Mandelblit Demands to Decide Israeli Elections

 

Israeli Attorney General Mandelblit, with the cooperation and support from State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan, has entered into the elections, now that the lists have been submitted and formalized, and has insisted that he decide which candidates are permitted to be in the Knesset and who must be denied entry into that body. Should he get away with this breach of legal etiquette and have the Central Elections Committee simply rubber-stamp his pronouncements, Attorney General Mandelblit will become the Lord High Elector casting his pale shadow over every candidate list deciding who can stay and who must go before the people are permitted any say with their votes. In the past week, Mandelblit has announced that he opposes the disqualification of the Arab Lists of Balad, Hadash and Ta’al parties from running in the elections. On the other end of the political spectrum, the story is quite different, as Mandelblit has submitted a request to disqualify Otzma Yehudit candidates attorney Itamar Ben-Gvir does not present sufficient evidentiary basis that would allow it to be accepted. These are the two candidates Otzma Yehudit has on the list with Jewish Home and National Union Parties.

 

Mandelblit based his claims against the two Otzma Yehudit on the “grounds of incitement to racism.” This poses the question as to why Otzma Yehudit should be tagged as unacceptable as they call for annexation of Judea and Samaria and expediting the voluntary emigration of Arab Palestinians while the Arab Lists are not being racist when they back armed revolt against Israel and dispossessing the Jews and have given open support to terrorist groups which murder Israeli citizens. The answer is clearly obvious once one includes the abrupt bringing of charges against the sitting Prime Minister and leader of the Likud Party right before the elections such that he can keep pounding the charges against Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu right up to the election and potentially have him barred from running by the Supreme Court. This is a political coup by other means than a military take-over, a putsch by prosecution. Mandelblit has proven that he is not fit to be Attorney General of the State of Israel as he appears to be unable to put aside his politically rose-colored glasses which makes every conservative, nationalist, Zionist and religious Jew into an raging racist and the leftists, socialists, and Israel detractors who call for the end of the Jewish State as an oppressed minority towards whom all should genuflect.

 

Mandelblit claims that statements made by Ahmed Tibi, Ayman Odeh, and Balad members supporting the “resistance to the occupation,” according to which, causing harm to a soldier is not terrorism, that this does not provide the evidentiary basis for disqualifying the parties. The Otzma Yehudit Party criticized the Attorney General’s decision stating, “The time has come to change the equation and inform the supporters of terrorism that they are not wanted in the Israeli Knesset. Democracy must defend itself, and the free hand that the Attorney General gives to the Balad members, to Ahmed Tibi and to Ayman Odeh, causes there to be in the Knesset an evil axis that supports terror, incites against the state, and receives a salary at the expense of the Israeli taxpayer on top of it.” Meanwhile, the candidates from Otzma Yehudit must be disqualified as they belong to the party which was founded in the spirit of Zionism and the thoughts of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach Party was disqualified for being too powerful and potentially might have placed Rabbi Kahane as Prime Minister, thus the Kach Party became racist and against the spirit of the State of Israel. But still the petition from the Reform Movement and Knesset members Tamar Zandberg (Meretz) and Stav Shafir (Labor) claiming racism against Ben-Ari and Ben-Gvir, the entirety of the Otzma Yehudit candidates on the list, for they incited against Arabs after terror attacks, used influence on the soccer fields to incite and more items which just cannot be made-up. Wait one second, there was one unforgivable sin committed by Otzma Yehudit Party and their candidates, they made repeated attempts to ‘revive’ the image and teachings of Rabbi Kahane. Well, there go my dreams of ever becoming Prime Minister as eventually they might dig deep enough to find out I was a supporter of the good Rabbi, may his memory be a blessing.

 

