Reading the tea leaves– and polling — for the next Israeli election in late March, experts say that Israel will elect an even more rightwing government than Netanyahu’s rightwing coalition.
Israel watchers are predicting a government led by former Netanyahu ally Gideon Sa’ar, openly committed to one “Jewish” state between river and sea, with no interest in allowing even a shadow of Palestinian sovereignty in the occupied territories. Indeed, the Israeli “center” and “left” are shattered, and the possibility exists that the Labor party that founded the state will disappear from the parliament in the next election.
As for the Joint List of Palestinian parties, which gained a record 15 seats in the last election last year, it too is in disarray, due in part to demoralization of its voters after the Joint List recommended a Jewish prime minister in 2020, Benny Gantz of Blue and White, and Gantz then refused to accept the Palestinians’ backing. (Come on, it’s an apartheid state, even CNN has the news.)
Of course Joe Biden could maybe tilt the table depending on his actions. (I’ve been hopeful). But before considering the U.S. responses, let’s hear the very strong consensus of the experts.
Yossi Alpher at Americans for Peace Now describes a rightwing flood.
Netanyahu and the Likud are now seriously challenged by fellow right-wingers Gideon Saar (New Hope), Avigdor Liberman (Yisrael Beitenu) and Naftali Bennet (Yamina). They seek to unseat him; they condemn his egomaniacal behavior and Trumpist tendencies. Their political positions are to the right of Netanyahu. Polls currently favor their chances of forming a coalition without Netanyahu after March 23.
Alpher has no illusions about where these forces are taking Israel– “our ongoing descent down a slippery slope together with the Palestinians toward an apartheid reality.” Because the rightwingers all believe strongly in one Jewish state.
Bear in mind that the rightist opposition campaigning persuasively to remove Netanyahu from office and restore honor to Israeli politics is more annexationist and broadly more messianic than [Netanyahu].
Hadar Susskind of Americans for Peace Now bears the same news, but like other liberal Zionists, wants Netanyahu gone:
Anybody who can look at the polls… there’s going to be a rightwing government after this next election. There’s perhaps a real chance that somebody else [than Netanyahu] will lead it… Personally if it’s somebody else, I will wake up and smile to that new morning, regardless of who it is, just the fact that it is someone else.
Evan Gottesman at Israel Policy Forum describes a process in which the Israeli right now dominates the political discourse. “Labor is poised to fall below the electoral threshold” of four seats, or 3+ percent of the vote. And Netanyahu is trying to pick up former Laborites to join his Likud Party to make the new center!
[T]he center-left [is] increasingly non-existent, the prime minister’s leading rivals are coming from the hard-right, represented by Likud defector Gideon Sa’ar’s Tikvah Hadasha and Naftali Bennett’s Yamina…
The next Knesset is also likely to be less ideologically diverse, with the right and further-right continuing to edge out what remains of a discredited center and left. With just two-and-a-half months to go before the election, the prime minister’s challengers have yet to recover from a series of decisions made in the aftermath of the 2020 Knesset election that have rendered the Israeli opposition a far less cohesive and less viable political force than ever before.
Gottesman says Gantz’s centrist party of Blue White is competely scattered and even though other centrist politicians have come forward (Tel Aviv mayor Ron Huldai, former Mossad chief Danny Yatom), the centrist-Israeli poll numbers aren’t growing.
Barak Ravid of Walla News also told Israel Policy Forum last week that Israeli politics are more rightwing than ever.
“The center-left camp that managed just a year ago to get 65 seats– the majority… is comletely disintegrated, it is disoriented, leaderless, and in a very, very deep crisis.”
As for policy, Ravid said, no one is debating settlements in Israeli politics, and the country is pursuing a policy of “creeping annexation.”
And Daniel Levy told Americans for Peace Now that even if Netanyahu is defeated, he is “sickened that we havent managed to build an alternative so it’s ready to run on the morning after Bibi.”
[Will] Yair Lapid or Ron Huldai emerge as these figures around which a whole new movement can coalesce and mobilize to bring on peace? Not at all– there’s nothing very hopeful in that respect!…
The best the left can hope for is that the “fluidity” in Israeli politics is such that what remains of the Jewish left will finally form a partnership with Palestinians or it will cease to exist, Levy says. “No leftleaning government won’t include Palestinians.” And so the big question is when such a partnership is formed. Meretz has been trying; but centrists Lapid and Huldai are not willing to extend themselves.
