The Israeli 2019 elections are over, and in spite of all the nonsense in the garbage press, there’s only one major reason why it turned out as it did. In the end, Israel voted for life, plain and simple.
The results are as follows, but basically they can be understood as the collapse of the Israeli Left and a final verdict on the Left’s worst mistake… Oslo and the fallacy of the so called ‘two state solution.’
Bibi Netanyahu has won a record breaking fifth term as Israel’s prime minister. And the new government he will form will likely be further to the right, more nationalistic and much more stable then the current one with at least 65 seats or more. They may even get more because Israeli law specifies that those parties who fail to make the vote threshold (3.5%) must distribute their votes to another party.
The Blue and White Party, with former Labour General Benny Ganz and his co-chairman former TV Talking head Yair Lapid were supposed to win and oust Netanyahu. A lot of the Israeli press was touting them, since basically, the Blue and White party consisted of politicians who favored Oslo and the two state ‘land for peace’ solution. Ganz has always been noted for his hostility to Israelis who live in Judea and Samaria and Lapid’s sole claim to fame aside from his TV antics was that he was once finance minister as part of the usual Israeli political horse trading. I remember asking one of my Israeli friends in Lapid knew anything about finance.His response? “Well, I think maybe he knows how to use an ATM.’ Actually a pretty accurate answer as it turned out. In the end, they got 34 seats, almost all of them based on votes from Tel Aviv, which is almost akin to New York in terms of its politics. I doubt the Blue and White will be around for the next election. The entire Left coalition got perhaps 50 seats or so, including the Arab parties.
Israel’s Leftist Labour Party, which ruled the country for decades is essentially out of the picture. They won all of six seats in the new 120 member Knesset. The EU funded ultra Left Meretz Party had a grand total of four seats.
All the polls of the 2019 Israeli Elections had Blue and White
leading Israel’s Left to victory.The press even trumpeted Israel’s
attorney general’s last minute ‘indictments’ of Netanyahu for
corruption, things that in most other countries would not even be
questionable. Like our own president, Netanyahu has a lot of haters on
the Left. Among his other sins, it was MIT grad Netanyahu who as finance
minister rebuilt Israel’s economy by privatizing a number of things the
government shouldn’t have been owning and encouraging entrepreneurship,
pushing joint government and private industry projects, and generally
turning Israel from a quasi-Socialist state with a struggling economy
into the economic powerhouse it is today. The Left has never forgiven
him.
So why did he win?
To understand that, you have to review both the past and the recent present.
The mantra of the Israeli Left was always 'land for peace.' The idea with Oslo was that this would work out like the deal with Egypt. There would be peace, and Israel's diplomatic status and image with foreign countries and the UN would be improved. Actually, that deal never really worked that way. Only since Egypt's Al Sissi took over has there been real co-operation between the two governments, based on a mutual distaste for Islamist terrorism.
The Camp David Accord was different because Anwar Sadat really wanted peace. Yasser Arafat was a Soviet trained terrorist who had no intention of it. It was President Bill Clinton who really created Oslo and gifted Arafat with his own kleptocrat fiefdom. Mr.Bill
loved Yasser. He had him to the White house more than any other foreign dignitary, even though he knew Yasser Arafat had ordered two US diplomats tortured to death in the Sudan. And after Mr. Bill intervened in the Israeli elections to get Labour's Yitzhak Rabin elected, the time was right. Arafat, huddled away in Tunis with his small group of thugs was given territory to have as an autonomous region (
not a sovereign state) in exchange for renouncing terrorism, avoiding incitement to violence and embracing peaceful co-existence.
Needless to say, he did nothing of the kind. The ensuing bloodbath and suicide bombings mounted up as the most appalling atrocities were committed while Rabin and the Labour Party talked about sacrifices for peace. And Israel's seeking peace resulted in even worse foreign relations with the EU and UN, demanding more and more concessions of Israel and only Israel.
