....rightwing netanyahu (and his personal vendettas) must go.

We are both divided countries, with one political party aiming for authoritarian government and the other tacking into the wind to address real issues like climate warming. Israel has ignored their major issue for decades and allowed the divisions of the right wing to gain the upper hand. We are in danger of doing the same thing if you can believe polls.

ISRARL’s right-wing settlers are our Proud Boys, Patriot Front, Boogaloo Boys, etc. They are violent, armed, and ready to kill because they see no one else having any rights. In the case of the Israeli settlers, they have killed many Palestinians in the West Bank.

We have a past leader who is like Netanyahu in his pursuit of vengeance against others. Netanyahu has used his power to try to dismantle the power of the Israeli Courts. Trump used his power to appoint judges by contaminating the federal judiciary with right-wing religious judges willing to help him and push Republican policies, and this includes his appointments to the Supreme Court. The difference here is that the Israeli Supreme Court has so far fought off Netanyahu’s attempts to weaken it, while our Supreme Court is destroying itself from the inside.

I think both countries are facing a reckoning. Israel because it has garnered the world’s anger at its continued treatment of Palestinians and refusal to negotiate for a separate state, and the US because another Trump term means the end of democracy as we know it. It also means the alienation of our traditional allies, the decimation of NATO, and the embrace of our enemies. We can only hope that the forces of evil do not prevail in either country.

I see a greater resemblance between Israel today and Judea just before the fall of the Second Temple, which the article has eluded to but did not, in my opinion, sufficiently appreciate.

There is Jerusalem, full of radicals, zealots, sicaris, each sect being small in numbers but big on rhetoric, claiming divine right to murder the other, and little Messiah wannabes ruling over them, each claiming to be ordained by God to grant absolution and possession of the Holy Land to their followers.

And then there is the rest of Judea and Samaria, pleading before the motley collection of the lunatics behind the thick walls of Jerusalem, like Josephus Flavius did in his days, to come to their senses for the sake of the nation.

Netanyahu is nowhere close to being the king of Jerusalem. He is the prisoner of the little messiah wannabes. He managed to temporarily unite them to keep him in power for selfish reasons, but now he is completely beholden to them and their whims: if just one of them leaves his coalition, Netanyahu is finished, both personally and politically. As obscene as it sounds, he is the left wing of his coalition, and he pander to its right wing.

I don't see this government being sustainable, let alone the division of Israel, as it is presented in the article, being permanent. Netanyahu is the peg that is holding the current government together, but he is a rotten peg. He will break under pressure, and then, as it happened in 70 AD, Jerusalem will fall.

But this time it will not fall to the foreign invader but to the "high-tech, secular, outward-looking, imperfect but liberal state" just outside of today's entrenched Jerusalem. There is no other force to fill in the vacuum in post-Netanyahu Israel. The right wingers are too small in numbers and are too compromised to retain their malignant influence on the country as they have done in the last few years. Even a small move to the left will bring about big changes.

BTW, thank you for taking a small but meaningful part in making the difference.

Last edited Wed May 15, 2024, 11:29 AM - Edit history (1)

how Bibi can sustain the status quo. None of the dynamics of the wartime politics in Israel favor Bibi - his political position, both in Israel and abroad, weakens with each passing day. I can see several likely factors that would contribute to Bibi's government falling before the elections, and none, with the possible exception of Trump becoming US President, favoring Bibi.

Bibi is an incompetent wartime leader, and several IDF generals openly criticized him for it. If the Haredis begin serving in IDF, and even if they don't, most Israeli voters are also Israeli soldiers. I believe the IDF gets consistently higher ratings than Bibi's government in polls. I am not talking about anything like a military coup, but Israeli voters, both right and left leaning, listen to what their commanders have to say.

As I mentioned before, Bibi is the left wing of his right wing government. He is ideologically unacceptable to his right wing ministers, they only tolerate him inasmuch as he gives them power, but no more. As Bibi's political position weakens, so does support within his cabinet. It only takes one of the ministers to drop out of the coalition for the government to fall.

The pressure on Bibi from Israel's allies is mounting. Specifically, in the US, the likelihood of his ally Trump becoming President is diminishing. Bibi can probably last until the US elections are over, but if Trump doesn't become President (if he does, the consequences for the entire world become dire and totally unpredictable), Bibi's prospects of remaining relevant as a politician are over. Without Trump, he will not be able to deliver much to his right wing ministers, and then, we already covered what is likely to happen.

I always thought of Jewish Diaspora as an added strong backbone for Israel. The secular techies leaving Israel are therefore, in my view, a positive development, not a negative one. Not only do they reinforce cultural and economic ties between their new localities and Israel, they become indispensable, especially in the traditionally antisemitic cultures of Europe and Latin America, as role models and ambassadors of good will for Israel. AND they vote. When Israelis leave the country, their votes still count.

The Saudis and other Sunni states can't wait to sign treaties for military and economic cooperation with Israel. They are being destabilized and threatened by the same Iran-backed terrorist proxies as Israel, but unlike Israel, they are defenseless against these enemies. While in the past they did their damnedest to wipe out Israel, today they themselves can't survive without it. This is a radical existential shift in the Middle Eastern balance of powers, involving multiple players beyond Israeli borders, and Netanyahu, not Israel, is in their way way.

It only takes a small movement to the left to radically change Israel's domestic and foreign policies. Netanyahu as prime minister is becoming prohibitively unacceptable to too many interests, both within and outside of Israel. The pressure is mounting on him to bow out, one way or another, and the straws he is grasping onto are becoming fewer and weaker. I don't see a way out of this situation for Bibi. He can delay, as he has done until now, but he cannot escape this.

When I referred to Bibi as the left wing of his right wing government, I was referring to the government prior to National Unity joining it, and my comment above is only relevant to members of that government.

If Gantz and Eisenkot drop out of the current government, it will not fall right away. However, in this event it is almost certain that a vote of no confidence will be brought up in the Knesset, and not necessarily by the members of National Unity party (I am not sure, but I think any member of the Knesset can call for a vote of no confidence). Given the dropping popularity of Likud across the political spectrum, Bibi is unlikely to survive the vote.

I believe that in this event, Isaac Herzog will have to either call for a party other than Likud to form a new government, or call for new elections.

brief Anti-Bibi government from June 2021 to December 2022, first with Bennett, then with Lapid. Why did that coalition collapse. It included Blue/white, Labor, Meretz, United Arab list, Yesh Atid among others. Plus it included Yamina, and a couple of other parties. If that broad of a coalition failed after just 18 months, what more can be done to oust Bibi?

Do more left/centrists just need to get out to vote? Do compromises need to be made again with right wing parties to oust Bibi?

I don't remember .
Im getting old sabbat hunter and its difficult enough to keep up to date with todays political
landscape never mind what happened then .

I will share a story with you tho .
My son was wounded in Gaza , he is okay but not mobile yet , so has been watching to much
Netflix .
He just finished watching House of Cards and said that Kevin Spacey's character is Bibi
personified

is creepy and icky, and I can no longer enjoy that show.
I am going to be 55 this year, so i know how you feel about getting old.

I hope your son recovers fully soon.

Physically he will be okay , just going to take time , mentally I not so sure of .
His unit were amongst the first to arrive by helicopter at Kibbutz Be'eri......
5 members of the unit were killed and one injured on the first day .
They continued fighting until the whole of the area was terrorist free .
You can imagine what he saw .
They were then sent into Gaza to clean out the tunnels .
Almost six months in the reserves from day one !!!!
Its a blessing he was wounded , so many of his friends never got to see their families again .

https://www.iaf.org.il/9701-61384-en/IAF.aspx