RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/its-israels-political-system-stupid-opinion-671343

The swearing-in on Sunday night of Israel’s 36th government was a relief to some of the public, if for no other reason than the fact that it staved off the fifth round of elections. Or so the members of the motley coalition would have us believe, though they, like most people in the country, don’t have great faith in its longevity.

But since the main purpose of the peculiar formation was to oust now-former prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, they have good cause to be pleased with themselves. Their mission was accomplished, at least temporarily.
The same cannot be said of the voters who gave Netanyahu’s Likud 30 Knesset seats, a far greater number than any other individual party. Nor are many of those who cast their ballots for Yamina, headed by Naftali Bennett, happy at its having joined forces with the Left and Islamist Ra’am Party. Ironically, though their candidate is now prime minister, they’re suffering from buyers’ remorse.

After all, their criticism of Netanyahu, no matter how vocal and hard-hitting, has always come from the right. The current constellation that Bennett finagled, then, isn’t exactly what they’d had in mind when campaigning for him.

Still, there are those among his loyalists who’ve decided to give him a chance to steer the government in the literal and figurative right direction. So far, he’s been put to and passed a couple of small tests.

These include enabling the Jerusalem flag march to proceed as planned on Tuesday, and subsequent airstrikes on Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad military compounds, following incendiary-balloon launches from Gaza into southern Israeli border communities.

https://bit.ly/35tV9z9  Pre-1967

In 1948, the CIA opposed the reestablishment of the Jewish State, contending that it would be a feeble entity, unable to withstand an all-out Arab war – which would yield a second Holocaust in less than ten years – fully dependent on US soldiers for its survival, jeopardize US ties with the Arab World, imperil US access to Persian Gulf oil, and probably join the Soviet Bloc. 

The State Department and the Pentagon, along with the New York Times and Washington Post, seconded the CIA assessment.

On the other hand, Clark Clifford, President Truman’s trusted advisor, who dedicated much time to studying the track record of Jewish sovereignty in Middle East history, impressed upon the President that an independent Jewish State would be a most effective military power, reliable, stable and inherently pro-US.

Clifford was absolutely right, while the State Department, the Pentagon, the CIA, the New York Times and the Washington Post were resoundingly wrong.

Following the impressive Israeli military performance in the 1948/49 War of Independence, General Omar Bradley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff, recommended that Israel be considered a favored strategic ally, since “the Israeli army would be the most effective force south of Turkey, which could be utilized to delaying action [in the case of a Soviet invasion]….”

The 1967 Six Day War

Since the 1967 Six Day War Israeli military victory over Egypt, Syria and Jordan, the US national security establishment has recognized the potency of Israel to advance regional and global US national security interests, which supersede the Palestinian issue.

Unlike NATO, South Korea and Japan, Israel has extended the strategic arm of the US with no need for US military personnel.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17472/israel-government-diversity

[B]igots… in the United States and Europe, insist on characterizing Israel as an apartheid state. Nothing could be further from the truth. Israel has real diversity, not the kind of phony diversity that characterizes many American institutions. American diversity is simply a euphemism for more Blacks, and especially more Blacks who hold the same views about political and racial matters.

The best evidence of this truism came from Google’s appointment of a chief diversity officer who had expressed anti-gay and anti-Jewish views…. He is Black and that is all that diversity means at Google and many other American institutions. It is different in Israel, because Israel is such an inherently diverse nation that takes its diversity seriously.

Every Muslim majority nation is officially a Muslim state that bestows considerable benefits on members of that faith. Great Britain is an Anglican Christian state with an established religion. Catholicism is the official religion of several European countries. Many national flags and emblems have crosses, crescents or other distinctly religious symbols.

So stay tuned to see how the now government manages to survive the challenges of diversity. In the meantime, however, stop singling out Israel for demonization by mislabeling it as apartheid or undemocratic.

I challenge anyone to name a parliamentary democracy that has had a more diverse coalition government — racially, religiously, ethnically, ideologically, politically, national origin — than the current Israeli government. It includes people of nearly every color from Black Ethiopians to brown Muslims to swarthy Sephardim to pale Russians. It includes a modern Orthodox Jew as Prime Minister, along with fundamentalist Muslims and atheist and agnostics Jews. It has a gay cabinet member, a deaf member of the Knesset and people who trace their roots to Asia, Africa, Europe and America.

