Haaretz: Netanyahu May Have Won, but Israel's Political Landscape Has Fundamentally Changed

So now we are back to two big parties, just without Labor. With its 35 seats, Kahol Lavan has received more votes than any other centrist party in Israeli history. Even Kadima, the only centrist party to ever hold power, never won more than 29. [...]

Why did Likud succeed in coming back from the double whammy of direct elections and the Kadima “big bang” while Labor has been all but obliterated? There are several factors. In Sharon, and now Netanyahu, Likud had strong, persuasive and experienced leaders who were also brilliant campaigners. Of the seven men and one woman who led Labor in the corresponding period, most lacked these skills. There were two who rivaled Sharon and Netanyahu’s stature — Peres and Barak — but they also failed to overcome the failure of Labor’s key policy: A historic compromise with the Palestinians, which had only resulted in more bloodshed during a second intifada and clashes with Gaza. [...]

The only issue really setting Kahol Lavan apart from the right wing is its support for the legal system, in the face of the governing coalition’s campaign to curtail the power of the Supreme Court and shield Netanyahu himself from the criminal indictments he faces. [...]

Kahol Lavan ran its campaign on being the antithesis to Netanyahu but didn’t present an alternative vision. Most of those who voted for it did so in the hope of simply seeing a change in government. That hasn’t happened and Kahol Lavan has no clear idea what to do with its 35 Knesset members.

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Haaretz: The Knesset Candidate Who Says Zionism Encourages anti-Semitism and Calls Netanyahu 'Arch-murderer'

Cassif is third on the slate of Knesset candidates in Hadash (the Hebrew acronym for the Democratic Front for Peace and Equality), the successor to Israel’s Communist Party. He holds the party’s “Jewish slot,” replacing MK Dov Khenin. Cassif is likely to draw fire from opponents and be a conspicuous figure in the next Knesset, following the April 9 election. [...]

“I call it ‘creeping genocide.’ Genocide is not only a matter of taking people to gas chambers. When Yeshayahu Leibowitz used the term ‘Judeo-Nazis,’ people asked him, ‘How can you say that? Are we about to build gas chambers?’ To that, he had two things to say. First, if the whole difference between us and the Nazis boils down to the fact that we’re not building gas chambers, we’re already in trouble. And second, maybe we won’t use gas chambers, but the mentality that exists today in Israel – and he said this 40 years ago – would allow it. I’m afraid that today, after four years of such an extreme government, it possesses even greater legitimacy.

“But you know what, put aside ‘genocide’ – ethnic cleansing is taking place there. And that ethnic cleansing is also being carried out by means of killing, although mainly by way of humiliation and of making life intolerable. The trampling of human dignity. It reminds me of Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is a Man.’” [...]

Cassif voices clearly and cogently positions that challenge the public discourse in Israel, and does so with ardor and charisma. Four candidates vied for Hadash’s Jewish slot, and they all delivered speeches at the convention. The three candidates who lost to him – Efraim Davidi, Yaela Raanan and the head of the party’s Tel Aviv branch, Noa Levy – described their activity and their guiding principles. When they spoke, there was the regular buzz of an audience that’s waiting for lunch. But when Cassif took the stage, the effect was magnetic. [...]

Cassif terms himself an explicit anti-Zionist. “There are three reasons for that,” he says. “To begin with, Zionism is a colonialist movement, and as a socialist, I am against colonialism. Second, as far as I am concerned, Zionism is racist in ideology and in practice. I am not referring to the definition of race theory – even though there are also some who impute that to the Zionist movement – but to what I call Jewish supremacy. No socialist can accept that. My supreme value is equality, and I can’t abide any supremacy – Jewish or Arab. The third thing is that Zionism, like other ethno-nationalistic movements, splits the working class and all weakened groups. Instead of uniting them in a struggle for social justice, for equality, for democracy, it divides the exploited classes and the enfeebled groups, and by that means strengthens the rule of capital.”

Tzipi Livni to Haaretz: Next Israeli Election Will Be Referendum on the Declaration of Independence

But Livni plans to use the situation to her advantage. In one of her first moves as opposition leader, she gathered together representatives of 40 civil society organizations active in a wide range of causes and invited them to join her new “emergency coalition,” as she terms it, to fight this law, which she believes jeopardizes Israel’s democratic character. [...]

