Vox: Israel’s election results show Netanyahu is in serious trouble

There’s a center-left alliance, which includes down-the-middle Blue and White, center-left Labor, the left-wing Democratic Union, and the Arab minority’s Joint List (which came in a strong third in this election). Then there’s a right-wing grouping, which includes Likud, the ultra-Orthodox parties Shas and United Torah Judaism, and the pro-West Bank settlement Yamina. (Another right-wing party, the Jewish supremacist Otzma Yehudit, failed to get enough votes to enter the Knesset). [...]

Lieberman is extremely hawkish on security and the Palestinians; he supports annexing part of the West Bank. This aligns Yisrael Beiteinu with the right-wing bloc; indeed, Lieberman had served in Netanyahu’s cabinet in the past.

However, Lieberman’s voting base — made up significantly of voters from Russian backgrounds — is also relatively secular and resentful of the privileges the ultra-Orthodox have in Israeli society. After Israel’s last election in April, Lieberman refused to join Netanyahu’s coalition unless Netanyahu agreed to a bill undermining the exemption from mandatory military service provided to ultra-Orthodox men. Netanyahu refused to avoid losing ultra-Orthodox support, but without Lieberman’s backing, he didn’t have enough votes for a parliamentary majority. So he chose to call new elections in September with an eye toward winning a more secure majority. [...]

Netanyahu could remain prime minister in some fashion — perhaps if he agrees to step down when the criminal indictment against him is formally filed. Gantz could end up sole prime minister. Another Likud member could end up with the top job, fulfilling Gantz’s condition that Netanyahu no longer hold the premiership. The wackiest scenario is that the parties could quite literally share power — with Gantz and some Likud leader taking turns holding the top job. This has happened before in Israeli politics, weird as it sounds.

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Haaretz: If Re-elected, Netanyahu's First Order of Business Will Be an Obscenity Against Democracy

The most common complaint about the past 100 days is that this campaign was devoid of substance and content. It occupied itself with the trivial and the sensational, along with displaying an addiction to mudslinging, cheap gimmicks and trashy video clips. We didn’t get to see party leaders sitting opposite one another and talking about their platforms, detailing their worldviews, presenting plans and serious content, confronting the issues.

That’s not only the fault of the politicians and certainly not of all of them. Part of the responsibility lies with the media, which was swept up in an ugly wave of false news and spins at the expense of the “issues.” [...]

But his path won’t be an easy one. Avigdor Lieberman, chairman of Yisrael Beiteinu, has declared that he won’t support retroactive legislation. He would prefer to have Netanyahu continue in the role of defendant. Kahalon already committed to opposing the proposal. Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked will decide when the time comes. Not even all of Likud’s members will vote in favor: Gilad Erdan said he would vote against such a bill; maybe Yuli Edelstein and Avi Dichter will, too. Here and there, a few islands of sanity remain.[...]

Only Netanyahu, whose status in the global arena is extraordinary, is capable of enlisting the heads of the great powers and “third-party countries” to help him in his election campaign. So it was with U.S. President Donald Trump and the Golan, and so it was with Netanyahu’s trip Thursday to Russia to meet President Vladimir Putin, who instructed his army in Syria to assist in the “intelligence and operational” effort that led to the return of the remains.

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Haaretz: Intervention Against Apartheid Law Casts Rivlin as Brave Gatekeeper of Israeli Democracy and Morality

Rivlin has fiercely defended the Supreme Court, the rule of law, the Israeli army, the civil service and its gatekeepers, free speech and an independent media. He has stood against racism, Jewish terror and discrimination of Israel’s LGBT community. Last year, from the podium of the Knesset, he railed against the tyranny of the majority and the politicization of Israel’s most basic values. He has stood shoulder to shoulder with Israel’s Arab minority, as he had from his first days as a parliamentarian. He has lobbied on behalf of Reform and Conservative Jews, a position in sharp contrast with his approach before becoming president.

