News Update - December 2

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http://www.centerpeace.org ** Israel and the Middle East News Update ------------------------------------------------------------ ** Tuesday, December 2 ------------------------------------------------------------ Click here for a printer-friendly version. (http://centerpeace.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/December-2.pdf) Headlines: * Israel Appears Headed Toward Early National Election * Lapid: Netanyahu Is Dragging Us Into Unnecessary Elections * Livni: Elections Are to Replace Extremist, Provocative, Paranoid Gov't * Opposition Leader Calls for Center-Left Bloc to Defeat PM * Liberman: New Elections Are a Done Deal * Shas Kingmaker Won't Be Drawn on Support for Netanyahu * PM: Palestinian Failure to Recognize Jewish Links to Israel is a 'Tragedy' * UN Security Council to Consider ‘Palestine’ Resolution Commentary: * Yedioth Ahronoth: “Suicide" - By Nahum Barnea * Times of Israel: "A Plague on All Their Houses" - By David Horovitz ** Reuters ------------------------------------------------------------ ** Israel Appears Headed Toward Early National Election (http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/02/us-mideast-israel-idUSKCN0JG0X620141202) ------------------------------------------------------------ Israel appeared to be headed on Tuesday toward an early election after right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his major centrist coalition partner failed to patch up differences. Netanyahu's government, which is dominated by the right and came to power early last year, has been unraveling over a range of issues including the 2015 budget. He said on Monday he would go to the polls unless rebellious ministers stopped attacking government policies. A new mandate could give Netanyahu more leeway domestically to pursue his settlement policies on occupied land Palestinians seek for a state and a controversial bill to declare Israel the Jewish nation-state, legislation critics see as discriminating against the country's 20-percent Arab minority. ** Jerusalem Post ------------------------------------------------------------ ** Lapid: Netanyahu Is Dragging Us Into Unnecessary Elections (http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Lapid-Netanyahu-is-leading-us-to-unnecessary-elections-383402) ------------------------------------------------------------ "The prime minister is leading us to unnecessary elections. He had an alternative," Finance Minister Yair Lapid said on Tuesday. “Netanyahu is acting irresponsibly for the nation. It is unforgivable. Instead of bringing down living expenses and assisting new sectors of the population, the prime minister prefers to raise taxes and pay the haredi (Ultra-orthodox) parties from the pockets of the Israeli middle class," he said, repeating earlier statements made on Monday accusing the prime minister of a political deal with the haredi parties. Lapid made the statements while speaking at the Israel Defense Energy conference in Tel Aviv, telling the audience "I wanted to talk to you today about the hidden opportunities in the energy sector, but the political reality today forces me to do otherwise." ** Jerusalem Post ------------------------------------------------------------ ** Livni: Elections Are to Replace Extremist, Provocative, Paranoid Government (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/188093#.VH3IaourP8E) ------------------------------------------------------------ Justice Minister Tzipi Livni on Tuesday let loose at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying the impending elections will "not be over zero value added tax," but over replacing a government she accused of "extremism, provocativeness and paranoia" without knowing how to fight terror while also "upholding freedom and Zionism." Livni, speaking at an Institute for National Security Studies conference, said she was going straight from her speech to meet with Netanyahu and that she "refused to compromise on any of the values that have guided me." ** Times of Israel ------------------------------------------------------------ ** Opposition Leader Calls for Center-Left Bloc to Defeat PM (http://www.timesofisrael.com/opposition-leader-calls-for-center-left-bloc-to-defeat-pm/) ------------------------------------------------------------ Opposition chief MK Isaac Herzog called for centrist and left-leaning parties to rally around him and form a bloc to defeat Likud Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in upcoming elections, as talk of a return to the polls ramped up Tuesday. Herzog, who heads the Labor party, appealed to Hatnua leader Justice Minister Tzipi Livni as well as Kadima chairman Shaul Mofaz to align themselves with Labor and declared that forming a united front was key to his campaign strategy. “I am capable of replacing Netanyahu. I will do everything in order to establish a bloc before the elections,” he said in an interview