The Blog that Predicted the Victory of Netanyahu

Likud’s Triumph Emphasises the Irrelevance of Labour Zionism 

When all the pundits predicted that Netanyahu and the Right would be defeated in the Israeli General Election, this blog stood alone in predicting that  the Zionist Right would triumph once again. 

Jews voting for the Joint Jewish-Arab List

How could one disagree?

 In a blog post and article for Weekly Worker of 5th March 'Polarisation Will Continue to Grow' I wrote:

Zionism racist?  Perish the thought

The Israeli Labour Party, running with Tsipi Livni’s Hatnuah, has high hopes of forming the next government. It is likely to be disappointed.  

Netanhayu addresses Congress

I did not, and do not, possess a crystal ball.  Nor was it, as I posted to Antony Lerman's blog  a hunch or guess.  It is based on an analysis that Zionism has no need today of the appearance of a 'socialist' cover.  A nakedly free market society adapts ideologically and in Israel's case it jettisons the old rhetoric of collectivity.  State capitalism as represented by Histadrut, which until the late 1980's and early 1990's was the second largest employer in Israel after the state itself, has given way to massive privatisation.  The welfare state has been progressively dismantled.  

Herzog - the Zionist Union (Labour) leader - Gaza should have been hit harder and earlier

The Israeli Labour Party, which pioneered the confiscation of Arab land, the military rule over the Arabs and the creation of an apartheid state, is now redundant, a left-over from the past.  In its wake there is a hysterical nationalist xenophobia that binds the settler majority and treats the Arab minority as a fifth column.  Arabs play the same role as the Jews did in Nazi mythology.  They are the traitors within, waiting to perform the 'stab in the back'.

This is my post:

Tony Greenstein

Antony says that he guessed that Netanyahu would win the election.  Perhaps he did but in an article for the Weekly Worker I was one of the few who put their cards on the table with an article The Right & Far Right Will Almost Certainly Win the Israeli Elections  (unexpurgated).

Israel's fascist foreign minister Lieberman - taking an axe to Israel's Arabs.  Leader of the Zionist ISIS

But it's not a question of who was right but why I predicted that the Right would win.  It was not a question of guessing.  Labour Zionism, to which Antony had a childhood attachment and still has a fondness for, is a busted flush.  It has served its political purpose.  It laid the basis for Begin's victory in 1977 and as Ze'ev Sternhell wrote, it is difficult to identify one social grouping that enthusiastically supports it.  

Netanyahu celebrates

I agree with Ali Abunimah when he says that Netanyahu's victory is the best outcome.  It means that the West has to confront its support for the war criminals in Tel Aviv.  The election of Livni and Herzog would have clouded that, raised hopes but have done nothing for those who need it most - the Palestinians.  Consider:

Livni is also the war criminal behind the attack on Gaza in 2008/9.  Some 1400 civilians were killed.  In the peace talks (see the Palestinian Papers, Clayton Swisher) she repeatedly proposes swapping Arab towns and areas of Israel for the settlements.  She is as much a devotee of a Jewish state as Netanyahu.

What of Herzog?  Is he just a traditional social democrat?   Hardly.  He campaigned on social issues but kept well clear of the settlements which he has vowed to maintain.  His party voted to support the banning of Haneen Zoabi.   He criticised Netanyahu in a video for going  soft on Hamas and not hitting Gaza hard enough or early enough.  2,200 dead in Operation Protective Edge was not good enough for him.  http://mondoweiss.net/2015/02/leader-attacks-netanyahu

I know Antony does not like the comparisons but when you see Israeli mobs chanting 'death to the Arabs' or a demonstration of hundreds of Israelis outside a wedding reception of an Arab male and a Jewess you are reminded of Europe in the 1930's and Germany in particular.  Zionism is playing itself out in Lieberman's remarks about taking an axe and beheading Israeli Arabs.  Ayelet Shaked speaks for many when talking of exterminating Palestinian women so that they won't give birth to 'little Palestinian snakes'.    All this accompanised by frightening military power.

We should be grateful that Netanyahu's victory has at least provided clarity.

