Neither major bloc has won a majority, but the deeper problem is what neither side is prepared to challenge: Israel’s wars, occupation and increasingly aggressive regional ambitions.
The whole world, or a goodly proportion of it, surely watched as the minority of enfranchised voters living under Israeli rule went to the polls Tuesday. I did.
But I was never clear in my mind why I was watching – understanding, along with the whole world or a goodly proportion of it, that the outcome would not matter much.
And so it will not, now that the votes are counted and results are coming in. Neither of the main contenders, Bibi Netanyahu and his rightist Likud, nor Gadi Eisenkot and his ‘centre-right’ (quotation marks, please) Yashar, has enough votes to form a government without recruiting minor parties, very likely including the small Arab parties, as coalition partners.
As in previous contests, it could be weeks before one or the other bloc forms a government – if, indeed, Israeli voters do not have to go to the polls again.
At writing with 93 per cent counted, Likud’s coalition has 53 seats in the Knesset and Yashar’s 48, leaving both short of the 61 needed to achieve a majority. [Arab parties have 19]. But there is no need to perch on the edge of your seat as the politicking proceeds. This is not a cliffhanger.
If there is one nation in the world that needs more than any other to find a new direction it is ‘the Jewish state’. But if there is one more committed to its current path it is the Jewish state.
Genocide, persecution, lawlessness, the Greater Israel project, the ‘seven-front war’ Bibi likes to talk about: to the extent any kind of change may be in the offing, this will arrive as an escalation of the Zionist regime’s aggressions.
One question in my mind as the Israelis sort out their political future is how the rest of the world will respond once a new government forms and it is bitterly clear that, with Bibi or someone else in power, Israel is either incapable of taking a new course forward or has no interest in finding one.
A scene in Jerusalem Tuesday as reported by The Associated Press:
“One young voter, Michal Shiloh, was on the streets helping to encourage last-minute voting for candidates like the far-right Bezalel Smotrich [Netanyahu’s fanatically racist finance minister].
She and friends cheered for Netanyahu, but Shiloh acknowledged the high Arab voter turnout, ‘unfortunately’.
‘We don’t want the government with the Arab people,’ she said, reflecting a rightward shift among some younger Israelis.”
This is the Israel that went to the polls Tuesday.
Israeli Jews had all sorts of things on their minds as they dropped their votes into ballot boxes all day Tuesday and into the evening. There is Netanyahu’s serial corruptions, his conduct of the terror campaign in Gaza, the West Bank crisis, the status of ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Netanyahu regime’s still-contested assault on the judiciary.
But there was no serious debate of the genocide in Gaza, the escalating settler-and-soldier violence in the West Bank, the occupations in southern Lebanon and parts of Syria, the war against Iran.
To the extent these questions came up at all the argument was whether Bibi has conducted Israel’s campaigns of terror righteously or has he been insufficiently violent in directing the Zionist regime’s aggressions.
Not subject to debate
It is ugly, all this, but it is precisely the same in America and, for that matter, elsewhere in the Western world. Domestic questions of no large consequence may go one way or another way, let at least a few flowers bloom, but nothing is to be questioned on the geopolitical side: domination – Israel’s in West Asia, the West’s over the non-West – is not subject to debate.
Any American who finds it disgraceful that Israel’s aggressions were not at issue Tuesday, to put this point another way, must pause to ask when the Pentagon’s budget last came up for serious debate – or any. There is no difference whatsoever between these derelictions.
Purposefully, assiduously, pointedly, Netanyahu hardened the Zionist regime’s commitment to destroying the Islamic Republic as the elections drew near.
Five days before the polls, he eliminated all possibility of a negotiated settlement of any kind with Tehran. “There is only one way to remove this threat once and for all: overthrow the regime in Iran,” Bibi told a graduating class of army officers. “And that is my directive to the IDF, the Mossad and the security branches.”
The air in Israel is thick with this kind of thing at this point. Ten days earlier the Institute for National Security Studies, a think tank close to the regime, published a paper written by Tamir Hayman, a former head of military intelligence, under the headline, “The ‘New’ National Security Concept“.
In it Hayman described permanent war as the core of Israeli security policy and peace agreements as temporary arrangements to be used and cast aside when no longer of use.
I appreciate Hayman’s quotation marks around his ‘new’. The only thing new about this policy is the forthrightness with which it is stated. This is the mark of the Netanyahu years, whether or not they continue after the political dust settles.
So has Bibi raised the bar, and let us not be surprised that Gadi Eisenkot, a hawkish general who previously served as the IDF’s chief of staff, is determined to clear it.
As Eisenkot made repeatedly clear on the hustings, he is prominent in the camp that thinks Bibi has failed, too soft, to destroy Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon and bring ‘stability’ to the West Bank.
Trita Parsi, the executive vice-president at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, offered a pithy observation the other day when parsing the Hayman paper: Israel’s only measure of success in its security policy is the extent of its destruction.
I will add that this has been the United States’ standard for many years: since I don’t know when, its role in world affairs has been that of spoiler, a builder of nothing.
Netanyahu’s vigorously stated commitment to live-streamed genocide in Gaza and the destruction of the Islamic Republic, along with the rest of his Eretz Yisrael programme, will stand as his legacy whether or not he survives in office when Tuesday’s results shake out.
And as Alastair Crooke pointed out in a piece published Monday, the Zionist donors without whom US President Donald Trump would not exist have assumed Netanyahu’s position: negotiations with Iran of any kind are no longer acceptable; nothing short of the downfall of the Islamic Republic will do. “The Terrible Power of the Purse”, a quotation from Theodor Herzl, was Crooke’s headline.
More of the same but in all likelihood worse: this is what will come of Tuesday’s elections. And so to the question posed above. The world was nothing resembling stable as of Monday. How will the world respond, West and non-West alike, as the Zionist regime, regardless of whose name is on it, deepens the crisis afflicting it?
Republished from Consortium News
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His new book Journalists and Their Shadows, is forthcoming from Clarity Press. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site. His web site is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.