Apparently, the left just cannot let go of their hatred for the man who was proven to be correct about everything he predicted would be coming at Israel and today we are facing the exact existential threats which Rabbi Kahane wanted to prevent by cutting them off before they could grow to proportions beyond the ability for Israel to control. A solid argument can be made that had the PLO and Hamas been quashed instead of catered and treated like delicate flowers, not terrorists, then there probably would not be any Hezballah as that organization was not even an idea until after Yasser Arafat started a revolution to overthrow the Christian heritage and government in Lebanon. Furthermore, the left knows they will be unable to oust Prime Minister Netanyahu from being the person chosen to form a ruling coalition but they might be able to make his efforts fruitless or simply having to allow at least the more numerous leftist parties a seat at the table. If the left can petition the religious Zionist candidates from their respective tickets, this will cause many who would have supported the list they had joined to become disenfranchised and very possibly staying home and not voting. They are also going directly at the Prime Minister with charges which the rest of the world, including a number of Harvard and Yale lawyers, have found irresistibly hilarious. Mandelblit, those people laughing and claiming that no self-respecting prosecutor would ever take such charges to trial or even seek an indictment are not laughing because they believe you got Bibi in your crosshairs, they are laughing at you for thinking you have Bibi in your crosshairs. They are laughing because they cannot believe you are going to try and remove the Prime Minister over cigars and champagne, speaking with media owners seeking fairer coverage, refusing a bribe to press certain regulatory bills favoring one newspaper over another and being so bribed that Bibi voted against the measure, and these are your cases. These accusations are weaker and far less convincing than the threatened charges from the Attorney General’s office in the run-up to the last elections. We can only hazard a guess at what charges will be brought if Bibi should run once more, for example breaking fashion standards by wearing white shoes after November first or holding a formal dinner and serving tuna salad sandwiches with Kool-Aid, and just one flavor of Kool-Aid, grape. Things really are getting this ludicrous.

 

When it comes to anything right of center, even center as defined by the left, which places the actual center to the right or even the far or distant right, thus any truly conservative party is automatically the radical right, centrists who are neutral are relabeled as the right, and anyone with strong rightist views become an intolerable fascist beast who must be destroyed for the good of the cause and claimed to be done to save the nation. When the agreement was announced that Otzma Yehudit would gain two slots in the Jewish Home list of which only one has a great chance and the second a slight chance, quite slight, Y-net News reported, “A dynasty of racism and provocation is on its way to the Israeli parliament.” Another article, this time in Arutz Sheva stated, “Otzma Yehudit, led by former Kach movement activists Michael Ben-Ari, Baruch Marzel, and attorney Itamar Ben-Gvir, has been linked with the ideology of Jewish Defense League founder and former Knesset Member Rabbi Meir Kahane. Rabbi Kahane advocated the expulsion of Arab residents of Israel, and was barred from the Knesset in 1988, after serving one term.” Rabbi Kahane favored encouraged emigration for the Arab population, a far cry from expulsion. Expulsion is what much of the Arab world across the Middle East and Northern Africa did to their Jewish citizens, and these Jews were long-standing citizens whose families had resided at their location for hundreds upon hundreds of years before being thrown from their homes and businesses being dispossessed of every ounce of wealth and sent packing often allowing merely one suitcase, if that, and even that was searched for anything of value on the way out. Israel absorbed and integrated into the society over eight-hundred-thousand of these Jews but the entire Arab world has been unable to integrate or absorb a single Arab who probably left their home obeying the orders from their own Mufti of Jerusalem. As Rabbi Kahane stated, Israel is for the Jews and Arabia should be for the Arabs. But Rabbi Kahane desired a peaceful and voluntary emigration and never claimed that an expulsion was required, that is pure leftist spin. Of course, listening to Mandelblit and many from the left and you would believe that Bibi Netanyahu has horns, which we made a picture to assist in seeing such and included it below. Needless to say, but Bibi supporters claim he is an angel and to assist in this there is a picture with this below. We have had many disagreements with Bibi politically where our complaint has been that he is too tentative and refuses to act decisively and pursue a finality, especially when it comes to Hamas and Gaza. We can only guess at what the majority of media might say to those attacking the Prime Minister from the right, and it would not likely be pretty.

 

Bibi Netanyahu, You Devil or You Angel, We Decide

 

The above will be decided by straightforward means the first two weeks of April as Israelis go to the polls and decide the face we will put forth to the world and what policies we will follow. Mandelblit will probably vote in opposition to Bibi and in opposition to all of Bibi’s announced intentions. We will also be voting against Bibi and for Bibi, but not exactly Bibi. Our hope is for a different right of center, religious, Zionist, most definitely Zionist person who knows both the biblical definition of our lands and the Mandate and international law defines as our lands. Should Iran make a move, Israel may very well decide that a natural border to the north is required and make the northern border match the biblical northern border, the Litani River. We could turn the rest of Lebanon into a Christian nation under Israeli protection for as long as it remains Christian. These coming Israeli elections are going to be vitally important as they will set the immediate future should the people actually turn out and vote. Israelis are looking at another situation sort of similar to the 1992 elections where the right wing was still stinging from a media firestorm and the right splintered which handed the left the government despite their taking well under half of the vote. The right is not as splintered, though it does have some outliers which could result in a fair amount of wasted votes. The left basically falls into three parties, the Blue-White Party of Gantz and Lapid, Labor which might still refer to itself as the Zionist Union and the Arab List which largely has people who represent the Palestinian Arabs more fiercely than they do Israeli Arabs. Israel is the only nation where people who desire tearing down the nation and placing under a tyrannical dictator who would murder half of the country’s population is actually represented in their national government.