The Right & Far Right Will Almost Certainly Win the Israeli Elections

The Last Fling of Left Zionism

Herzog and Netanyahu - Spot the Difference

Moshe Kalon of Kulanu -  A Likud offshoot

The late Shulamit Aloni who founded Meretz and drifted away from Zionism

The last time that the Israeli Labour Party (flying under the Zionist Union flag today in alliance with Tsipi Livni's Hatnuah) won an Israeli General Election it was in 1992 under Yitzhak Rabin.  The only comparison with today is that Israel, under a far-right Zionist administration (then led by Yitzhak Shamir who had proposed a pact with Nazi Germany as one of the leaders of Lehi) had come into conflict with the US Administration.  George Bush Snr. had then frozen $11 billion in export credit guarantees.

Haneen Zoabi of Balad/Joint List attacked

Israeli woman and Aida Touma-Suliman joint list

Today Netanyahu's administration, which is further to the right than Shamir's, has aligned himself with a powerful section of the US political establishment against Obama.

The Ogre

Israel's fascist foreign minister - Avigdor Lieberman

The arithmetic however is completely different.  Rabin gained 44 seats and Meretz, the left-Zionist civil rights party (which included Shulamit Aloni, who was barely a Zionist) gained 12 seats.  Today the Zionist Union will gain about 24 seats and Meretz 5 seats at most.  In 1992 Labour and Meretz nearly had an overall majority and with the Arab parties and Hadash couldn't be overthrown.  Today they will be at the mercy of all sorts of 'centrist' Zionist parties if they try to form an administration.

Yair Lapid - of the opportunistic 'centre' Yesh Atid

Below is the unexpurgated version of an article I wrote for the Weekly Worker 1048 Polarisation continues to grow

Israeli General Election 17^th March 2015

Polarisation but no change

Israel is due to go the polls on 17^th March 2015.  The above table is based on the latest 3 opinion polls and they differ only slightly.  The Israeli Labour Party, running with Tsipi Livni’s Hatnuah, has high hopes of forming the next government.  It is likely to be disappointed.

The Joint List Press Conference

Naftali Bennett - leader of the racist far-right settler's party Jewish Home (Habayit HaYehuda)

The previous General Election was held in 2013.  Netanyahu dissolved the Knesset two years early as a result of the refusal of Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid and Tsipi Livni of Hatnuah to agree to proposals to entrench, as a basic (constitutional) law, the definition of Israel as a Jewish state.  Accompanying Arabic would have been removed as the second official language in Israel and there would have been a failure to even pay lip-service to the equality of all Israeli citizens, regardless of national/religious affiliation, in law.

Zahava Galon - leader of Meretz/Mapam

There have, of course, never been any disagreements within the Zionist parties about Israel being a Jewish state.  What the disagreement focused on is the wisdom of putting this into law and thus making it clear that Israeli Palestinians are the equivalent of gastarbeiters (guests), tolerated strangers at best, within this state.

Zionist Union leaders Herzog and Livni

The context for this has been a raft of legislation specifically targeting Israel’s Palestinian minority.  Teachers are banned from teaching about the Nakbah, the expulsion of Palestinians in 1947-8.  Discrimination against Palestinians in terms of the right to lease ‘national land’ has been reinstated after the decision of the High Court in Kadan in 2000.

Aryeh Deri of the religious sephardic Shas party

To emphasise their Zionist credentials, the Israeli Labour Party has stood as the Zionist Union for the purpose of the elections.  It wishes to make it clear that it is not ‘soft’ when it comes to the Arabs. 

The Zionist ‘left’ has always hidden behind the formulation of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic state, whereas the Right has always been clear.  In the words of Moshe Feiglin, a right-wing libertarian Likud MK ‘Not one of the dreamers and pioneers… who returned to our holy Land after 2000 years of exile did so in order to establish another democratic state. … Those who came to Israel wanted a Jewish State.’  Or as the Jewish Nazi MK, Rabbi Meir Kahane put it, you can have a Jewish state or a democratic state but you cannot have both.  A democratic society could vote that the state was no longer Jewish, something no Zionist could accept.