Rivlin knew full well that he would come under fierce attack from right wing loons and their parliamentary representatives after his dramatic intervention on Tuesday against legislation of the so-called Nation-State Law. The last time he expressed opposition to the law a few years ago, Rivlin was branded an anti-Semite and photoshopped in a Nazi uniform. On Tuesday, within minutes of the publication of his letter to the Knesset committee in charge of the Nation-State Law, Twitter erupted with a stream of expletives, including demagogue, charlatan, crook, Jew-hater and prisoner of the left, and these are just the descriptions that are fit to print. Right wing legislators, caught with their pants down, followed in the footsteps of the trolls.

It’s hard to understand how a right-wing coalition that wages eternal war against BDS and its activists is undeterred by the proposed Nation-State Law clause that would allow Jewish local councils to legally exclude Arabs, given the probability that it will provide a justifiable pretext to accuse Israel of apartheid. Even the more moderate members of the coalition are capitulating to the ugly tide of nationalism that is sweeping some parts of the Israeli public and bowing their heads to Netanyahu’s cynical, rabble-rousing machinations.

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Haaretz: Netanyahu to Make It Official: Fascism Is What We Are

First among Netanyahu's current priorities this is the Nation-State Bill. As its name suggests, the proposed law has everything to do with extreme nationalism, and with the exercise of raw, explicitly unequal power. It has nothing to do with what we used to know as Judaism.

So ill-advised is the Nation-State Bill, so giant a step it is toward the implementation of fascism – and, in fact, so anti-Jewish is its essence - that President Reuven Rivlin, a lifelong advocate both of enhanced democracy in Israel and of Netanyahu's right-wing Likud Party, wrote in an open letter Tuesday that a central clause of the bill "could harm the Jewish people and Jews around the world and in Israel, and could even be used by our enemies as a weapon." [...]

- Science Minister Ofir Akunis - interfering with and ruining the work of a German-Israeli committee which could have brought millions in funding for neuro-science research in Israel - this week barred one of the country's foremost brain researchers, Prof. Yael Amitai, from the panel. Akunis' explanation?  In 2005, along with hundreds of other Israeli academics, she signed a petition supporting soldiers who, while continuing to serve in the military, refused to serve in the territories. [...]

The measure would allow her ministry to cut off funding to institutions and films which, in her view, "participate in incitement against the state," "delegitimize Israel," or violate the Nakba Law, which is meant to defund any institution which views Israel Independence Day as a day of mourning for the Palestinians who fled or were forced to flee in 1948. [...]

Rivlin singled out for particular condemnation a clause which Knesset Legal Advisor Eyal Yinon declared Tuesday apparently has no "equivalence in any constitution in the world." It would explicitly legalize what the Attorney General's office has called blatant housing discrimination in towns and communities, which would mean that "the residents 'selection committee' can hang up a sign saying ‘no entry to non-Jews.’”

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Haaretz: This Is Netanyahu's Dying Israel. Where the Doctor Is the Disease

Though they go by many names, we all know the symptoms and signs of the disease. There is the physical, psychological and genetic damage caused by generations of ever-deepening occupation, associated with and exacerbated by creeping annexation, and a behind-the-wall West Bank apartheid which is seeping unchecked into pre-1967 Israel.  [...]

This week, a barrage of rabid incitement was levelled squarely at President Reuven Rivlin, a level of extreme-right venom that approached the ferocity of the public-arena hate storm which directly preceded – and led to – the 1995 assassination of then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. [...]

In 20-plus years of having himself contributed to incitement against Arabs, against leftists and liberals, against Reform and Conservative American Jews, against human rights groups, against asylum seekers and a host of others, this week Benjamin Netanyahu managed to hit a new low. [...]

Israel crossed a line this week. Then again, of late, Israel crosses a line every week. The list of the disloyal grows by the day. Arabs and leftists and Reform Jews and rights activists have been joined by the chief of police, the Shin Bet, the Supreme Court, the attorney general, and the state comptroller – to name a few.

This is Netanyahu's Israel. Where a quarter to a third of the people stand with their ruler no matter what. No matter what segment of Israeli citizens his party demonizes – as long as it's leftists or Arabs or Reform Jews or Ashkenazim or kibbutznikim or Haaretz readers or Breaking the Silence or B'Tselem or a judge in the army who convicts a potential voter like Elor Azaria.

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