 

In the case of Israel, both Attorney General Mandelblit and State Prosecutor Shai Nitzan support allowing those who would destroy the nation and probably murder most of the Jews, no matter their politics, taking power, transforming the nation from the Jewish homelands to the Jews final resting ground. Should the right require a reminder, it was the disintegration from the right wing which brought forward the Oslo Accords which were designed in secret by leftists who were not in power working with the Netherlands and United States State Department (State Department is all one need know to realize that freedom loving people will suffer from the results) without informing anybody in the government and telling their other partners that they can do this if only they could win an election. Since then, there has often been Democrat operatives working in Israel to support leftist parties despite such being against Israeli election rules, accepting assistance from outside the country. This time the right will once again be facing a unified left who has promised to find the way to provide a state for the Arab Palestinians, the same Arab Palestinians whose leadership claims that the only solution is the replacement of Israel with an Arab Islamic dictatorship completely free of any Jews. That is what they claim and state regularly and we have no reason not to believe what they say would indeed occur should they ever get half a chance of completing their nefarious plans. This Israeli election and every future Israeli election, the right will need to hold the line and not allow any further slippage leftward. Granted, Israel has made great strides despite its socialist beginnings. Israel now has slowly and inexorably been sliding leftward which can be seen by looking at the centrist parties such as the Blue-White Party which would attempt to establish an Arab state carved out of tiny little Israel as an attempt to satisfy the Arab thirst for Israel’s demise. That would simply be blood in the water and the sharks would gather seeking the bleeding source, and that source would be Israel. The left which argued for Oslo was in favor of Israel retaining three-quarters of the regions which had been liberated from Jordanian occupation, and now the centrists, not even the left but the center want to give away virtually all the lands which Jordan had illegally occupied. That is the evidence of a slippery slope which comes from making unilateral concessions at the insistence of the originator of this mess, the United States State Department. These are the functionaries who make many laws by referring to them as regulations and levy taxes calling them fees and can run or destroy the country. In the United States, it is called the “Deep State” and in Israel we can just call it a hive of leftists which we can only be neutralized by electing right wing, religious, Zionist parties; anything less will end the Jewish State of Israel. Our two pictures of Bibi above are also the view which the left wing establishment, which runs much of the media and entertainment programming as well as having a stranglehold on the education and its environment, making them hostile against the very youth Israel needs to make their own ethical decisions. We need look no further than Europe, the United States and Canada to see what could be the result here in Israel if we continue to move leftward with one caveat; we are far smaller and this makes us potentially more vulnerable thus we need to be aware and teach our children exactly what is expected and needed to avoid an inevitable takeover by Islam or any other group which comes along. This is Israel, and we have over four-thousand years of history and have out-survived every great empire which came and went along the way. Mark Twain probably stated it best when he wrote the essay titled, “Concerning the Jew.”

 

“If the statistics are right, the Jews constitute but one percent of the human race. It suggests a nebulous dim puff of star-dust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people, and his commercial importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk. His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are also away out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in the world, in all the ages; and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself, and be excused for it. The Egyptian, the Babylonian, and the Persian rose, filled the planet with sound and splendor, then faded to dream-stuff and passed away; the Greek and the Roman followed, and made a vast noise, and they are gone; other peoples have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now, or have vanished. The Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert and aggressive mind. All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?”

