By Ted Belman
JPOST just published a very long but very interesting article titled The Israeli left has lost more than an election by Haviv Rettig Gur and subtitled “Israel’s left has been in freefall for 3 decades. It didn’t lose ground in the election; it simply woke up to the mismatch between its political institutions and the electorate”
Essentially, he points out that the electorate has been changing for 30 years but the left, Meretz and Labour, didn’t.
In the US, we often read older Democrats say, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, it left me.” which is quite true.
In Israel its the opposite. The people left the Left, not just because they were becoming more religious but they also were being mugged by reality. The reality is due to the Oslo Accords which brought Arafat and his henchmen into Israel and the Disengagement which gave rise to Hamas. Both of these cataclysmic events were brought about by the Left.
Rettig Gur’s post mortem on the Left’s defeat was a very interesting read. One point that he seems to ignore is the reason for why the Left are unable to follow their base, taking for granted that the Left wing voter will continue to support one or another of the Loony Left parties, despite how badly these parties of the Left provide for the welfare and security of the nation. I would suggest one significant reason that the Left have failed to follow their base is due to the fact that the Left have necessarily aligned themselves with international and globalist forces, specifically the US and EU, which is in complete disregard of the nation’s interests and values.
With the advent of Oslo, and its complete rejection by the Right, the international peace processors found the Left to be their chosen focus of support. Through the use and funding of NGOs, the peace processors have aided the Left in election after election, just as the direct US intervention in Israeli politics never gets old. Yet, as with all support, nothing comes without a cost, and the cost of this support by these ‘allies’ of Israel comes in the form of tying the Left to strategies and policies which do not represent the interests or values of the Israeli people. As the Peace Process has become more and more evident as a vestigial product of a failed agenda of Israel’s Western associates, this revelation has made the demands on the Left ever more extreme, leading them to openly ally themselves with the Arab parties, falsely present themselves as faux ‘centerists’ rather than the honest Leftists which they are, and the parsing of Jewish lands in Yesha selectively to the Arabs. It should be noted that in the Oslo era, the transfer of land was ostensibly intended to be in exchange for peace. This of course was far from what was accomplished, but it was the stated aim of the land transfers. Today, the Left are unilaterally ceding land to the Arabs without any agreement at all. These extreme hard Leftist positions have left the parties of the Left carrying foreign baggage while still expecting their base to show up at the polls to support their pro-Globalist and self destructive policies, and as their traditional Leftist base has failed to do so, the Israeli Left have turned ever more openly towards seeking the support of the Arabs and their terror supporting parties.
Very well described.