As Israeli elections approach, Avigdor Lieberman remains the kingmaker of a likely rightwing coalition. Even if the new leftleaning Democratic Union and center join up, they would need the Palestinian parties and Lieberman to create a majority bloc, and that is not going to happen, Jonathan Ofir observes.
Benjamin Netanyahu has given the job of Transport Minister to Bezalel Smotrich, who says that he is working for God. Smotrich tried to become Justice Minister, and though his suggestion that Israel should follow biblical law ended that bid, there’s no reason his portfolio won’t grow in years to come.
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.
Liberal Zionist hero Tzipi Livni says Netanyahu is paving the way to the “nightmare of Zionism” — a greater Israel with a Palestinian majority, when the true “vision” of Zionism is a Jewish majority, which can only be attained by “separation… separation… separation.” Her words echo George Wallace calling for segregation forever in 1963, but it didn’t last.
At an Israeli Ministry of Education conference, Moshe Zar, a former Jewish terrorist, brags, “I am known for saying ‘Build a house, it’s like you wiped out a hundred Arabs. Build a settlement, it’s like you wiped out tens of thousands of goyim. That’s the truth.” The ministry does damage control, but Zar’s ideology is widely held.
Granted an op-ed in the New York Times to spread distortions and lies regarding Israel’s critics, the country’s Education Minister Naftali Bennett attempts to whitewash the recent Israeli ban against BDS activist groups, by demonizing them as “enemy soldiers” and slyly comparing them to those who “helped Nazi Germany.”
Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett made a genius triple breakthrough in the fields of psychology, psychiatry and sociology on Friday, offering a new term for the old idea of Jewish self-hatred: “Auto-anti-Semitism is a social-psychological phenomenon in which a Jew develops obsessive contempt and hostility towards Jewish tradition, customs, and observant Jews,” he wrote.
It’s not easy for a religious Jew to feel civilized these days. On the streets…
A controversy, if you can call it that, has broken over Naftali Bennett’s operational role as an officer during a 1996 attack in Lebanon that killed 102 civilians, including four U.N. officials.