The same thing happened after Gaza. The UN, President George W. Bush and his Roadmap and the EU all promised Gaza would strengthen Arafat as a gesture for peace, and that Gaza would never be allowed to become a security problem for Israel. None of those guarantees were worth the paper they were written on either.
Most Israelis realize now that the entire 'Oslo/Land for peace/ Two state solution' nonsense is and always was a total fallacy. you can't allow a den of rattlesnakes or a pack of rabid dogs to live in your backyard and expect to have peace. It doesn't work that way. And tthat's really what Israel's 2019 elections were about.
Netanyahu announcing that he's going to annex the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and that he is committed to make them part of Israel is a major change. Among other things, it means those communities will be under Israeli law rather than military law. It gives them permanency.
Likewise, Netanyahu finally coming up with the courage to say there will be no 'Palestinian State' is also a major step. There's no reason for one and never has been, especially since Jordan gave these Arabs citizenship back in 1954 and most of these 'Palestinians' still have it, including Mahmud Abbas. 'Palestine' has received more aid money than any other developing nation in history. What is there to show for it except some fat bank accounts in the EU and the Emirates? Nothing except a terrorist squat with murder for hire as its chief export.
The Israeli 2019 elections were the electorate finally saying '
Ani lo friar'* once and for all. Recent terrorist attacks, including the brutal murder and rape of a nineteen-year- old girl and the murder of a Rabbi with ten children definitely help solidify this sentiment.
Another reason for Netanyahu's win is his diplomatic successes. His relationships with the UN and some of the nations in the the EU are a problem , but the relations to the UN and these particular EU Nations with any Israeli leader would be the same. They have their far Left and a lot of Muslim migrants to appease.
But Israel under Netanyahu has fostered very close relationships with Russia's Putin, India's Modi, Brazil's Bolsanaro, numerous African nations, Australia's Scott Morrison, Egypt's Al Sissi and other Arab nations and of course, our own President Trump, Vice President Pence and the Republicans in congress. Ganz had zero foreign policy experience, and neither did Lapid.
And of course, Israel's economy remains robust.
So how will this affect America? In several ways.
First, it will definitely affect President Trump's deal of the century peace plan if it even gets aired. Since I doubt Netanyahu wouldn't have told President Trump what he had in mind beforehand, and
the president has already confirmed that his plan does not require a 'Palestinian' state.That makes president Trump smarter than any President since Reagan, who said exactly the same thing about the necessity of such a thing.
I doubt this doesn't change a few things. But since Mahmoud Abbas has already said no to anything Trump comes up with, it's probably a dead issue.
Second, the recent anti-semitism coming from almost every Democrat running for president in 2020 and those of anti-semitic Democrat members of congress is going to be one more issue to divide things. Thanks mostly to Barack Hussein Obama, this stuff is now out in the open as the Democrat Party follows the trend set by the UK's Labour Party. The only Democrat presidential hopeful to go to AIPAC's convention was Cory Booker, who actually has a Jewish constituency in New Jersey. The rest boycotted it. I expect this to continue as Israel haters like Beto O'Rourke, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg among others fight for the nomination. Buttigieg in particular is the craftiest of the three, masking his contempt for Israel by attacking Netanyahu and thus claiming that attacking Israel's democratic choice 'isn't anti-semitism' and pushing for that same old two state nonsense. I wonder if Buttigieg knows hoow gays are treated in 'Palestine?'
Beto actually called Netanyahu a racist. BTW, anyone who thinks Mayor Buttigieg is the sort of person you want running America
should check what he's done to South Bend, Indiana as mayor. The media's hushing this up, but I have a feeling it's going to come out as things heat up.
American Jews are going to become more divided...until they wake up. For many Jews in the past, especially those closest in age to the Holocaust, Israel was a major issue. It isn't anymore for a significant number of today's Jews, for various reasons.
There are a number of things responsible for the change. As Israel went from a socialist, left leaning country to a more capitalist, nationalist state with a strong military most Israelis not only took pride in but served in it, many Jews who already leaned hard to the Left became estranged.