A record number of nine women will be serving in the new Israeli cabinet. The current Prime Minister is a right-winger. The Prime Minister designate who is currently Minster of Foreign Affairs, is a left-winger. Every shade of political opinion — and there are many in Israel — is represented in this government. The old expression “two Jews, three opinions” can now be changed to “20 Israeli cabinet members, 30 opinions” — because each cabinet member represents multiple opinions within their parties.

https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/murder-on-the-tel-aviv-beach-?token=eyJ

Just after dark on the evening of June 16, 1933 (88 years ago today, precisely), Chaim Arlosoroff and his wife, Sima, went for a stroll on the Tel Aviv beach.

Arlosoroff was the head of the Jewish Agency’s political department and effectively the foreign minister of the yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community of Palestine. As he and Sima walked along the beach, two men approached out of the dark, one shining a flashlight in Arlosoroff’s face while the other pulled out a gun and fired. Arlosoroff died on the operating table a few hours later.

We’ll never know if Arlosoroff would have been killed had he not, years earlier, had an affair with the woman who would become the wife of Joseph Goebbels (Hitler’s infamous Minister of Propaganda.) We’ll come back to that very strange twist, or tryst, below. But what we do know is that Arlosoroff was the first political assassination in the history of the yishuv/Israel. He’s worth recalling today not only for that, but even more ominously, because segments of Israeli society seem determined to replicate the circumstances that led to his murder.

In an earlier posting, “Picture the protesters, they’re worth a thousand terrifying words,” we spoke about the political environment that had Israel in its grips as the Yair Lapid / Naftali Bennett coalition seemed to be taking shape. Not much has changed since then. True, Israel has made it past some hurdles: whether you like the coalition or not, Israel at least has a government, and might succeed in passing a budget for the first time in two years. Bennett has managed to stay alive not only politically, but actually alive, thanks to Shin Bet security that he was provided earlier than would otherwise have been the case.

But the accusations of treason are hardly over. At yesterday’s Flag Parade in Jerusalem, which mercifully passed without major incident, one could see more than a few protesters holding up signs with the words “Bennett, shakran”—Bennett, The Liar. That, of course, is precisely what was said about Rabin, who was also, like Bennett, called a traitor.

https://www.jns.org/opinion/comic-relief-from-a-serious-israeli-drama/ 

 The sight on Sunday night of the trendy Tel Aviv set celebrating the new Israeli government with great fanfare—flags and all—was nothing short of hilarious. After all, one would have been hard-pressed to locate a single person in the throng of thousands dancing in and around the fountain at Rabin Square who had voted for Yamina, the party whose chairman had just been sworn in as the country’s next leader.

Indeed, ahead of the March 23 Knesset elections—the fourth round in two years—the munchkins chanting the equivalent of “Ding dong! The witch is dead” at the ousting of Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu would have shuddered with horror and disgust at having Naftali Bennett become prime minister.

Yes, in the eyes of the state’s chattering classes, the kipah-wearing Jew who made a fortune in high-tech exits was and still is a capitalist “fascist” bent on annexing Judea and Samaria at all costs. And Yamina (“Rightward”), in their view, was merely an iteration of Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) and the Religious Zionist Party headed by Bezalel Smotrich, with far-right pariah Itamar Ben-Gvir  of Otzma Yehudit in its ranks.

A similar opinion was frequently expressed by the radical leaders of Labor (Merav Michaeli), Meretz (Nitzan Horowitz) and certainly by Mansour Abbas, leader of the Islamist Ra’am Party. Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid and Blue and White’s Benny Gantz have less of an ideological stake in any of it, which is why they are referred to euphemistically as “centrists.”

Their euphoria at Bennett’s taking the reins, then, is both comical (or would be if Israel’s domestic and foreign challenges weren’t so monumental) and illustrative of just how deep the pathological loathing for Netanyahu runs in certain circles.

https://www.jns.org/with-bennett-at-the-helm-how-will-he-steer-the-bedouin-negev

Israelis think of the desert area as its “Wild West,” a place where sovereignty is more honored in the breach, and where concerns center on crime and national security. For the government, the biggest challenge is bringing to heel unregulated Bedouin building on state land.

 Israel’s newly sworn-in Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has many landmines to avoid. One concerns land issues in Israel’s Negev Desert, specifically whether he will rein in unregulated Bedouin settlements that some say threaten to overwhelm Israel’s land reserves in the south.

