↓
 
Home » What’s ahead for Netanyahu?

What’s ahead for Netanyahu?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s an article that discusses what might be ahead for Netanyahu.

One interesting thing about the recent Israeli election is that the polls were wrong:

Some pre-election polls had Netanyahu’s Likud and its allied parties polling highly enough to secure a bare 61-seat coalition majority — Israel’s Knesset, or national legislature, has 120 seats — but others did not. In the final count, the Likud-centric rightist coalition will attain 64 seats. That may sound like a narrow winning margin, but compared to the previous four indecisive elections going back to 2019, that is a monumental victory, at least comparatively speaking.

…Remarkably, as Likud secured a durable majority and as Religious Zionism cruised to a third-place result, the Israeli Left’s now-decades-long collapse was only further exacerbated. Labor, which dominated the first three decades of Israeli history, will have a minuscule four seats in the next Knesset. Far-left Meretz, moreover, did not even qualify for Knesset representation.

What changed to upset the razor-thin balance of recent elections? The issues this time were the economy, crime, public safety and national security (particularly the threat of Iran). Some of that sounds very familiar, doesn’t it? I also think the election was influenced by the thinness of the legal charges against Netanyahu as revealed in his corruption trial, still ongoing but with a prosecution case that was already much weakened prior to the election. The evidence simply isn’t there.

Comments

What’s ahead for Netanyahu? — 10 Comments

  1. Netanyahu is Israel’s Trump although he has been there longer. Like, I hope tomorrow, this was a security election. I don’t know how much of a problem, crime is, aside from Palestinians, but with Biden and Democrats here, plus Iran, they have much to worry about.

  2. Bibi addressed my National war College class (88-89) during his tenure as Israel’s ambassador to the US. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more well-rounded, intelligent and capable ambassador, from any country. I thought to myself then, and still do, that Israel was fortunate to have so high caliber a representative and citizen. I think his legal troubles are akin to the law fare we’re experiencing, or the Russian collusion hoax.

  3. “The evidence simply isn’t there.”

    It’s sweet to think evidence, or lack thereof, really matters in these sham prosecutions. The Democrats almost all voted to impeach or convict Trump based on nothing. Tish James is still trying to harpoon Trump. I’ll be pleasantly surprised if the Israeli justice system is any less corrupt. The fact that Bibi’s prosecution hasn’t been tossed out makes me doubtful.

  4. Jimmy:

    I am not talking about the final disposition of the trial. I am talking about the effect that watching the travesty of a trial had on the Israeli voters and their willingness to re-elect Netanyahu.

  6. Daniel Greenfield explicitly addresses the parallels between Israel’s and America’s elections and their political situations in general; the details are not exactly analogous, but they rhyme.

    http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2022/11/the-fall-of-israeli-left.html

    But the paradox of the Israeli Left is that it has virtually no electoral power, but nearly unlimited political power. There may not have been a Labor prime minister since 2001, but it still controls the machinery of officialdom from local bureaucrats to Supreme Court justices. Even while the media declares that the latest right-wing bogeyman is a “threat to democracy”, it is the civil servants, the prosecutors, judges, brass and administrators who actually run most things.

    And who are the real threats to democracy.

    There’s a reason Democrats often describe the Israeli Supreme Court with its unlimited power of judicial review and ability to override government decisions on everything from the macro to the micro, from where people can live to who should receive the Israeli Prize, as their model.

    Beyond the upper echelons of the judiciary, prosecutors openly collaborate with the media and leftist activists to indict, prosecute and remove conservative, patriotic and Zionist elected officials. It was a bunch of these groundless prosecutions that forced Netanyahu out of office. To understand the Kafkaesque absurdity of the prosecutorial campaign against Netanyahu, it’s enough to mention that his wife was investigated over recycling bottle deposits.

    To make sense of what’s going on though, you have to understand Israeli demographics.
    …
    Israel’s Left derives the majority of its support from the upper class elites of Tel Aviv who were part of the old socialist establishment. Israel’s Right leans heavily on the Middle Eastern and Russian immigrants whom they treated like dirt. They want a strong country and a weak bureaucracy. The old establishment Left wants a strong bureaucracy and a weak country.

    Talk to members of that old establishment and you find that they are a small incestuous group. Israel is a small country, but in those circles, everyone really knows everyone else, they went to school with them, served with them, or lived next door to them. They feel that their country, with its cafes and kibbutzim, red flags and membership in an international socialist order, and the more intangible cultural elements, was stolen from them by these disgusting new arrivals.