A large part of this increasing trend was the coverage Israel received from the media here in America. The
New York Times and the alphabet networks were especially dishonest and repugnant, as was the BBC in Britain. Aside from demonizing Israel, they also sold the 'Palestinian' cause to these young Jews with the preconceived script of the Arab David versus the Israeli Goliath...carefully avoiding the vicious attacks on 'Goliath.' They also popularized the myth of Israel as 'occupier' and an 'apartheid state' committing 'war crimes.' This was the strategy of the Big Lie on steroids.
On universities where the Left had control (that is, most of them) Jewish students were made to feel uncomfortable by both radical professors and anti-Israel student groups. A great number of Mid East studies Departments were essentially bought by the Saudis for the express purpose of giving an academic luster to the 'anti-zionist ' agenda. This propaganda was especially well received by a number of black and other minority students, adding pressure to Jews to virtue signal by damning Israel and become part of the in crowd.
Finally, the nomination of Barack Hussein Obama served as a test for those 'good Jews' to virtue signal and vote for the first black president, even to the point of ignoring his many anti-semitic and anti-Israel mentors. His establishing J Street with the financial backing of anti-Israel billionaire George Soros gave many of these Jews a banner to march under to pretend they were pro-peace no matter how many of their fellow Jews the 'Palestinians' brutally murdered. These Jews simply made a choice - Obama over Israel. Not even Obama's appeasement of the genocidal Iranian regime made any difference. Many of them have made the same choice today...the resistance and the newly anti-Israel Democrat Party over pro-Israel President Trump. Will they continue to make that ultimately self hating and suicidal error? Time will tell. In the UK, it took awhile before Britain's Jews awoke to what Labour had become and by then it was pretty much too late.
Interestingly enough, as a number of young American Jews go left, associate themselves with the increasingly anti-Israel Democrat Party and distance themselves from Israel and religious observance, their contemporaries in Israel are doing exactly the reverse, getting closer to religion and moving right politically.
There's a reason for that.
While these young Israelis were too young to experience the signing of Oslo Accords in 1993 and 1995, these younger Israelis lots of them religiously observant to some degree, grew up with the consequences. They grew up with the so-called Second Intifada, which began in September 2000. they saw their friends and contemporaries murdered by Israel's 'peace partners and saw the government doing little about it. They went to the funerals of their friends murdered by homicide bombers and in many case experienced them firsthand, even though they survived.
Trust me, when you experience something like that and what it looks like, sounds like and smells like, it changes your entire perspective about 'land for peace' and 'the two state solution.' When you see parents sobbing over their dead children, when you see grown men in tears picking up their dead bodies while you can actually hear the 'Palestinians' celebrating this in the distance all the rhetoric you've been fed by left wing politicians, the media and what's known as the international community is revealed as the horse manure it really is. You never forget. Never.
The Israeli Left is essentially history now. The most Netanyahu's new government is going to allow is a small enclave in Area A where the majority of Arabs live, a place where they lack statehood but can run their lives domestically. and frankly, I wouldn't even give them that much. A 'Palestinian' enclave would simply be a cancer in an otherwise healthy area. Most of these people are Jordanian citizens, including Mahmoud Abbas. There's no reason they shouldn't return there, where they can mouth their hatred of Jews to their heart's content without hurting anyone but themselves.
Israel has finally gotten out of it's defensive crouch. There won't be any more cringing over the latest nonsense from the UN or questioning over the ownership of the land from the river to the sea, land not only promised to the Jews by the Almighty but by the League of Nations Palestine mandate, its reaffirmation by Article 80 of the UN Charter and the San Remo accords that even the Arabs agreed to. It's time to end this.
Selah.
*'
I'm no sucker'
Rob Miller writes for Joshuapundit. His articles have appeared in The Jerusalem Post, The Washington Examiner, American Thinker, The Los Angeles Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The San Francisco Chronicle, Real Clear Politics, The Times Of Israel, Breitbart.Com, Yediot and other publications.
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