Mideast Reacts with Horror: “Israel has elected Extremism and Racism”
By Juan Cole | Mar. 19, 2015 |
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) –
Observers in the Arab press who contemplated the victory of far right Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu in the Israeli elections express emotions from “concern and anxiety” to out and out horror at the potentially destructive impact it will have on the region.
Barhoum Jaraisi writes in the Jordanian newspaper al-Ghad (Tomorrow) that in voting so many seats to the far right wing Likud Party, the Israeli electorate has chosen “extremism and racism.” He points out, however, that Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu still has a choice of what kind of government to form. The Israeli parliament has 120 seats and the ruling coalition needs 61. Likud appears to have gotten about 30. There are two ways for it to gain the other 31 or more. Netanyahu could form a government of national unity with the center-left Zionist Union (something its leader, Isaac Herzog, appears to have ruled out late Tuesday. Such a government would have a better footing with the international community. Or, he says, Netanyahu could cobble together a smaller majority of right- to – far – rightwing parties and exclude the center and the left, producing a government that many in the international community would feel extremely uncomfortable with.
Ziad Halaby writes from East Jerusalem in Alarabiya.net that Netanyahu’s win shows that you can always get more votes in Israel by showing you can direct a war than by promising peace. He says that Netanyahu’s win means the end of the two-state solution. He argues that in stealing the issues for his Likud Party of support for Israeli squatter settlements in the Palestinian West Bank and scaremongering about war with Iran and other countries, Netanyahu cannibalized his other far right wing allies, taking seats from The Jewish Home (Ha-Bayit ha yahudi) and Yisrael Beitenu (Israel our Home), the former a squatter-based party and the latter mainly serving a Russian Jewish constituency that arrived in the 1990s and after. Both lost seats to Likud. Halaby believes that Netanyahu will put together a far right wing government and drop any fig leaf of moderation for the outside world. The message of the election is the worrying one, he says, that the Israelis don’t want to withdraw from territories they occupied in 1967 and don’t want a Palestinian state.
Jihad al-Khazen in the pan-Arab London Daily al-Hayat (Life) argues that Israel is now, after the 1990s collapse of Afrikaaner South Africa, the primary exemplar in the world of the racist, Apartheid state with regard to its policies in the Occupied West Bank. Khazen worries that Netanyahu’s pledge to keep millions of Palestinians stateless and subjected to the Israeli jackboot is actually a call for a third, fourth and fifth Palestinian uprising (Intifada) and possibly a turn to extremism and rise of a Palestinian leadership willing to attempt to do real harm to Israel, say with chemical gas attacks. It is a dark vision but Khazen is one of the few to see the real possibility of a civil war in the West Bank that could be momentous for the history of the region.
Again I repeat. This is the best outcome for a US realignment of its feverish relationship with the monster of its own creation, Israel.
ReplyDeleteIsrael does not belong in the West. Now it should be obvious to everyone except the GOP Likuds Force, seditious AIPAC and the US Christians praying for the destruction of Israel so they can all go join Jesus.
Without GOP pandering to these Christian fanatics, there is no Republican Party. AIPAC and US Zionists choose to overlook who they are in bed with (at least publicly) because they need them as the useful idiots they are, to achieve their secular agenda of a greater Israel.
ReplyDeleteFrom The Washington Post...
ReplyDelete...On Election Day itself, he sought to “zetz” any somnolent Likudniks into going to the polls by voicing alarm that Israel’s Arab citizens were actually — oh, the horror — turning out to vote.
Say this for Bibi: He ran a balanced campaign. One part fear, one part loathing.
In the campaign’s closing days, with polls showing his Likud Party trailing its Labor Party opponent, Netanyahu evidently decided to make a play for any voter contemplating casting a ballot for a party to Likud’s right. If the ploy worked, nobody would turn out to vote thinking there was anyone who despised and degraded Palestinians more than Bibi.
