explain why Netanyahu will come out on top.
And it all just makes you think, Who are these a******es who moved there from America to tell Palestinians they have no standing in the government of the country they live in?
Surely my favorite moment on i24 this week was when Dennis Ross was interviewed (at an election watch party held by the “Israel Forever Foundation” in Washington), and said it’s necessary for Israelis and Palestinians to “separate.” Otherwise Palestinians will demand equal rights! And the settler Yishai Fleisher, who was raised in New Jersey but now lives in occupied Hebron and is published by the New York Times, responded that Ross is a “segregationist,” but Israelis can be “creative” with Palestinians– and hand them over to Jordan.
It is really hard to say who the bigger scoundrel was! Do you want your apartheid hard or soft, and with sprinkles or dipped?
All the racist gerrymandering could result in another scary outcome for the Jewish state: The Palestinian parties become leaders of the official opposition in parliament, and thereby included in security briefings.
Not to worry. Danny Ayalon, former Cabinet official, and Oded Revivi, a settler leader, agreed on i24 that no Palestinian leader would be allowed to see Israeli defense documents. “He won’t get the full. Only diluted,” Ayalon said.
All of this is reminiscent of the Jim Crow era in the U.S., when the Democratic Party was on board with southern racists up into the 1960s, till the Democrats reformed. But as keen students of Israeli politics all agree, from Mike Wagenheim of i24 to Yossi Gurvitz and Jonathan Ofir, Israeli politics swung further right this election.
“This was an unprecedented right-wing victory,” Michael Koplow writes.
As the Jewish State gets older, it only gets more anachronistic. And its adherents get more embattled, seeing enemies on all sides.
Which brings us to the great showing of the Joint List. Both anti-Zionist and liberal Zionist Jews have celebrated the Joint List’s incredible results, with Einat Wilf, a former Labor parliamentarian, saying on i24 that Odeh should be Interior Minister and Ahmad Tibi minister of health.
Consider Ayman Odeh’s final campaign message (as reported by Harry Reis of New Israel Fund):
“I turn now to Israel’s Jewish citizens: friends, our interests are shared. The interests of 90% of Jews, of 90% of Arabs is to live in peace; to live in democracy, with social justice and equality. But it’s not just interests; it’s our values that we need to live by. This time, I want to talk to you about another direction. A direction of solidarity; of identification. Who better than the Jews can understand what it is to live as a minority–to be a persecuted minority? We — Arab citizens of Israel — are suffering from unrestrained incitement of the prime minister @netanyahu– and from a bold-faced lie: whether it’s Arabs ‘flocking to the polls in droves,’ or ‘Arabs are stealing our elections’ of last week;or ‘Arabs want to annihilate us’ of 3 days ago, we have gone from a persecuted minority in this country–to an endangered minority.”
Odeh frankly describes the racist politics that I observed on i24. His voice represents real leadership, far different from the religious national authoritarian demagoguery on display in Jewish politics.
American Jews have needed Palestinian partners to liberate themselves from Zionism. We could never have reached an understanding of the damage of Zionism on our own. The same goes for Israeli society. There is only one way out of the ugly place you have painted yourself into, democracy.
The problem as I see it is that you called the Joint List “the Palestinian parties”. So the question is, are they Israeli Arabs, or are they Palestinians? I tend to think that more Israeli Jews would be more welcoming of their inclusion into the body politic if they were “Israeli Arab” parties, and not as you called them, “Palestinian parties”. Many Israeli’s have lurched rightward over the years as the result of violence. Remember, I’m not too old to remember when Labor party dominated Israeli politics. I think it was Ehud Barak who made the Palestinians a fair offer which they rejected and launched war instead. Things have not been the same since. I have almost always been a liberal, but the events of 9-11 and after caused me too to lurch rightward, for a short while at least. Most American Jews do not like Trump, or Netanyahu. So now there is a great divide. But maybe if the Israeli Arabs began to identify themselves as Israeli Arabs and not “Palestinian parties”, it could be helpful moving forward.
Aspirations regarding a peace between the Palestinians and Israeli Jewish peoples seem forlorn. The nakba is a chasm between the two sides and the demographic assumptions that this act of exiling such a large population have cultural and societal consequences that are negative and quite entrenched.
Yet I am devoted to the Jewish move towards self emancipation that has centered on the land near Jerusalem. Unable to imagine a birth that did not involve such an exiling, my differences with the prevailing Jewish attitudes are not sufficient to undo all the pain caused. For example: olmert spoke of 10,000 returning refugees and I think in terms of 500,000, insufficient for the mindset of millions of Palestinians, but way beyond the mindset of my fellow Jewish Zionists.
The enmity regarding distrust of having Palestinians in the army is “self evident”. this is quite different from the drafting of the blacks into the american army. it is a different dynamic than jim crow. worse in many ways but better in other ways and very different, but i suppose analogies are necessary as a beginning of a comprehension.
the democracy phil weiss talks about meaning one state will come at the hands of annexationists whose attitude towards the Palestinians is retrograde, to say the least. Jewish zionists in general are opposed to the two state solution for a variety of reasons. if it is going to be like hamas in gaza or hezbollah in lebanon there is nothing to see in the true sovereignty for palestinians three miles away from lod airport as anything but security folly. since the nakba is the real gripe in any case and jaffa and haifa not nablus and hebron, then the two state solution is only a marker on the road to jewish emancipation oblivion.
if the settlement enterprise had been nipped in the bud by eshkol and if begin had never come to power, then the occupation of the west bank might have been predominantly military and the military decision to choose occupation rather than hezbollah near lod is understandable. but, once the occupation is turned into a settler occupation that which is created is so anti democratic as to be too blatant even ridiculous.
As far as American politicians, I wonder when the attitude of the grass roots of the democratic party will filter up into their elected officials, this type of artificial gap between the roots and the politicos seems unprecedented. This is bound to be an ugly process. and there is zero good will between the antizionists and the zionists, so it will be very ugly.
Tillerson reveals how Crooked Bibi manipulated Trump. Sounds ugly.
“Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that Israeli officials “played” Donald Trump during talks, using “misinformation” to manipulate the president. He warned that a “healthy amount of skepticism” is necessary when dealing with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“They did that with the president on a couple of occasions, to persuade him that ‘we’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys,’” Tillerson said at a panel discussion Tuesday at Harvard University.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rex-tillerson-donald-trump-benjamin-netanyahu-played_n_5d83f698e4b0957256b3e9f4
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2019/09/18/connect-the-world-israeli-elections-adnan-jaber-shaindy-ort.cnn
Short CNN Video:
Voter: “Israel is not a democracy.” – Sept. 19, 2019
“Palestinian entrepreneur, Adnan Jaber, and Israeli voter, Shaindy Ort speak to CNN’s Becky Anderson in Jerusalem following the Israel elections.”
Phil asserts that “Israeli politics swung further right this election.”
Let’s see:
On the Right: Likud -31 -loss of 4 seats .If you add Kulanu, which united with Likud, it’s a loss of 8
Yamina (far Right)-7 -gain of 2, compared with the union of the Right, actually a huge disappointment for them, because they joined forces with Shaked/Bennet
Blue/white (Center-Right)-33-loss of 2
Otzma Yehudit –(farther Right )- 0. Defeated in their attempt to gain seats .
Haredi parties:
Shas -9 -gain of 1
Torah Judaism—8-no change
On the Left:
Joint List-13 -gain of 3
Labour -6 -no change
Democratic Front (Meretz)-5-gain of 1
Wild Card : Yisrael Beitenu (Lieberman)-8-gain of 3
I fail to see a” further swing to the Right”.