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Israeli Elections Update Three, Future Coalitions

 

The main result of elections is the eventual composition of the governing coalition. There have been rumors claiming, as we did immediately after elections were called, that Bibi Netanyahu will form a coalition with his Likud Party and the left centrist merged Lapid-Gantz Blue White Party. The purpose behind this is to repeat the same mistakes of both Gaza and South Lebanon, except this time it will be the Shomron. Most of the border will fall along the anti-terror barrier dividing Jerusalem once more. We believe that instead of a total partitioning of all of East Jerusalem, the region to be gifted to Mahmoud Abbas will merely include the predominantly Arab neighborhoods with the Jewish Quarter and the entirety of the Temple Mount remaining under Israeli rule and control. There are those who have claimed, as has Naftali Bennett, that this plan was worked out between Bibi Netanyahu and President Trump when they discussed the future of the region after President Trump announced the pulling of American forces from Syria. We cannot validate nor refute these claims but believe they are simply used to add fuel to the fire, so to speak, of Mr. Bennett’s claims. As far as Bibi Netanyahu is concerned, this is the path to a legacy and a Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, should this come to pass, it will almost certainly have even worse results than did the retreat from South Lebanon giving Israel Hezballah and over one-hundred-thousand rockets and missiles pointed at every inch of the nation and the Gaza Disengagement which resulted on Hamas and Islamic Jihad launching rockets over half the nation at will. Both of these borders are now basically controlled by Iran who can yank Israel’s strings at will and from either border, or eventually both borders at once.

 

Bibi Netanyahu, Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz

 

There could be a completely different result from the election with the Blue White Party receiving the plurality of mandates and forming a coalition with Labor, Meretz and other left wing parties and anyone else as required to reach the magic number of sixty-one. The wildcard for this proposition are the Arab parties who also have a coalition which will likely get between eight and twelve, possibly as many as fifteen or so, mandates which could make or break any attempt by the Blue White Party to form a ruling coalition. We spoke about the change with Jewish Home and National Union bringing Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) into their electoral list at the urging, more like brow beating, of Bibi Netanyahu in yesterday’s article. We had predicted the result of such a merger and these results are coming true in spades. Rabbi Benny Lau made references against the merger, which is fine as he is an avowed liberal who loathes teachings of Rabbi Meir Kahane (ז״ל), but he made references against fellow Jews which should never be used. Referring to Jews using the terms he utilized is an insult and a disgrace to the memory of millions of Jews and their surviving families. But what about the coming elections, who will win and who will lose, that is the big question.

 

Rabbi Benny Lau

 

The elections end results are going to depend heavily on how three parties do and whether or not Bibi Netanyahu desires to go with a right wing government or follow a similar path as his Likud predecessor, Ariel Sharon (ז״ל), who took a large block from Likud and merged with groups from across the political spectrum forming the ill fated Kadima Party and executed the Gaza Disengagement under pressure from President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. This was an epic disaster, and that is an understatement. Before Prime Minister Sharon, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made a desperate and ill-planned withdrawal from Southern Lebanon leading to Hezballah filling the void left behind and now perched on the northern border as a Sword of Damocles over the entirety of Israel. An interesting aside is that both Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon were generals in the IDF, which kind of puts a large dent in the argument by Gantz that with him you get the wisdom of four IDF Generals of which many were Chiefs of Staff. With the results of the previous generals, including Chiefs of Staff, we are not sure that advertising having a plethora of generals is all that wise though there are those who believe that nothing could ever go wrong with such people running the nation. We only hope that such is so.

 

Former General Benny Gantz has designs on being Prime Minister which begs the question, where does he stand on such things as the Oslo Accords, a Palestinian State and the Gaza and Lebanon disengagement/withdrawals. Well, wait no longer, as he gave a recent interview since his declaration to form the Resilience Party where he answered these questions on the record telling Yediot Ahronot the following, as reported here.

“The central question is a security question. We need to ensure the State of Israel’s security. Now, we have here a question of interests – and even Bibi [Netanyahu] said this at his Bar-Ilan address [in 2009] – that we don’t want to rule over anyone else. We need to find a way for us not to be governing other people.
“The [Gaza] Disengagement was carried out based on the State of Israel’s policy concerns. All the sides involved got high scores for the ability to not tear the country apart when [the Disengagement] was carried out.
“It was a legal undertaking, which was adopted by the Israeli government and carried out by the IDF and the settlers in a way that was painful, but also good. We need to take the lessons [we learned there] and apply them elsewhere.”