Former Reform Jewish leader Eric Yoffie writes in Haaretz that American Jews, overwhelmingly Zionist, have little idea about these developments because our media aren’t informing them, but they won’t like this Israel.
[I]f American Jews finally wake up and pay attention to Israel’s upcoming election, they are not going to like what they see. The great majority — the moderate center — loves and supports Israel, but wants policies that keep the settlers in check, leave Israel a Jewish and democratic state, and stop the never-ending capitulation to the Haredim that has become deeply embedded in Israeli politics.
As happy as American Jews may be about a possible Netanyahu defeat, on all of these fronts, they will see that they have ample reason to worry.
Yoffie sees a likely Gideon Sa’ar government, which means: A government that affirms the idea of one Jewish state in a land that is very diverse.
Sa’ar….actually believes in a Jewish state from the Jordan to the sea, and would likely be more supportive than Bibi has ever been of the right wing’s vision of a single state in Eretz Israel.
Sa’ar’s one-state credentials are disturbingly comprehensive. He began his political career as an activist for the pro-settler Tehiya party. He has warned American Jews against a two-state solution and has spoken openly of his intention to annex territory.
His political platform rejects withdrawals of any kind, and the number two on his party list is Zeev Elkin, an unbending settler and Land of Israel extremist who was chairman of the Likud bureau, which is the Likud’s ideological body.
As prime minister, Sa’ar would face constraints, to be sure, from the Biden administration and from Morocco, the UAE, and the other partners to the recently signed normalization agreements. But at the very least, Sa’ar would likely ratchet up Land of Israel rhetoric, build as many settlements as he could get away with, and in the process inflame relations with every country in the region and with allies of every stripe…
To be clear, there is only one “Jewish and democratic” state now between the river and sea: Israel controls those lands and makes all the decisions and denies the Palestinians critical human and civil rights. The drama of this election is that it will so expose this reality that it will make it harder for US liberal Zionists who are a critical part of Biden’s coalition to deny it, and continue to support endless US aid to an apartheid regime.
Daniel Levy says that Biden is going to have to cashier the Trump plan/illusion early in his presidency and issue a kind of ultimatum to Israel, saying:
“We also want to make clear.. ttat if it’s not two viable sovereign states, on the 67 lines, then you have to guarantee the full and equal enfranchisement of everyone in this new political space that you have created.” I think that’s not a bad starting point.
Palestinians have been trying to deliver this news for some time. The Israeli election may finally do that.
“Referred to as “Israel,” the borderless, expansionist, illegal/brutal occupier and ethnic cleanser of the indigenous Palestinians is digging its grave. Inevitably, the ever increasing debt ridden U.S. will have to set it adrift.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/startup-nation-sees-brain-drain-as-national-priorities-sidelined/
“Losing our best minds: Startup Nation sees brain drain, fall in productivity”
EXCERPTS:
“For every graduate who returns to Israel, 4.5 emigrate; ‘exceptionally small’ number of people responsible for propelling the economy, report says; also warns of growing inequality”
Times of Israel, By SHOSHANNA SOLOMON , June 5, 2019
“Israel is losing some of its brightest and best minds as tech professionals, engineers and academics leave its shores, thus depriving the country of fuel for its economy, a policy report warns.
“The figures presented in ‘Leaving the Promised Land — A look at Israel’s emigration challenge’ — released by the Shoresh Institution for Socioeconomic Research, an independent nonpartisan center headed by Prof. Dan Ben-David — are bleak.
“For every Israeli with an academic degree who returned to Israel in 2014, 2.6 Israeli academics emigrated. By 2017, this figure had risen to 4.5 emigrants per returnee.”
“Israel has a population of 9 million, but according to the report, an ‘exceptionally small’ number of people, fewer than 130,000, are instrumental in keeping its economy and healthcare system forging ahead, and the nation is thus dependent on them.
“These select few pay the most taxes and make up the staff of the hospitals and the workforce in the tech industry. Indeed, those in the top two income deciles accounted for 92% of revenue from income taxes. The tech sector accounts for 40% of the nation’s exports, yet it employs just 2.7% of its workforce.”
