Challengers to Crown In a speech on Tuesday explaining his decision to fire two centrist ministers in the government, Netanyahu warned that Israel needed “a strong prime minister from the national camp”, one with “a large ruling party”. But while Netanyahu hopes to occupy the extreme right’s ideological terrain, his two main challengers for that crown – Lieberman and Naftali Bennett, both senior ministers in his government – have also been busy updating their own versions of an anti-Arab campaign. Interestingly, each has tried to dress it up as a “peace plan”, presumably in the hope of giving themselves a veneer of seriousness in Washington and European capitals exasperated by Netanyahu’s intransigence, while selling their schemes at home more as pacification plans. Bennett, the leader of the settlers’ Jewish Home party, recently used the platform of the New York Times to set out his scheme to formally ditch the peace process, annex most of the West Bank while leaving small islands of territory as a demilitarised semi-autonomous area for a compliant Palestinian leadership. Meanwhile, Lieberman has unveiled yet another iteration of his plan to create a demilitarised, weak Palestinian state that requires expelling many Palestinian citizens from Israel. This time he proposes not only redrawing the borders to remove Palestinian citizens but also using economic bribes to persuade Palestinians to leave their historic cities in Israel, such as Acre and Jaffa. Netanyahu believes – and most polls seem to corroborate this – that the right, backed by the Jewish religious fundamentalist parties of the ultra-Orthodox, will win a convincing majority of seats. Crisis for Arab Parties The right’s opponents are, in any case, likely to be fatally split. The centre is closer on the Palestinian issue to the right than the tiny Jewish left, and both in turn will find it hard to make common ground with the parties representing Israel’s Palestinian minority. A further question mark hangs over the future of the small non-Zionist parties in the 120-seat parliament, or Knesset. There are currently two Palestinian parties – a largely Islamic one and a more nationalist one – as well as a joint Jewish-Arab communist faction. The parliament raised the electoral threshold from 2 to 3.25 per cent earlier this year with the barely concealed intention of blocking these three parties’ entry to the Knesset. Their best hope for survival is to create a unified list, but strong ideological differences have been making an agreement difficult. The move towards elections has now put them under pressure to act. Amal Jamal, a politics professor at Tel Aviv University, observed that the rapid decline in turn-out among the Palestinian minority in recent elections was an additional factor for the parties to consider. “A unified list would probably encourage some of these non-voters to turn out again.” Al-Araby – 5 December 2014 globalresearch.ca/netanyahus-election-scapegoat-israels-palestinian-minority/5418347
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 09:20:53 +0000
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