The strategy calls to mind the vow that a young George Wallace took in his pre-gubernatorial days, when he lost an election to a candidate who had engaged in far more race-baiting than he had. As reported by Dan T. Carter in “The Politics of Rage,” Wallace said, “Well, boys, no other son-of-a-bitch will ever out-[n-word] me again.”
Until the final days of the Israeli campaign, there were leaders of parties to Likud’s right — Avigdor Lieberman, Naftali Bennett — who, when it came to their pronouncements on Palestinians, clearly out-race-baited Netanyahu. But in a closing rush, Bibi — henceforth, the Jewish George Wallace — closed the gap. His success in wooing the fearful and the bigoted to Likud was such that all the other far-right parties saw their results drop from their previous levels. Netanyahu’s apprehensions about high levels of Arab voting echoed not only such old-guard segregationists as Wallace but also our present-day Republican Party. The GOP’s war on minority voting, waged through voter ID laws and other obstacles to expanding the franchise, could offer Netanyahu lessons in winnowing the electorate in future contests. Perhaps Likud and the Republicans can open an Institute for the Prevention of Dark-Skinned People Voting....
...As Israel’s international isolation grows, and as the fear and loathing that Netanyahu stoked has the predictable effect of increasing the nation’s level of, well, fear and loathing, how long will these Jews elect to remain Israelis? The vision of Israel’s future that Netanyahu evoked is one that could intensify a counter-aliyah — an emigration to other nations, the United States in particular. Should that happen, the nation’s descent into tribal paranoia and religious fundamentalism (the same trajectory one sees in Israel’s Arab neighbors) would only increase. The paradox at the heart of the vision of Israel’s Zionist founders — at once particularist and universal, exclusionary and egalitarian — would be resolved in favor of a garrison-state tribalism.
ReplyDeleteIt’s hard to think of a campaign that has done so much damage, or brought such disgrace upon the victor, as Netanyahu’s. He’s given “winning ugly” a bad name.
Read more from Harold Meyerson’s archive or follow him on Twitter.
>>Exit quotation from Mark Hemingway: “Some journalist should show up at Hillary’s next presser with an OF-109 form and ask her to sign it right then and there.”<
ReplyDeleteShillary didn't sign :)
Jen Psaki: We have no record of Hillary signing a separation agreement when she left State
posted at 2:41 pm on March 17, 2015 by Allahpundit
http://hotair.com/archives/2015/03/17/jen-psaki-we-have-no-record-of-hillary-signing-a-separation-agreement-when-she-left-state/
So, according to Judge Napolitano, she is guilty of theft of government property. :)
Why not give it, and us, a break for a few days, Deuce?
ReplyDeleteThe 20% of Israel's arab population voted right along with everyone else.
Yes, Israel belongs in the West. It is the moslems that don't fit in.
It is Sharia Law that doesn't fit in.
It is Sharia Law that oppresses women.
Politely, I say you have gone totally off the tracks.
Obama supported the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt, for Christ's sakes.
If Sisi and Israel can get along, surely you can give it a break for a day.
G'nite, and
ReplyDeleteCheers !!
The Christian end timers are a rather tame bunch, compared to the 12ers.
ReplyDeleteThe Iranians, some of them, actually believe they are called upon to bring on the end of the world by bringing on a world conflagration.
Then finally, all will be Okey Dokey.
It's hard to find much real end time stuff in the Gospels.
And it's a big question as to whether what there is actually goes back to Jesus, who doesn't seem to know much about the subject, but talks more about the mysteries of the human heart.
Given the general level of education in Mississippi, it's not surprising to see southern preachers there taking shit out of Revelations,disregarding the Gospels, and making a big deal out of it, and passing the money hat.
ReplyDeleteRevelations is actually speaking of Romans, and the Roman Empire, and not the USA, of the undreamed of North America, which didn't exist until nearly two thousand years later.
ReplyDeleteVerily, I say unto thee:
ReplyDeleteRelax
>>>Mark 13:32
"But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.<<<
;)
Just don't let the Iranians get the bomb.