    They complain about the language, the manners, the religion, the superstition and the ugliness of the Haredim, the Middle Eastern and Russian Jews.
    …
    Though they can’t win elections for long, they control the machinery of power. And paradoxically they see themselves as underdogs still fighting the ‘Right’ and the influx of immigrants who don’t know their place and have ruined everything.

    In a small country, their hateful views are no secret. It’s why they can’t win elections.

    Israel’s politics are a struggle between an emerging multicultural conservative majority and a supremacist European leftist minority holding on to power. It’s a mirror image of how American liberals see our politics and yet when given a choice, they side with the European minority.

    In this struggle, the media, both theirs and ours, depicts coalitions of Middle Eastern Jewish refugees, Russian immigrants, and Orthodox Jews as if they were all interchangeable “right-wing extremists” while painting a leftist fringe that consists of upper class elites who all know each other and look like each other as the liberal tolerant heroes of tomorrow.

    That reveals as much about our media and political elites as it does about the Israeli Left.

    Democrats and the media never actually ask why Israelis seem to insist on electing so many conservatives and few lefties, or why Netanyahu broke Ben Gurion’s record for the longest consecutive term in office. Instead, we’re told that Israelis are supremacists and bigots. It’s a convenient projection by the real supremacists and bigots who are smearing Israel.

    Why did the Israeli Right win while the Left lost? For all these reasons the media won’t discuss.

    Decades of Islamic terror, failed socialist politics, corrupt monopolies, an abusive bureaucracy, and outright bigotry and discrimination of the ugliest kind somehow never come up in these conversations even though the majority of Israelis are painfully acquainted with all of them.

    The Left lost badly in Israel. Our Left is terrified that they’re about to lose just as badly here.

  7. I’m shocked by the legal double standard in the US, but I don’t know how much electoral impact it has in the US. It seems to have made conservatives more conservative, but I wonder if it’s attracted new voters.

    Chronological List:

    Legal Jihad against Trump by nyc
    Jan 6 prisoners
    Hunter Biden Laptop
    Two impeachments of Trump
    Russia-gate
    Weiner Laptop
    Hillary Bathroom Server

  8. Daniel Greenfield explicitly addresses the parallels between Israel’s and America’s elections and their political situations in general; the details are not exactly analogous, but they rhyme.

    Not buying. Israel has a British-style flexible constitution, which provides a means to discipline the judiciary. From 1977 to the present, the ministry in Israel has included the Labor Party, Meretz, Yesh Atid, or Israel Resiliance about 1/3 of the time, but actual Labor ministries have been in charge only 12% of the time. The neophyte lawyers of 1977 are now approaching 70. No doubt academe, the legal profession in general, and the judiciary have a different culture than the general public, but to take him at face value I’d have to believe the composition of the judiciary and the corps of public prosecutors was not influenced in the least by the Labor Party having been for 40 years deprived of positions in which they could make appointments.

  9. 1. Another parallel Americans should consider: Bibi was alone on the campaign trail – on purpose. Other high-level Likudniks with name recognition displayed unity and discipline, and did not engage the media. This was an “in your face” demonstration the Likud would not let the elites railroad Bibi, or even sideline him.

    Americans who think/hope someone other than Trump is the Republican candidate should shut up and listen to the “deplorables” who understand this…. the Left’s ability to cancel ideas and people IS THE ISSUE. It’s gotta be The Donald.

    2. Turnout counts. In Israel the turnout was an almost-unprecedented 70 percent, or more. This is what emptied the swamp and revealed the true lay of the land.

    3. The future: this may be the Israeli administration that brings the curtain down on the Oslo fiasco… MOR Israelis who believed in Oslo – or simply thought the Palis were someone else’s problem since they lived in “the consenus area” of Israel’s coastal breadbasket – can no longer delude themselves.

    Decades of Pali terror and rockets have woken up wave after wave of these people – but these were (if possible) dwarfed by the pogroms, vandalism, and barefaced rejectionist Arab nationalist rhetoric displayed this year in major Israeli cities. This Israeli-Arab version of BLM-style violence has woken up many more, and brought home that they are not insulated, that Oslo in fact has weakened the “consensus” about their homes… even more horrific was that the center-Left government tacitly abandoned Jews in mixed cities because the coalition depended on Arab MPs.

    All this was alluded to during the campaigning with the euphemism “personal safety.” And against the backdrop of Israeli Arab violence, attempts to paint Ben-Gvir as an “extremist” fell flat. Many were suddenly more receptive to “the settlers” and their message.

  10. Art Deco:
    There are no checks-n-balances in the Israeli system. The legislature does not appoint judges. It is a mafia/old boy network where higher judges make appointments. At best the Knesset rubber-stamps their picks.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

↑