Mohammed Barakeh and Dov Khenin of Hadash/Communist Party

As is normal in Israeli elections, parties suddenly spring up for no other reason than there is an election.  The two new parties are Kulanu, a ‘centrist’ party (in Israeli terms) and hard-line on security and Yachad, formed by the former leader of the Ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Shas Party, Eli Yishai, which is on the Zionist Right.  This rapid formation and disappearance of political parties, usually based around a single individual, is a by-product of Israeli settler-colonialism  and its distorted class politics.

The racist Tsipi Livni - co-leader of Zionist Union

If the Israeli Labour Party were even the equivalent of a European social-democratic party and Israel was a normal bourgeois-democracy, it would be romping home.  Whilst the cost of housing continues to soar (provoking the Tent protests 3 years ago) and poverty and low wages affect even the Jewish sector of the population, billions of shekels are spent on the settlements.  Coupled with this there are now revelations that Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, spent enormous amounts of public money on take-aways, cleaners and they even transferred garden furniture from the Prime Ministerial residence to their own private home in Caesaria.  Netanyahu is a good example of the marriage of racism and corruption yet Israeli Labour cannot land a blow.

Meretz's Issawi Frei - the sole Arab MK for a Zionist party

The other major feature of this election has been the effect of the decision to raise the threshold level which a party needs to gain representation.  Previously in Israeli elections, you needed to gain 2% of the vote but the fascist leader of Yisrael Beteinu, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, raised it to 3.25% specifically to exclude the Arab/Palestinian parties.  However this has backfired as it forced them to form a joint list of the United Arab List and Tal, the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement, the nationalist Balad party and the Arab Movement for Change - Hadash, the Communist Party.  The number of seats for Arab parties is expected to increase from 11 to 13.

Ayman Odeh of Hadash/Joint List

It is, however hard to see the Israeli Labour Party forming the next government since it is a cardinal rule of Zionist politics that you do not form a coalition with Arab parties, or even rest on their support to form a government coalition.  Assuming the Zionist Union gain 23 seats and Yesh Atid, the rightward looking ‘centrist’ party of Yair Lapid gains 12 seats and Meretz and Kulanu gain 14 seats that is still a total of 49  seats.  It is normal for the ILP to include an Orthodox Jewish  Party in a government coalition and Shas would take such a coalition to 57 seats on current forecasts.  But if Shas joined the coalition then a peace settlement would be all but ruled out.

Benny Begin - Netanyahu's retread

Likud (22) plus Yisrael Beteinu (6) Jewish Home (12) and Yachad (4) total 44 seats but the Ultra-Orthodox parties have 14 seats between them making a total of 58 seats.  Kulanu, which might form a coalition with Israeli Labour has a hard-line security policy.  Another Likud coalition seems the likeliest outcome.

Herzog

If Likud and the Zionist Right do lose a number of seats and the Zionist Centre gain a few, then the second most likely outcome is a repeat of the 2009 general election when Israeli Labour went into a coalition with Likud and virtually destroyed itself.  There is, after all, no difference of principle between Likud and Labour.  Isaac Hertzog, the new Labour leader, made that clear when Israeli Labour representatives on the Central Elections Committee voted along with Likud and the Zionist Right to ban Haneen Zoabi of Balad from standing in the election (Ms Zoabi successfully challenged this in the Supreme Court).  It probably didn’t occur to the ILP that existing racist members of the Knesset, such as Ayelet Shaked, who advocated the murder of all Palestinian  mothers, because they will only give birth to Palestinian ‘terrorists’ or ‘snakes’ in her description, might be a more suitable candidate to bar.  Racism and Israeli Labour have always gone hand in hand and that is why, whatever the mathematical outcome, Israel’s General Elections heralds no change.

Haneen Zoabi - the Arab MK the Zionists love to hate - a secular Palestinian woman is too much for the Zionists

The last time the Israeli Labour Party won a convincing majority was in 1992.  Yitzhak Rabin’s victory was primarily on account of the freezing by George Bush of export credits by the United States.  Despite recent differences, there is no sign that Obama is thinking of similar moves.

Tony Greenstein