There’s stunning news from Israel this morning. The country’s year-long political stalemate appears to be over. The leader for the last year of political opposition to Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, has folded and joined forces with Netanyahu to make a government with Netanyahu continuing as prime minister.
Gantz is breaking up his “Blue White” alliance of three center-right factions and bringing 15 seats over to Netanyahu’s bloc of 58 or 59 seats to make a strong majority, according to reports.
“Benjamin Netanyahu will be Prime Minister… Benny Gantz will be Foreign Minister,” says Ellie Hochenberg of i24 News. She says Netanyahu stayed loyal to his rightwing base and political allies, while Gantz did not.
Netanyahu is already Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, at four terms and 14 years, including 11 straight since 2009. He has been saved by his former army chief of staff — General Gantz pummeled Gaza in 2014, killing more than 500 children.
Netanyahu appears to have been saved by two factors: Coronavirus crisis boosting his numbers in Israel, and making Israelis reluctant to replace him, despite the fact that he is under indictment for corruption charges and due to go on trial. And outright racism.
It appeared that Gantz was going to remove Netanyahu just a week or so back. But then racism blocked any hope of doing so. Gantz’s Blue and White (33 seats) had been dedicated, along with Avigdor Liberman’s rightwing party (7 seats) and the remains of the Israeli left (7 seats) and the Palestinian Joint List (15 seats) to make a majority to knock out Netanyahu. The Palestinians would not be part of the resulting government, but then, that’s how a Jewish state works.
Then the defections began: three rightwing Jewish legislators refused to even work with the Palestinian legislators on a provisional basis. Gantz went from 62 to 59. Once again he and Netanyahu were virtually deadlocked, and there was talk of a fourth election, following three in the last year (April 2019 to March 2).
The new government is not official: what is official is that Benny Gantz is about to become Knesset Speaker, replacing Netanyahu ally Yuli Edelstein and reopening the Knesset, which had been shuttered. “The move is supposed to be temporary until a unity government is formed,” writes Lahav Harkov of the Jerusalem Post.
Gantz’s move betrays a lot of his allies. Palestinians legislators will vote against Gantz, Palestinian political leader Ahmad Tibi says.
Another Palestinian leader, Ayman Odeh, writes acidly (Hebrew google-translated), “They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” A play on the Abba Eban line that Arabs never miss such opportuniteis.
The Jewish left has been utterly discredited by these events. It played a part in elevating Gantz and praising him. One of their own number refused to vote for Gantz if the Palestinians were in the bloc.
Tibi writes at CNN that the Joint List is the true opposition to Israel’s rightwing government.
But Harkov says there will be a political battle between the Joint List and the remains of Gantz’s Blue White alliance — the 18 or so seats of Moshe Ya’alon’s and Yair Lapid’s parties — for the role of opposition. Raviv Drucker says that Moshe Ya’alon’s rightwing party will head the opposition.
Some observers say Gantz will be played by the political magician, Netanyahu.
“Benny Gantz with 15 seats is completely in Netanyahu’s hands. It would not be surprising if Netanyahu’s promises started to fade now that he was on his main mission – he managed to disassemble the Blue and White,” opines Raviv Drucker. Chemi Shalev of Haaretz is of the same opinion (per google translator): “If I’m Bibi, a minute after Gantz is sworn in [as speaker], I blow the agreement on unity. He crushes the opposition without paying a penny.”
Shalev likens Gantz to a short-lived German vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, who enabled Hitler’s rise to chancellor in 1933. Who said Nazi metaphors are illegitimate about Israel? More Shalev (per google translator): “Inconceivable… As if Corona was not enough, Gantz came and shit on the heads of half the civilians. Is it to raise morale?”
Shalev also says that “the only safe votes against Netanyahu were Lieberman – and the Joint List.” Another sign that the Jewish left is reduced to feathers in the age of Netanyahu. While the Joint List is the only address for the left in Israel. And it is rising to a role of leadership in crisis.
Arabs and Jews fight coronavirus together but Jews don’t want Palestinians in the politics, Odeh writes. “I guarantee that whether you are Arabs or Jews, whether you voted for us or not, whether they took you out of the USSR, cut you percentages or get fired – you have an address in the Knesset. We are here for you.
Shalev likens Gantz to a short-lived German vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, who enabled Hitler’s rise to chancellor in 1933.
As much as we all love breaking the taboo of Nazi Germany comparisons, this is disingenuous because Papen served as Chancellor before Hitler without running for office, period, and didn’t even attempt to beat him in an election. Hitler and the three Chancellors before him were hand-picked by the President (Hindenburg) using emergency powers. Whatever democracy there was in the Weimar Republic had already been dismantled by the time H got into office.
Gantz had a chance to show Israel could be a democracy for at least its non-Jewish citizens but chose to reveal the true colors of the Zionist state. He validated Netanyahu’s rhetoric that the votes for Joint-List don’t count.
Gantz had an opportunity to force Likud to replace Bibi as its leader. (By convening the Knesset for the sole purpose of passing a law outlawing the Prime Ministry from a person under indictment.) But to establish a government (which would have to have a foreign policy or a policy regarding the West Bank and Gaza) would be a tricky business when the foreign policy of the right wing of Blue White is barely distinguishable from Likud and such a government would require support from advocates of the “Right of Return”. It is disappointing that Gantz did not choose to depose Bibi. It is not a surprise that a government cannot believe in two contradictory ideas regarding the West Bank at one and the same time.
So Gantz will be eating his own words and going to have a cozy relationship with Bibi, despite stating vehemently he will not have anything to do with a corrupt leader. Bibi wins again. Israelis seems to love their corrupt PM. They keep voting for him again and again. They had numerous chances to vote against him, but they only made it harder for his opponents.
He has got away with all his manipulations, lies, and soon, corruption.
It is not racism to be preventing Arabs, whose underlying agenda is to undermine Israel as a Jewish state, to be given the power to potentially destroy the country. It is racism though to not accept Zionism as the legitimate liberation movement of the Jewish people.
“How will a minority party holding some positions as a minority in a coalition government have the power to potentially destroy the country?”
Oh, Yossi Gurvitz , in this article gave a very probable explanation, detailing how the Palestinians could ‘destroy the country’ :
“Because equality also means sexual equality. And this is the greatest taboo of rabbinical Judaism: Marrying the foreigner. Rabbinical Judaism has a pretty sound fear of merging with other populations. History teaches it that it has precious little to offer; wherever and whenever Jews were given a choice, they left rabbinical Judaism behind. Most Jews over the centuries left Judaism, mostly on their own volition. In order to prevent such merging, you need fences; the gentiles were good enough to create such fences over the years – and once they were removed, most Jews escaped.”
And once the Jews escape, where’s your “Jewish State”?