With Israel you have to expect things to go from bad to worse. It seems they have a generous supply of right wing extremist politicians, and no moderate or left leaning ones. Don’t forget the next PM must show his people that he can be even more vicious than Netanyahu, and will shoot fish in a barrel with the people of Gaza, to prove it. So predictable.
http://normanfinkelstein.com/2021/01/14/journal-january-13-2021-jewish-supremacist-state/
“Journal-January 13, 2021 (Jewish Supremacist State)”
By Dr. Norman Finkelstein,
Journal-January 13, 2021
“Israel: Jewish Supremacist State”
“A brief comment on B’Tselem’s position paper designating Israel an Apartheid state”
EXCERPT:
1. “During the past two decades, many respected individuals and organizations have designated the regime Israel has established in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)—the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and Gaza—as a form of Apartheid. A small subset of these individuals and organizations designated the regime Israel presided over in the whole of ‘historic Palestine’—i.e., from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea—as Apartheid.
2. “This writer for a long time hesitated to go beyond the broad consensus that designated the OPT an Apartheid regime while leaving open the proper legal description of the regime inside the Green Line. However, while researching a lengthy legal appendix to Gaza: An Inquest into Its Martyrdom, this writer was persuaded that the entire area from the ‘river to the sea’ should be denoted an Apartheid regime. The basis of this conclusion was simple and straightforward: A) the defining feature of an occupation under international law is that it is temporary; if it is not temporary, then it constitutes an illegal annexation; B) after more than a half century of Israeli ‘occupation,’ and after repeated declarations by the Israeli government that it didn’t intend to withdraw from the OPT in conformity with international law, the only reasonable inference was that the OPT had been de facto annexed, regardless of the formal legal label Israel attached to them; C) Israel ‘from the river to the sea’ thus constituted a single entity; if the presiding regime disenfranchised or severely qualified the citizenship rights of its non-Jewish population, then it constituted an Apartheid regime.”
i’m thinking that Biden will never lift a finger against Israel. He will indeed be able to ‘cashier’ the Trump plan, which seems never really to have become the Israeli plan, and go back to the merry-go-round of negotiations without preconditions between the unequal parties. But he will surely say, as so many have said, that Israel’s security must be paramount and, if Mr. Saar takes over, that he deeply respects, even shares, Saar’s reverence for Biblical tradition. (Maybe Saar will say that he’s a very moderate Biblicist, since the ancient kingdom extended east of the Jordan.). Biden surely can’t afford a general tilt of American Jewish opinion towards the Republicans.
Rabin’s peace offensive with the Palestinians resulted from a combination of Palestinian resistance and American pressure. (The very specific type of resistance of the first intifada and a reaction to the Madrid process in terms of American pressure.) It also resulted from a specific party the Labor party and a specific prime minister: Rabin. The history since then has been quite different. No one since Barak has gotten a working majority based upon a candidacy of Labor. The 2nd intifada, with its different type of resistance, (which Rashid Khalid among others labels as a failure) and the absence of any successful Labor successors to Barak is part of the background of what occurred over the last 20 years.,
Currently the gist of Israeli society is devoted to getting rid of Netanyahu, by hook or by crook.
I think that with the dismissal of Jon Kerry and his attempt to negotiate in 2014 and with the election of Donald Trump the Israeli public which views this mostly as a public relations problem, has not had to face the facts regarding the future of the west bank: annexation, followed eventually by full franchise. Regarding that “eventually”, they feel it’s a long way off, we will deal with tomorrow’s problems tomorrow. But the fact is that the idea of handing off military control of the west bank has zero credibility and the advocacy of such a move only makes sense if you believe in it before the argument begins.
I would be interested to be in on a conversation between Antony Blinken and Gantz or Blinken and Lapid and then interview them afterwards to see if the two sides are even on the same page. if Gantz and blinken are not on the same page, then how can we expect Blinken and Saar to be on the same page.
These are relevant dynamics that will be intertwined in a Saar premiership if it results, But there is a dynamic of the present tense in America it seems and in Israel as well. And the Israeli impulse is to get rid of Bibi ASAP and the most direct path seems to lead through Saar. This is the type of distortion that results when you don’t have term limits.