An outspoken advocate of the two-state solution, Livni has led numerous rounds of negotiations with the Palestinians on behalf of the Israeli government. Her cabinet posts have included stints as foreign minister, housing minister, immigrant absorption minister and, twice, justice minister. And in more than two decades of government service, she has moved increasingly toward the left. [...]

Livni broke with Likud in 2005 and, together with then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and future Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, helped found the centrist Kadima party. After Kadima disintegrated, she started a new party, Hatnuah, which focused on promoting peace. It joined with the Labor Party before the 2015 national election to form the Zionist Union alliance. After Isaac Herzog left the Knesset earlier this month to assume his new position as chairman of the Jewish Agency, Livni was appointed opposition leader by Avi Gabbay, Labor’s new chairman. (Although he heads the party, Gabbay does not have a seat in the Knesset and, therefore, cannot serve as opposition leader.) [...]

Livni steps into her new role at a time when Israel-Diaspora relations have also hit rock bottom: Progressive Jews – who account for the vast majority outside of Israel – have grown increasingly anxious about the direction the country is taking, both religiously and politically.

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Haaretz: Netanyahu Has a New Scapegoat for His Corruption Scandal

Only Benjamin Netanyahu could have navigated the past three days and landed on his feet, unscathed in any significant way politically and without throwing the coalition into turmoil. He chalked up an impressive success in shaping the media discourse following the calamity of the police’s recommendations after their investigations of him. His party is united in supporting him and many of his friends took part in the vilification of the political rival who turns out to be a witness in Case 1000: MK Yair Lapid, chairman of Yesh Atid. [...]

The death throes are going to be prolonged and ugly. The handwriting of Netanyahu’s end is already written on the wall. The lightning polls conducted a day after the police publicized their findings showed that Likud has not been weakened and in fact has been strengthened, but that its leader’s situation is dire and isn’t likely to improve. The majority of the public doesn’t believe him, prefers the police account and thinks the prime minister is corrupt and needs to resign. The breaking point will come when the attorney general announces his decision to indict the prime minister – if that’s what he decides. However, that is still months down the road. [...]

Throughout all his years in politics, Netanyahu has honed to an art the practice of shifting the campaign to his rival’s field. He defines himself through the agency of his foes, both in the international arena and in domestic party politics. In the run-up to the last election, for example, he portrayed Zionist Union leaders Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni as traitors and collaborators with the Islamic State, who were directing the militants toward Jerusalem on their pickups.

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Haaretz: The 'Two-state Solution' Only Ever Meant a Big Israel Ruling Over a Palestinian Bantustan. Let It Go

This is a skewered view, to say the least. In fact, every Israeli government since 1967 has failed to live up to those proud liberal values by pursuing an expanded Israel ruling over a truncated Palestinian Bantustan, even if they did it under the guise of a "two-state solution."

Within weeks of the start of the occupation in 1967, the Allon Plan (under Labor prime minister Levi Eshkol) already proposed Israel annexing territory surrounding and isolating the Palestinian population centers. [...]

By Oslo’s end in 2000, there were 400,000 settlers in massive "settlement blocs" that fragmented the Palestinian territory into some 70 tiny enclaves of Areas A and B, plus the prison that is Gaza. Today, the settler population approaches 800,000.

If the two-state solution is gone, it is because of successive "sane" Israelis in government, in particular those of Golda Meir and Ehud Barak, as well as of the Likud, Kadima and the religious right, and the Zionist left, "hard" right, and the always malleable center that put them into office. [...]

But Yoffie is also wrong about how he characterizes what he calls the "hard left's" one-statism. Left groups who acknowledge the death of the two-state solution have not moved to a one-state alternative – at least not yet. Jewish Voice for Peace, which Yoffie demonizes because of its support for BDS, does not actively advocate for such a solution. And the rest of the "hard" left is still wrestling with where to go.

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Haaretz: Right-wing Dissent Against Netanyahu Is Growing, but They’re Not Turning on Him Just Yet

On Saturday night, an assorted group of right-wingers, settlers and religious folk will gather in Jerusalem’s Zion Square for a rally in support of the rule of law and against corruption. It is intended as a riposte to the now weekly anti-corruption Saturday rallies in Tel Aviv, which are largely dominated by left-wingers and open calls for the removal (and imprisonment) of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. [...]