 

His running mate is Yair Lapid, a longtime supporter of forming a Palestinian Arab State within the Shomron, even at the price of having to relocate the Jews residing there. Both he and the general, as well as at least two of the other generals the list presents, have made references to hard choices and difficult but necessary concession and even that if we would just find the right balance and sacrifice lands, then there would be peace. Why we would have peace after retreating to the same borders which had produced terrorism before the Six Day War and the borders which resulted in the Six Day War and expect that they would bring peace and tranquility this time is simply folly. The plans which have been bandied about have an even darker and more adverse side than simply retreating. The repeatedly proffered idea would be to retreat to the anti-terror barrier plus east Jerusalem but allow the IDF to remain in order to prevent terror attacks and to gather intelligence to protect the people of Israel. Now, there will be those who ask what is wrong with such an idea. Well, the main problem is that was tried before in a place called southern Lebanon and it led to serious repercussions. Once Israel retreats behind whatever line which is chosen, that results in Israel surrendering those lands to the Palestinian Arabs and whatever government they choose or end up having over them. We tried the first thing, the disengagement in Gaza, which resulted in three terror wars thus far and who knows what will come in the future. There have been rockets, suicide bombers sent while presumably going for medical treatments, infiltration tunnels, incendiary kites and balloons, colorful balloons with poisoned candy attached, colorful balloons with explosives in the shape or inside toys with contact detonators and who can even guess what will be the next exiting plan by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their masters in Tehran to try and murder Israeli civilians. So by pulling back and granting them lands to make a go of a state, we have repeated Gaza only with lands which overlook Tel Aviv. This means that these lands would no longer be Israeli in any means as compared to now where all the land is by right still belonging to Israel, and giving them a state rules out Israeli ownership. Leaving the IDF or any forces within what is, for all intents and purposes, Palestinian Arab land outside of Israel, the IDF would be an occupying force and this would play well for all those whose lives are thrilled by scourging Israel. The IDF would be facing almost daily attacks either from what would have been terrorists but now could rightfully claim to be freedom fighters attempting to oust a foreign military from their country. The young Israeli soldiers who would die as a result would mount and there would be another set of mothers of the IDF demanding to bring their sons home. Eventually, between domestic demands and foreign pressures, the IDF would be pulled and then there would be an Arab terror state siting overlooking Ben Gurion International Airport with shoulder fired anti-aircraft weapons along with lines of rocket launchers with line-of-sight for targeting downtown central Tel Aviv. The borders would be returned pretty much along the former 1949 armistice lines known as the Green Line. We discussed the differences between the Green Line and the anti-terror barrier here. The map shown at the link depicts the entirety of the security zone and much of the areas colored in blue will be surrendered and the furthest west (left) area is where the border will result being drawn. Such a plan would leave close to three-quarters of a million Jews homeless with over half also losing their place of employment. Further, after the Arabs destroy everything built by Israel, there will be tens of thousands or more Palestinian Arabs without a place of employment. Any plans for allowing the Israeli companies to remain operational and run by the Palestinian Arabs will fail just as the greenhouses in Gaza were destroyed and the pipes and other materials used to build rockets and launchers.

 

Tel Aviv Now Before Green Line Peace
and
Tel Aviv the Day After Green Line Peace

 

The above image is equally as likely to be the result even should the anti-terror barrier become the border as they are almost indistinguishable, especially since any protest by Arab interests, including Palestinians, which petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court and resulted in a decision for the route to be redrawn to comply with whatever demands were demanded. So, simply replace Green Line with Security Barrier and the rest remains the same as the Arabs will, in either case, hold much of the Judean hills overlooking central Israel and over three-quarters of Israeli infrastructure and about the same percent of the population. The one thing which will become true is that should such a plan be instituted and the Arab Palestinians be given their third nation, with Jordan and Gaza being their first two, soon after the above picture becomes reality and rockets are sent raining down on central Tel Aviv and a couple of the skyscrapers are brought down; the hue and cry from even the most pro-Arab Palestinian leftists will demand that the entirety of the Shomron not only be retaken, but for the Arabs to be pushed from the land and it be cleansed of any Palestinian Arab presence. This is what it will take as when the Gaza Disengagement was taken as a means of giving the Arab Palestinians a chance to prove they could have a viable civilized nation, the Bush administration promised that Israel could just retake Gaza and end the problem. Anybody looking at Gaza today can see how well that idea was implemented, as Gaza remains a terrorist stronghold for Hamas, Islamic Jihad and their Iranian sponsors. The probability is that within the first year after such another horrific disengagement is carried out, then Hamas will either overthrow Abbas or win in a landslide if elections were to be held, which is why Abbas never allows elections as such would throw him from power and his life would be endangered. But somehow, governments seem to never learn from their past mistakes and insist that this time they will do it the right way. When people insist that such is delusion and not logical, they disregard those warnings and will always claim that those claiming it will not work are just too negative and have no faith. When the predictions prove correct, then they claim that you are a racist or fascist and with the echoing media repeating these claims, in time, they become accepted fact and then you can be ignored when they go to try the same failed policies elsewhere. The problem this time is they are taking the two largest errors of the past and rolling them together to make the way they will get it right this time. Sometimes all you can do is shout from the hills and shake your head sadly as those who never seem to know better make the same tired mistakes of the past, and this is true of for too many ideas and concepts which history should have wadded-up and tossed into the trashcan of history. Somehow, bad ideas seem to be repackaged and sold as new every so many years and the youth and the fools gravitate to them as if they will bring in all the promises made the last time are repeated and swallowed whole by the public. Somethings are simply too sad to even rant against, but what else can one do?

