It’s my party…

By Victor Rosenthal

As everyone knows, Israel has way too many political parties. In the last election, ten parties made it past the 3.25% cutoff into the Knesset. In all, twenty-five parties contended for the 120 seats in our parliament, and some of those were alliances of multiple parties pooling their votes to keep from falling below the cutoff (the Joint List, for example, is composed of four primarily Arab parties).

There is a party called Ale Yarok (Green Leaf) which calls for legalization of marijuana and managed to get more than 47,000 votes from members who were not too stoned to find the polls. There is a party called Hapiratim (The Pirates), which belongs to an international movement favoring extremely democratic and open government, and which garnered 895 votes, or 0.02% of the electorate. Arghh! The party with the least amount of votes was the Manhigut Hevratit (Social Leadership) party, which consists of a convicted felon named Yosef Ba-Gad. Apparently he has enough friends and relatives to obtain 223 votes.

In fact, Israel does not need anywhere near this number of parties. I would like to propose a simpler arrangement of only six parties. Here they are, with their platforms:

  1. The Really Religious Party: God is on our side, so give us money, don’t draft us, and keep your immodest women away from us and their pictures off our bus shelters.
  2. The Very Right-Wing Party: Send the Arabs to Jordan and annex the historic homeland of the Jewish people.
  3. The Bibi Party: He knows best. Just be quiet and do what he tells you.
  4. The Cheap Apartments Party: Apartments are too expensive. In fact, everything is too expensive. Make everything cheaper. We are not interested in security and stuff.
  5. The Very Left-Wing Party: End The Occupation. This will bring Peace. The state will use the money it saves on the IDF and Shabak to provide cheap apartments and a free subscription to Ha’aretz for one and all.
  6. The Arab Party: End Zionism. Put us in charge, admit that everything is your fault and apologize for the Nakba and maybe we’ll let you live, which you actually don’t deserve, you dogs.

Right now many of you are saying that it’s impossible to live without Ashkenazic and Sephardic Haredi parties, and indeed without Hassidic and Mitnagdic Ashkenazi Haredi parties. And others are saying that there is a big difference between religious and secular right-wing Zionism, or that we can’t forget the historic difference between Etzel and Lechi, or Mapai and Mapam, Ichud and Meuchad, Betar and B’nai Akiva.

Get a grip.

I am still angry about the Altalena, but I’m willing to be in the same party as anyone who understands the importance of a Jewish state for the Jewish people, who is capable of understanding that the Arabs are not just Jews that go to shul on Fridays, and that someone who wants to kill you or your people is an enemy. My heroes are Jabotinsky and Begin, but I could work with Rabin, despite his big mistake (I’m sure if he were here today, he’d admit that he shouldn’t have allowed himself to be pushed into Oslo).

Right now, in the run-up to the election to be held on April 9, we are watching a depressing spectacle of various public personalities maneuvering here and there in the political spectrum, making and breaking alliances, and positioning themselves to feast on what they think will soon be the political corpse of Binyamin Netanyahu. We have the unpopular Avi Gabbai publically kicking the equally unpopular Tzipi Livni out of his “Zionist Union” movement, which went from 24 Knesset seats in the 2015 election, to 8 or 9 projected seats if the election were today. We have Benny Gantz, whose qualifications are that he was IDF Chief of Staff and is very tall, and who refuses to say anything about his position on any important issue, with 14 projected seats (Netanyahu said, and I agree, that “anyone who won’t say whether he is Left or Right is Left”).

One interesting development is the defection of Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked from the religious Zionist Beit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) party to create a right-wing party that would truly be a home for both religious and secular people, called Haymin Hehadash (The New Right). I think the name is a little cheesy, but ideologically it’s a good fit for me and many others who found the Zionism of Jewish Home appealing, but were uncomfortable with the degree of social conservatism of some of its members. I’m sure also that Bennett and Shaked understand that an explicitly religious party would never have a chance to lead the government.

Today there is already a party that purports to be right-wing and welcoming to both secular and religious Jews, and that is Netanyahu’s Likud. So probably The New Right will draw its votes from the old Jewish Home and from the Likud, and will cooperate in a coalition with them as well. As long as Netanyahu is more popular than Bennett/Shaked, and the Right maintains its present edge over the Center plus the Left, the governing coalition after the next election will end up looking more or less as it does today.

However, if Netanyahu steps down for any reason, the Likud is likely to lose much of its appeal to security-minded voters (and most Israelis fall into this category). The balance of power on the right might then move to the New Right, and one could imagine a government led by Bennett or Shaked. Bibi certainly doesn’t intend to quit now, but we’ll see what impact the possible criminal indictments (which, in my opinion, are simply political warfare by legal means) will have. And Bennett and Shaked are young, 46 and 42 respectively, while Netanyahu is 69. Their day will come no matter what.

The as-yet undefined party of Benny Gantz, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party, and other centrists will try to present themselves as hawkish on security to prevent this. The danger is that they might succeed, and we could end up with a Center-Left coalition. Naturally, Bibi is making sure to remind us of this at every opportunity. And I agree with him that letting the Left within 100 km of power would be a disaster. Look what the two Ehuds, Barak and Olmert, almost did when each was Prime Minister.