Their comments echoed similar recent sentiments written by other leading right-wing journalists, including Kalman Liebskind and Yoaz Hendel, who is one of the organizers of the Jerusalem rally and also served as Netanyahu’s communications director from 2011 to 2012. Without necessarily targeting Netanyahu, they have served as a counterpoint to the regular right-wing rhetoric that attacks the police, the prosecutors, the left and the media for unfairly persecuting the prime minister. 

The most powerful voice so far has been that of Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, who’s one of the more mainstream rabbis on the religious right. Defying his own public, he appeared at the Tel Aviv rally last Saturday, where he said “corruption is a strategic threat to Israeli society. The meaning of corruption is abuse of power by those who have been given it – power that is used for the wrong reasons. Power is essential, but it is dangerous and can topple the state into the depths.” [...]

The trauma of 1992 is still deeply felt within the Israeli right. Yitzhak Rabin won that election, even though the religious and right bloc received more votes than the center-left parties. Fragmentation on the right led to the ultranationalist Tehiya party not crossing the electoral threshold, with its votes rendered useless.

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Haaretz: Avi Gabbay, a Business Exec With Little Political Experience, Just Won Israel's Labor Party Primary and Hopes to Replace Netanyahu

Avi Gabbay, who won Monday’s runoff for the Labor Party leadership, is not the typical candidate to lead Israel’s largest left-wing party. Not only is Gabbay a relatively new name for the voters, but the path he had chosen so far for his political and business career is at odds with the ways of traditional Labor leaders: He served as environmental protection minister under a different, right-wing party, he sat in a right-wing government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu, and before entering the political arena served as CEO of the biggest telecommunications firm in Israel.

On the eve of the runoff that will determine his political future, Gabbay can be seen as a complex and multifaceted character. The same person that had no problem sitting in a government accustomed to a diplomatic freeze now swears he is continuing the path of the late Yitzhak Rabin, and that he is unafraid to touch on the sensitive issue of East Jerusalem. His printed platform even states he would hand over Arab neighborhoods in the capital to the Palestinian Authority. [...]

Even in the business sector it is hard to identify the real Gabbay: He crossed the lines from the Finance Ministry’s budget department for a job at telecommunications monopoly Bezeq, and later fired workers while pocketing tens of millions of shekels for himself. On the other hand, all his colleagues at the firm described to Haaretz a sharp and well-liked manager who made the company more efficient and helped it grow while always treating people with respect. [...]

Kulanu officials note that Gabbay wasn’t always so adamant about Lieberman and his party. Before the 2015 elections, Kulanu and Yisrael Beiteinu had a surplus-vote agreement, which earned Kulanu a 10th seat and enabled it to demand a third ministerial post – for Gabbay. So what changed between then and May 2016? Gabbay’s close associates asserted that the appointment of Lieberman as defense minister following his support for Sgt. Elor Azaria, who executed a gravely wounded Palestinian assailant in Hebron, crossed a red line. Kulanu officials deem the resignation a cynical, carefully planned move, an attempt to differentiate himself from Kahlon and to find a gimmick allowing him to strike out on his own. [...]

Gabbay left Bezeq a young man who didn’t have to worry about earning a living. His 14 years there made him a very rich man. He reportedly earned 50 million shekels ($14.1 million). Gabbay told “Uvda” that the 175,000 shekels a month he was earning by the end of his tenure did not necessarily reflect his contribution to Bezeq. His years there gave him the privilege of being able to enter politics for the sake of ideology rather than for a livelihood. Also, it cannot be ruled out that without the enormous sums he earned, he could not have funded his current electoral campaign. His money has also allowed him a larger home in North Tel Aviv, where he lives with his wife Ayelet, a teaching coordinator at a Tel Aviv high school, and their three children. His friends say his wife is a great influence in his life. Some of them say she pushed him for years toward leftist positions.

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The Economist: Politics in Israel no longer offers much of a choice

Holy sites are the powder kegs of the conflict, imbuing the nationalist dispute with religious fervour. A row over the Kotel in 1929 led to deadly anti-Jewish riots across British-ruled Palestine. A visit to the Temple Mount in 2000 by Ariel Sharon, then the Likud party leader, lit the fuse of the second Palestinian intifada. And the increasingly frequent prayer visits helped launch the current wave of stabbings and car-rammings by Palestinians. [...]