“Bennett is selling the Negev!” was one of the first broadsides hurled against the new premier by Benjamin Netanyahu, who attempted to use the issue as a last-ditch effort to peel away right-wing members from the Knesset’s vote of confidence in the government on Sunday. He claimed that Bennett would hand control over parts of the south to the Ra’am Party—the first Arab party to agree to join an Israeli government. The Bedouin make up an important part of Ra’am’s base, and one of their key voting issues centers on illegal housing.

The Negev—and the Bedouin who make up 25 percent of its population—has long been a political football in Israeli politics, although it’s often pushed to the backburner. Israelis think of the desert area as its “Wild West,” a place where Israeli sovereignty is more honored in the breach, and where there are concerns over crime and national security. For the government, the biggest challenge is bringing to heel unregulated Bedouin building on state lands. The Bedouin are spreading rapidly because they are growing rapidly; they have one of the highest birthrates in the world, in part due to polygamy. Designated a crime in Israel, it is largely unheeded by the Bedouin. A 2012 Tel Aviv University study found that one-in-three Bedouin men have at least two wives.

“They have families with sometimes 30, 40, even 50 children. … When they’re grown, they have to build somewhere, and this is the recipe for the illegal houses that we have in the thousands in the Negev,” said Kobi Michael, senior researcher at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies and editor of the institute’s periodical “Strategic Assessment.”

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/message-to-iran-the-era-of-lies-is-over/91542/

As Israel’s new government settles in, President Biden and Prime Minister Bennett agree to disagree on Iran — which means we could be at the start of a geopolitical game of good-cop-bad-cop.

Addressing the Knesset before the Sunday vote that made him premier, Mr. Bennett said that “as the greatest threat to Israel, the Iranian nuclear project is reaching a critical point.” The Mideast, he added, “is yet to recover from the effects of the first nuclear deal, which emboldened Iran to the tune of billions of dollars, and with international legitimacy.”

Renewing it “is a mistake that will once again lend legitimacy to one of the most discriminatory and violent regimes in the world,” Mr. Bennett said. Then he made clear that “Israel will not allow Iran to be equipped with nuclear weapons. Israel is not a party to the agreement, and will maintain full freedom to act.”

Freedom to act is key to the new government’s Iran policy, as it was for Benjamin Netanyahu when he was prime minister.

Yes, Yair Lapid — the new foreign minister and alternate prime minister — said one of his top goals is to repair relations with America’s Democrats. Addressing the foreign ministry staff, he said that Israel must prepare for renewal of the JCPOA. Yet he insisted that “this is a bad deal” and that “Israel will use every option at its disposal to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon.”

In an interview last week, outgoing chief of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, detailed some secrets behind the Israeli methods — sabotage of Iran’s nuclear facilities, assassinations of top nuclear scientists, and, most glaringly, taking an entire nuclear archive from a warehouse at the heart of Tehran and safely smuggling it to Israel.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/mark_levin_provides_insight_about_what_happened_in_israel.html

Those who long for a parliamentary system in America, instead of our “winner take all” system, would do well to look at what’s been happening in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, after 12 years as Prime Minister is now out and, in his place, there’s an unstable coalition made of people whose only common bond is that they, like the Israeli equivalent of America’s Deep State, wanted Bibi out. Mark Levin does a good job explaining how what happened.

In parliamentary systems, the people do not vote directly for the Prime Minister. Instead, parliament itself chooses its leader. If there’s a clear majority and a single minority, it’s simple. If there’s a clear majority and several minorities, all of which are too small to combine against the majority, it’s still simple.

It starts being a problem when there isn’t a majority but is, instead, only a plurality. A plurality means that one party received more votes than each of the other parties received. However, the first party nevertheless failed to receive more than half of the total votes. Dictionary.com offers a good example:

For example, Gabriel won the plurality for school vice president with 40 percent of votes while Kiara came in with 35 percent and Carl with 25 percent. If Gabriel had received 54%, he would have received both the majority and plurality. 

In that situation, all the various parties start making deals – building coalitions – in the hope that their coalition will have a majority of members in the parliament. When the coalitions fall apart (as they often do), elections begin all over again. It’s an unstable system, especially in times of war – and Israel is always in a time of war.