The Israeli Jewish right wants to keep 620,000 settlers in West Bank– and the left wants to keep 585,000 there, says legislator Yair Golan. So there is no real opposition to the settlement project, or the one-state reality, even though it threatens “the Zionist dream.”

Blatant racism by three Israeli pols, including one allied with the leftwing party Meretz, has stymied the effort to knock Netanyahu out of the premiereship. Sadly, American liberal Zionists are too busy pushing a “progressive” slate to the World Zionist Congress to denounce the racism among their allies. magine if a Democratic Party politician refused to work with black leaders?

The big surprise of the Israeli elections was the lead that Likud got over centrist Blue White, 36 to 32. ALthough just short of a right-wing majority for Netanyahu’s bloc, the lead spells hope for Israeli rightists out from the deadlock of the past year.

Benny Gantz support for annexing the Jordan Valley shows that the left is completely feckless in Israeli politics, and the only liberal hope is in Palestinian politicians. American liberal Zionists should accept that the two state solution is dead, and they should abandon the ideology that created apartheid: Zionism.

The governing coalitions that are likely to come out of the Israeli election are all absent the third largest party, the Palestinian Joint List, because it’s not Jewish and Zionist. “We will not invite a party that does not recognize Israel as a Jewish state,” Blue and White leader Gabi Ashkenazi says. So what does that say about Israel’s claim to be a democracy?

Yossi Gurvitz on what the surrender of the Meretz party to Ehud Barak means for the upcoming Israel elections, and to the Israeli left as a whole.

The nature of Zionist politics is always to lurch right not left. As Israel moves closer to elections Ehud Barak’s party has pushed talking points on “deterrence” in Gaza which has made his leftwing Meretz partners uneasy.

If there’s any consensus from the political chaos in Israel, it’s that the Trump peace plan will get kicked down the road again for months, right into the U.S. election season, so it may disappear entirely. Several Israel observers say the plan is over. They warn that Trump will be even more of a presence in Netanyahu’s next campaign, but the prime minister is badly wounded by his failure to make a government.

The centrist Blue White opposition to Netanyahu’s Likud organized a demonstration in Tel Aviv to ‘defend democracy’. But it was rife with militant symbolism and orientalist mockery, and it marginalized Palestinian voices, as usual. Notably, protesters wore fezzes to say Israel shouldn’t become Turkey. It was surely lost on the demonstrators that many Arabs wear fezzes, including Arab Jews.