It was in Hebron in March 2016 that an army medic, Sergeant Elor Azaria, killed a Palestinian lying on the ground, even though he had already been wounded and incapacitated after trying to stab Israeli soldiers. Mr Azaria shot the man not in the heat of the moment but 11 minutes after the stabbing—and was caught on video. The army’s high command demanded exemplary punishment, but populist politicians agitated for an acquittal or, once the soldier was convicted of manslaughter, a pardon. Strikingly, the prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, took the side of the pardon-seekers.

The Azaria affair says much about the chauvinism that suffuses Israeli public life. Politics is no longer a contest of right against left but of right against far right. Israel has become more ethno-nationalist and less universalist; more Jewish and less Israeli. Mr Netanyahu, once regarded as a demagogue, often looks like a moderate next to many of his cabinet members. [...]

Right-wingers have sought to marginalise Arab parties in the Knesset and hamper leftists and liberals. The Knesset is pushing laws on everything from reducing the volume of Muslim calls to prayer to forcing the disclosure of money given by foreign governments to NGOs (which often support human rights and other liberal causes) and giving immigration authorities greater power to ban BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel) activists from entering Israel. The government has inveighed against what it calls the “activist” Supreme Court (which it deems too liberal) and against the media.

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Haaretz: 15,000 Rally in Tel Aviv in Support of Two-state Solution

"The time has come to live, you and us, in peace, harmony, security and stability. The only way to end the conflict and the fight against terror in the region and the entire world is a solution of two states based on the 1967 borders, Palestine alongside Israel. We've accepted the decisions of the UN, recognized Israel and accepted the two-state solution, and the world has recognized the state of Palestine. Now the time has come for the State of Israel to recognize our state and end the occupation. The opportunity still exists, and it cannot be missed when our hand is extended in peace that is created between those who are brave." 

Herzog called for the creation of a political bloc representing the Israel's center-left that would replace the current government. "We must put aside ego and connect, all of us, to one large political bloc - a large political bloc that doesn't want a bi-national state; a large political bloc that doesn't want half of a democracy; a large political bloc that wants a Zionist, Jewish, democratic state that gives full equality to minorities and is open to a variety of opinions. This bloc needs to include many good people, from Tzipi Livni, my partner in the Zionist Union, to Moshe Kahlon, Yair Lapid and other people." [...]

A poll released by Channel 2 news on Friday found that 47 percent of Israelis still support a two-state solution to the conflict with the Palestinians based on 1967 borders, while 39 said were opposed, and 14 percent said they do not know. 

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Haaretz: Bibi the Invincible: Netanyahu Is Acting Irrationally but Political Arithmetic Is in His Favor

Benjamin Netanyahu looks like he’s playing with fire. His ongoing crusade to strangle at birth the new public broadcasting corporation, scheduled to begin operations on April 30, has put him on a collision course with both the entire political and media establishments.

With the exception of a small handful of toadying ministers and members of Knesset, and a few hundred employees in the soon-to-be disbanded Israel Broadcasting Authority, just about no one in Israel understands what he’s fighting for, or at least claims to be fighting for. Not even the majority among the prime minister’s supporters in Likud, many of whom have openly questioned the wisdom of threatening to hold early elections if Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon doesn’t agree to defund the new corporation, also called Kan (Here), and to keep IBA alive. [...]

Then there’s the “weekend effect” theory: that Netanyahu routinely changes his mind after family Shabbat meals, when his wife Sara and elder son Yair egg him on to confront his enemies, real and imagined. The timing of the latest twist in the saga gives some credence to this theory. Last Thursday evening Netanyahu and Kahlon agreed that Kan would begin broadcasting on schedule and that the coalition during the next Knesset session would pass a new media regulation law, giving the government control over all public broadcasting. Then along came Shabbat eve and the next day Netanyahu had ditched the agreement and was threatening early elections if Kahlon didn’t back down. [...]

Netanyahu truly believes he is omnipotent. Just look how he beat down all opposition to his grand designs for exploiting the natural gas finds off Israel’s coastline. It’s all coming together exactly as planned and the protesters can go to hell. Everything is working for him. He decides to designate “smart transportation” as the government’s priority and in a matter of weeks Intel writes a $15.3 billion check for Mobileye. His critics accuse Netanyahu of isolating Israel due to his intransigence over the diplomatic process with the Palestinians, but barely a day goes by when he doesn’t host in Jerusalem another president, prime minister or foreign minister from every corner of the globe.

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