Haaretz: Getting the Democracy We Deserve

There’s also no one to struggle with. Aligned against Netanyahu is nothing, an empty space. No one stands up to him. The prime minister is being questioned as a criminal suspect and no one challenges him seriously, except for the police commissioner and protest organizer Eldad Yaniv. Just imagine similar allegations against Shimon Peres, with Menachem Begin or even Yitzhak Shamir in the opposition – heaven and earth would be shaking. But Israel has in recent years developed a regime with no opposition, like in Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey – but with a global innovation Made in Israel: It’s the opposition’s fault that there’s no opposition, not the government’s.

The so-called opposition has nothing to sell. It has nothing to offer other than “Netanyahu is corrupt,” as if Netanyahu would be fit to continue in office if he were modest, morally pure teacher of Jewish law. There is no alternative to be found, even if you search with a microscope. This can be seen on the Facebook page of Labor candidate Avi Gabbay: It’s empty. “Together we will turn Israel into the greatest country in the world.” The populists Netanyahu and Yair Lapid couldn’t have put it any better. [...]

From the other contender, Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid, we could of course expect much less. “Mr. Prime Minister, you’ve done good things for the Jewish people. But enough.” What a fighting opposition! Lapid’s Facebook page deals mainly with corruption and conscripting the ultra-Orthodox. We all know that Israel that has no other issues to deal with – or maybe Lapid just doesn’t have anything else to say.

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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: When Israel Ignorantly Blames the Holocaust on the Poles, It Boosts Their Illiberal Nationalists

Clearly, it’s a complicated situation that requires a thoughtful and yet forceful response. Israeli leaders opted instead to equate the Polish law with Holocaust denial, in an ignorant and foolish display of haughtiness and prejudice.

Ignorant, because it ignores historical facts, and foolish, because it only plays into the hands of the Polish government, which can now legitimize the law by saying it’s standing up in defense of Polish national honor. [...]

Even before we debate a "Polish culpability" for the Holocaust, it should be admitted that the very concept of collective guilt is fraught with danger. No one knows this better than the Jews, whom the Church only cleared of collective guilt for the death of Jesus in 1965. In modernity, no pogrom in Russia was carried out without the preamble of a supposed atrocity by a Jew. Even the Nazis had recourse to one, the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, to "justify" Kristallnacht in 1938, when more than 90 Jews were killed in attacks across Germany. [...]

"Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, opposes the new legislation passed by the Polish parliament, which is liable to blur the historical truths regarding the assistance the Germans received from the Polish population during the Holocaust. There is no doubt that the term "Polish death camps" is a historical misrepresentation! The extermination camps were set up in Nazi-occupied Poland in order to murder the Jewish people within the framework of the "Final Solution." However, restrictions on statements by scholars and others regarding the Polish people's direct or indirect complicity with the crimes committed on their land during the Holocaust are a serious distortion. Yad Vashem will continue to support research aimed at exposing the complex truth regarding the attitude of the Polish population towards the Jews during the Holocaust."

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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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Politico: The Man Who Would Beat Bibi

Benjamin Netanyahu is a survivor. He’s beaten back what looked to be near-certain defeat at the polls more than once. He’s outlasted hard-line rivals and liberal critics to become Israel’s longest continuously serving prime minister, and if he can hang on two more years, would even outdo David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s idolized founding father, to claim the overall record in the job. [...]

The late Shimon Peres, the peacemaker behind the Oslo Accords who was beaten by Netanyahu in an election he was widely expected to win, was famous for saying the polls are like perfume, best to be smelled not drunk. Are these latest surveys showing Netanyahu’s vulnerability and Lapid’s surprising strength, for real? And do they matter at a time when Trump and his advisers actually seem to be getting serious about rekindling a peace process just about everyone else had given up for dead? [...]

Labels aside, whatever he’s doing seems to be working, and Lapid’s newfangled politics—heavy on the requisite tough talk about Israeli security but with an emphasis on good governance and boosting Israel’s economy—have improbably vaulted him and Yesh Atid, the party he founded in 2012, to first place in survey after survey over the past several months. The latest polls generally show Yesh Atid (“There Is a Future” in Hebrew), leading Netanyahu’s conservative Likud party by about four seats in parliamentary elections. [...]

Enter Lapid, a polished talker with a lush head of anchorman-silver hair who tells me he is running as “an extreme moderate,” preaching centrism as the new populism and a sort of gauzy patriotic nationalism that tends to give his former colleagues in the world of liberal journalism fits. Lapid, who served a stint as finance minister in a short-lived coalition with Netanyahu, now tours the world as a sort of shadow foreign minister, tangling with increasingly vocal Western advocates of boycotting Israel as a result of its continued occupation of the West Bank and ongoing settlement building there. “With the world of alternative facts, the country is under attack” by advocates of the budding boycott movement, Lapid tells me animatedly, and he is at his most passionate these days taking on those who prefer beating up on what he invariably calls “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

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