It’s not possible to reduce the number of parties to six today. Founding political parties seems to be a national pastime here, and the inflated egos of politicians, each one of whom believes that only he or  she is qualified to lead a party or the nation, prevents the system from becoming more rational.

Today I am leaning toward voting for The New Right, despite the silly name – unless Bibi convinces me that this will empower the Left. So far, I don’t see it.

Or unless my brother-in-law starts his own party. Then I’d have to vote for him.

January 4, 2019 | 2 Comments »

Leave a Reply

2 Comments / 2 Comments

  1. I completely forgot to include in my last post what I call ‘this article,” which appeared in the Jan.4 issue of the Jerusalem Post, by Tovah Lazaroff. Here it is:

    ANALYSIS: Amona’s third fall opens door for West Bank settlement approval
    When Amona fell in 2017, Netanyahu rode the wave of anger by authorizing a completely new settlement, the first in more than 20 years.

    ANALYSIS: Amona’s third fall opens door for West Bank settlement approvals
    Border Police evacuate the illegal Amona outpost. (photo credit: TPS)
    If there was a handbook of how to win an election, then top of the list for any right-wing candidate, particularly the prime minister, would most definitely be – don’t evacuate an outpost in the opening days of the campaign.

    Yet early Thursday morning, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did just that. In a pre-dawn raid, security forces moved against two modular caravans on the site of the former Amona outpost that filled with right-wing activists, mostly teens. Security forces forcibly removed them, then placed the two caravans on flatbed trucks and drove them away.

    It is akin to Netanyahu financing, writing, designing and published a campaign ad on behalf of any of his Right opponents.
    All the Bayit Yehudi party (the Jewish Home) or the new Hayamin Hehadash (the New Right) parties need to do is run footage from Amona with the slogan saying, “vote for us, we don’t uproot Jews.”

    The Left could have a field day as well, with the slogan “only the Likud can.”

    It’s a situation made even worse by the Netanyahu-led Likud Party’s own history. It remains as the only party to have actually evacuated settlements and territory: the Sinai in 1982 and Gaza in 2005. There is also the division of Hebron in 1997, yes, also under Netanyahu and the Likud.

    The premier could insist that he was only carrying out the rule of law. At the end of the day, all that happened, outside from the violence on the hilltop, was the removal of two small structures that had been placed there just weeks ago as a protest move.

    But Amona, which survived the demolition of nine permanent homes in 2006 and which was completely demolished in 2017, has a particularly emotional resonance among the Right.

    When Amona fell in 2017, Netanyahu rode the wave of anger by authorizing a completely new settlement, the first in more than 20 years.

    The stage is set for him to recoup the electoral loses from Amona by approving a project on the right-wing wish list, which would strengthen Israel’s hold on Judea and Samaria.

    But in the immediate aftermath of the evacuation, the loudest demand was for the demolition of the illegal West Bank herding village of Khan al-Ahmar.

    Earlier in the week, Public Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan had insisted that Netanyahu must authorize the South Hebron hills outpost of Asa’el and transform it into a new settlement already this Sunday.

    It is a move, which aside from its location, would be very easy to do. It is on state land and there are advance plans for its development.

    The only barrier could be the wrath of the US. But one can almost imagine the conversation between Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump. The besieged Israeli leader would explain that he needed to do this to help assure his re-election.
    But in the aftermath of Amona, Erdan did not repeat his call for the community’s authorization.

    The only person who showed up at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem was Eran Dgani from Kfar Eldad, who represents the forum of 70 fledgling communities, otherwise known as outposts.

    Forget about one outpost. Dgani told Netanyahu in his letter that now was the time to seize the moment and authorize all the outposts as new settlements or neighborhoods of existing ones.

    “In the face of the terrible destruction this morning, you must authorize our communities and restore the right of the thousands of citizens who live there,” Dgani wrote.

    He also brought a pen with him, just in case the premier lacked one.

    “We understand that in your office there are pens that are used for demolition only, and as a result, apparently you have not signed the authorization so far. Therefore, we are honored to give you a new pen – the pen of authorization,” he said.

  2. This article (in the Jerusalem Post–see below) reveals the extremes to which Israel’s government has gone to betray the settlers and appease the the Arabs and Europeans . The Israeli military has not removed an illegal Arab settlement near Jerusalem and it sJewish suburban “settlement” Maale Haadumim, even though the pro-Arab and anti-Zionist Supreme Court, amazingly, has authorized its demolition. Yet the military has continued to demolish Jewish settlements in the “West Bank,” and is rounding up settler activists and holding them without trial access to their families and legal counsel. How much of this is on Bibi’s orders, and how much is undertaken by the military “occupation’s” “civil administration,” is unclear. But certainly Bibi has done nothing to prevent these treacherous policies by the military administration in Judea-Samaria.

    The senior military officers assigned to govern Judea-Samaria are leftists with undisguised pro=-Palestinian sympathies. The military “occupation’s” legal advisors, who now exercise de facto control over the army, are even more pro-Arab. It is possible that they are even exceeding the orders of the Supreme Court in their backing for the Arabization of ‘Area C” in Judea-Samaria.