 

Beyond the Cusp

 

Israeli Politics of Ineptitude and Improbabilities

 

Just a few weeks ago, the leader of the Jewish Home Party, Naftali Bennett, threatened the governing coalition headed by Bibi Netanyahu, at a time immediately after Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman resigned pulling his Yisrael Beiteinu Party from the coalition making things shaky at best leaving exactly the minimal sixty-one mandates required to have a ruling coalition, that if he did not receive the Defense Portfolio he and his number two, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked would leave the coalition taking their party and the coalition would collapse. Well, Bibi had a heart to heart with Naftali and Naftali had a change of heart and remained in the coalition. That was a few weeks back and since then Bibi had made a recovery and again appears to be the strength of Israel, so his ruling party, Likud, collapsed the coalition sending Israel into an election cycle. This made Naftali Bennett appear weak and ineffectual after caving to and basically appearing to be played by Bibi, a position many an Israeli politician has felt as Bibi made out best in a test of wills and power. Netanyahu, if nothing else, knows exactly what everybody’s weakness is and how best to exploit their vulnerabilities.

 

But all of this was about a week ago and things have really gone full circle and entered the realm of the absurd. Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked recently announced their split from Jewish Home where they had been the leaders of the party and are forming a new party they are calling The New Right, no points for originality, no points for pizzazz but they do get points for simplicity and being cryptically vague. Their complaint about Jewish Home was that the party caved too often and had been played for the fool by Bibi Netanyahu, an interesting charge from the people who set the policies and were making all the decisions over the past year. But when making a fresh start in politics, you burn your bridges behind you and set fire to the castle and the fields on your way out and then try to rise above it all by standing on the very rubble you created. Since their split, the rumors have been flying from all directions and this is not what we wish to discuss, as it is basically irrelevant and all for the effects it may cause in the voting patterns of the electorate. There is always the problem of producing a new base if you cannot take the former one you had built in your last party. Thus Bennett and Shaked are striking out to claim they were hamstrung by the religious nature of Jewish Home, the religious Zionist party they had led for the past half a decade plus, and now they were going to form a secular version of Jewish Home, which in plain speak is simply another party which stakes its claim to the secular Zionist votes, the same target audience already presumably represented by Likud, but Bennett is claiming that Likud had betrayed that cause and he is the new true and completely faithful leader for the secular Zionist. That is fine as it leaves Jewish Home to be the main religious Zionist party which also welcomes secular Zionists as proven by the two people who just left and were the top two people in the party.

 

Now let us simply talk about some of the idiosyncrasies of Israeli politics. For some unknown reason, such as overly-inflated egos, as soon as elections are called, the right wing Zionist movement splinters into half a dozen new parties plus some old parties come back from the political hinterlands. At the head of each of these parties stands a single, or potentially two, individuals who have name recognition and who claim to be the next great deliverer of Israeli political right, nationalist, Zionist population without whom the entirety of this segment of the Israel population, a plurality if not majority, would be lost and their voices never heard. The splintering of this segment of the population to these separate great saviors results in many of these parties never reaching the threshold and thus not representing anyone and the votes they garnered were wasted on the egos of their top people. Too many of these parties attempt to claim the religious Zionist camp which would be so much better if these many parties would put aside egos and make a united stand. The best method would be to have all the right wing, nationalist and Zionist parties other than Likud to have a primary election to decide the leadership and the order in which the candidates for the Knesset would appear on their combined single list. The problem here is that most of the splinter parties are not democratic but are simply dictatorships where the leading individual or two individuals decide who will be on their list and hope to garner sufficiently well known and liked people such that they reach threshold, something made all the more unlikely as the numbers of parties increases.

