The Blue White party gave Israelis who used to vote left the option of voting Likud-light with the pretense of being centrist. Blue White is essentially a rightwing party. And there was only one winner in this election, and it’s the one that has always won: Zionism.
The last decade in Israeli politics was all Netanyahu, all the time. The Israeli left twisted itself into a pretzel trying to get rid of Netanyahu and forgot about trying to end apartheid. Now it looks like the great hate monger is gone and the issues that matter may matter again.
The Israeli election challenges Americans to recognize what “Jewish democracy” has produced: a rightwing society in which all the politicking has been on the far right, and even the center-left Blue White calls for expanding the illegal occupation and pounding Gaza. Palestinian parties are a sign of real democracy, but leading Jewish parties want nothing to do with them.
With only two days to go, the Joint List was campaigning for a last push to unseat Netanyahu is Israel’s snap election. “It’s simple,” Ayman Odeh, head of the Joint List told Mondoweiss. If 65 percent of Palestinian citizens of Israel vote on Tuesday, “we will bring down Netanyahu.”
Today is the last day Israeli election polls may be published before the vote, and the latests gives Likud a substantial lead over Gantz’s Blue and White party. This suggests Benjamin Netanyahu may be in a good position to form a new right-wing government.
Recent comments by Republican members of Congress who traveled to Israel as part of a trip sponsored by AIPAC indicate that GOP support for Israel is moving beyond cynical two-state solution rhetoric and toward a more public embrace of Netanyahu’s annexation vision.
Suheir Abu Oksa Daoud says Israel’s repeat national elections grants the Palestinian leadership a golden opportunity to seek lessons from last April’s results where they dropped four seats and lost their standing as the third-largest party in the legislature.
Netanyahu wants to annex the West Bank, what will the Democrats do?
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is coming under fire again for anti-Arab comments made by his campaign, this time for a message on his official Facebook page telling voters “Arabs want to annihilate us all – women, children and men.”
Trump fired John Bolton as national security adviser today, signalling his independence of donor Sheldon Adelson. Trump at last has the upper hand in his relationship with Netanyahu and Sheldon Adelson because Netanyahu desperately needs Trump to deliver on OK’ing Israel’s annexation of Jewish settlements, a huge Zionist victory that Netanyahu promised voters today in a desperate bid for reelection. Trump will deliver, but at the price of Iran policy.