 

Wailing Wall with Soft Pale Blue Star of David Writ Large

 

The left has a similar problem but to a lesser degree. The two main political powers on the left are the Zionist Union and Meretz. There is also the Joint List which is a collection of several Arab parties, a communist group and some other parties who by banding as one garner fifteen to twenty mandates. This Joint List, as a rule, never joins any government preferring the opposition where they can condemn every action as most of their party members have openly called for the destruction of Israel replacing it with an Arab Muslim state. By the Joint List insisting they will never join a coalition, they make forming a coalition that much more difficult as now instead of sixty-one out of one-hundred-twenty, you need sixty-one from one-hundred-five or just one-hundred. On the left, there is always a struggle over who should lead the Zionist Union, which while being a union of the Labor Party and Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah Party, is not exactly a traditional Zionist group as they favor giving the Palestinian Authority ever increasing regions of authority even, in some opinions, to Israel pulling back within the Green Line and simply surrendering the Shomron to the Palestinian Authority and taking over a half-million Israelis from their communities, homes and often jobs. Tzipi Livni’s Hatnuah Party was formed when she split from Kadima which was wilting after Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke. Kadima was a splinter group from Likud and a collection of leftist parties including Labor which was formed in order to carry out the Gaza Disengagement, and we all know how well that worked out and the obviously monstrous results with which we suffer to this day. But the left has its prima donnas as well. The main difference is that a number of these are former IDF general officers whose claim to fame was being a battle hardened soldier who knows everything about the Israeli struggle for survival. What is amazing is the numbers of these generals whose views are about as far to the left as one can get without falling off the end of the political scale. They are almost to a man, the ones who come forth to the the great leader of the leftist camps, favorable in pulling back to the Green Line and gifting the entirety of the Shomron to the Palestinian Authority and uprooting over a half-million Israelis as noted above. These are the same generals who while not running for political office are touring the United States talking to every leftist Jewish group and synagogue collecting nice fat fees while gathering contributions to the leftist political positions, mostly NGO’s favoring a complete pull out back to the Green Line, which end up being the very NGO’s which support their run to lead the nation. One would think that there would be laws against using foreign donations to run for office in Israel, and there are but the NGO’s are not covered directly and will claim they are not directly tied to these campaigns which receive their blessing and praise. There should be a degree offered in Israeli Political Theater as that is an accurate assessment of the situation, it is theater and at its best, it is also a tragedy, almost on the same level as Shakespeare’s Hamlet, or would it be King Lear. Thus far, this time around we have retired General Gant forming a party and former politician and possibly returning to head whatever party is set on committing voter suicide, Ehud Barak.

 

Israel is just as poll happy as the United States with an average of six or more polls coming out daily once new elections are announced. They are even more meaningless here in Israel than they are anywhere else. Many a respondent does so in an attempt to make the poll appear as ludicrous as possible which means that all too many are not leading to accurate results. Sometimes one can look at a poll and just know it is a simple reaction to a sudden and previously unexpected turn of events such as the poll the morning after Bennett and Shaked announced their departure from Jewish Home and founding the New Right, the combined tally for both parties cleared easily the numbers from two days prior had shown for Jewish Home before the split. One has to wonder if they are really pulling voters away from Likud when every poll has consistently indicated that Likud will coast to an easy victory and then form the next coalition. In other words, Bibi will get to pick his coalition and punish those who have fallen out of favor. That leads us to making two predictions. The first is that Bennett and Shaked will merge their party with Likud receiving a waver to the three-year waiting period before holding political office such as Minister in the Knesset. That is the weaker of our two predictions. Our other prediction is that Bibi Netanyahu is on the verge of pulling an Ariel Sharon and completing his inexorable, tendentious and tediously slow slide leftward and away from traditional Zionist views to those views of the leftist camp. This will lead Bibi into making a coalition which will be made up by Likud along with Yesh Atid, Shas, Yisrael Beiteinu, Gesher (split from Yisrael Beiteinu) and last but not least Benny Gantz’s Hosen L’Yisrael giving Bibi a sixty-three to sixty-seven coalition mandate and forming a slightly left of center government. It would not surprise us if the Zionist Union would not request to join such a coalition which would simply be icing on the cake and pushing the coalition numbers up to around seventy MKs.

 

We told you that Israeli politics is seldom what it appears to be from the outside. One of the reasons that we can foresee such a move to the left by Bibi Netanyahu, often seen as a lion of Zionism, though how is beyond our ability to fathom, is something he said once himself. He claimed that one of his mentors was Ariel Sharon and that he believed that Sharon showed integrity and strength. Sharon also showed another making the slide to the left and he gave up Gaza creating the problems being faced today in southern Israel and the Hamas threat goes much further than just southern Israel as their largest rockets can now reach Haifa. Could it be that just as Sharon did before him, Bibi Netanyahu will be the one to completely compromise Israeli security and gift the Palestinians a state overlooking the heart of Israel. The only thing which could prevent such would be for some of his hand-picked Likud members to revolt and bring down the government standing to oppose such a disaster. Then there is always the possibility that Bibi could then do as Sharon did and make a new party out of the remnants from Likud and bring in everyone who would permit such a sacrifice of Israeli sovereignty and security all in the false name of peace, as it will bring war and not peace. The precedents are all there and of late Bibi’s actions, or lack thereof, have begun to spook us as he all too often appears ready to make good on his June 14, 2009 Bar-Ilan Speech where he stated, “In my vision of peace, in this small land of ours, two peoples live freely, side-by-side, in amity and mutual respect. Each will have its own flag, its own national anthem, its own government.” Many had hoped that statement was a simple bromide to appease a hostile and unappeasable American President Obama. But our fear comes from the apparent reluctance of Bibi to act by annexing Area C at the very least if not the entirety of the Shomron while Israel has a President in the White House and his United Nations Ambassador who both would give Israel cover for such an act. But Bibi appears too hesitant as if he awaits permission to act which is not leading but simply taking commands from foreign interests, not a viable means for ruling a nation successfully. May we be proven wrong because giving the Palestinian Authority the ability to rule and rain down rockets on the greater Tel Aviv metropolis would lead to a war of proportions which would quickly spread to Gaza and then Lebanon as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Hezballah all joining in an attempt once more to eradicate Israel. Heaven forbid such a calamity for both Israel and her antagonists.

 

As for the remainder, we will need to wait for the elections. It is our concern that Jewish Home (our preferred party) does not suffer setbacks because of the grandstanding of our former top two going it in a new effort taking with them at least one and as many as four other of our MKs as this is a blow. The good side to this is that we will not be bound to gift top spots to any single individual and the primary elections will also choose who will lead the party, a true democratic forum is coming which could breathe some fresh faces into the top positions of power. With change comes opportunity. We can only hope that Jewish Home takes this opportunity to grow stronger and present an open and welcoming face to the public at large. We will always favor the annexation of the lands which were promised to the Jewish People in the Mandate. We desire no more but also no less. The Arabs residing in these regions should be offered three alternatives from which they can choose. The first offer is to take what you desired and the Israeli government will arrange transportation to your desired location as well as provide you with a monetary package for you to use to assist your move. The second alternative is that you may remain within Israel and be able to vote in your local election but not in the national elections and be considered a resident legal alien citizen. You will be obliged to live by the Noahic Code and obey Israeli laws or face deportation. Immediate deportation will be handed to anyone attempting to or actually carrying out an act of terrorism. That will receive zero tolerance. The final choice is made by refusing the first two. That places you in the position of opposing the right of Israel to exist as the State of the Jewish People and as such, you have chosen to be at war with the Jews of Israel. We must inform you that this will be a war whereby we will follow the rules from Biblical times. We hope that is frightening enough for you to at the very least consider taking advantage of offer number one as your current path will result in your no longer having the capability of choosing anything. That is what a war under Biblical rules means. We are to present the first two choices before implementing the third and the fact we are not simply asking the leadership of the Palestinian Arabs is because we get the impression that you all do not represent the average Arab and further, when these people are choosing their future, wherever they choose, you Mahmoud Abbas and those who have assisted your terroristic ways will already be removed from the scene. This is the path to liberation for Israel and the Arabs receive improved living conditions and freedom to choose their new leaders at the local level. With time, the Arabs who decide to remain may be granted full Israeli citizenship providing they meet certain prescribed goals. There cannot and will not be any Arab statehood west of the Jordan River, as any such state would pose an existential threat to Israel and her people as it would be able to operate as the staging area within Israel which any enemy, such as Iran, could attack while not being required to cross the Jordan River or breach the cliffs on either side. The Jordan River valley is a natural barrier protecting Israel from any eastward origins of attacks.

 

Beyond the Cusp