with the Ynet News website. ** Jerusalem Post ------------------------------------------------------------ ** Liberman: New Elections Are a Done Deal (http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Liberman-New-elections-are-a-done-deal-383428) ------------------------------------------------------------ Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman on Tuesday said it was a certainty that the Israeli government will conduct early elections, and called for them to happen as soon as possible. Speaking at an Institute for National Security Studies conference, the foreign minister said that "it's no secret that the people of Israel don't know why we're going to elections after less than two years." The foreign minister said the reasons why the government was facing new elections was not as important as how Israel moved on afterward. He called for a new government that could work together to overcome the challenges that Israel faces, including, budgetary issues, a possible workers strike, terrorism and diplomatic problems. ** Ynet News ------------------------------------------------------------ ** Shas Kingmaker Won't Be Drawn on Support for Netanyahu (http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4598504,00.html) ------------------------------------------------------------ With Israel apparently on an election footing, Shas leader Aryeh Deri refused Tuesday to make an absolute commitment to back Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to keep his job if and when the country goes to the polls. Elections just two years since the last vote seemed almost inevitable after Finance Minister Yair Lapid rejected an ultimatum from Netanyahu in an explosive meeting Monday night ostensibly aimed at salvaging the warring coalition government. "There is no deal before the election, we have no agreement," Deri insisted at a press conference in Ashdod. "There were two deals, from the left and from the right. Yesterday they tried to convince me not to hold elections and to form a government without Netanyahu. As we have consistently said, 'alternative government? Only after the elections'." ** Jerusalem Post ------------------------------------------------------------ ** PM: Palestinian Failure to Recognize Jewish Links to Israel is a 'Tragedy' (http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/PM-Palestinian-failure-to-recognize-Jewish-links-to-Israel-is-a-tragedy-383337?elq=db3a7ccdbed04030adbb4aedc9da1ad2&elqCampaignId=3589) ------------------------------------------------------------ It is a “tragedy” that many Palestinians deny any Jewish connection to the Land of Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Monday at the start of a meeting with visiting Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic. This marks the first ever visit to Israel by a Serbian prime minister. “Here, in the State of Israel, the Jewish people have achieved their self-determination in a democratic state that guarantees equal rights for all its peoples, all its citizens, regardless of race, religion or sex,” Netanyahu said, as the debate over the Jewish State Bill seemed to animate part of his welcoming comments to Vucic. ** AFP ------------------------------------------------------------ ** UN Security Council to Consider ‘Palestine’ Resolution (http://www.timesofisrael.com/un-security-council-to-consider-palestine-resolution/) ------------------------------------------------------------ A draft resolution demanding an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines by 2016, as part of a wider agreement to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, will be presented to the UN Security Council by the middle of the month, the Palestinian envoy to the United Nations said Monday. Palestinian representative Riyad Mansour said the text, being shepherded by France, is expected to lay out a timeframe for negotiations on a final peace deal and possibly a second deadline for Palestinian statehood. “The French are moving more and more, trying to bring all the European colleagues together, and I think that eventually they will succeed,” Mansour told AFP. ** Yedioth Ahronoth – December 2, 2014 ------------------------------------------------------------ ** Suicide ------------------------------------------------------------ By Nahum Barnea Barring a last-minute miracle (or calamity), the third Netanyahu government came to the end of its life last night. Or, more accurately: it committed suicide. It was neither ideological differences that killed it, nor was it an exceptional failure or popular protest. It died because of mutual loathing, because of the prime minister’s dysfunction, because it lost its way. The question that now ought to concern us is how to handle the inheritance. The 2015 state budget bill has been introduced to the Knesset. In the situation that has evolved, there is no chance of it being approved. That means that a transition government is going to have to maintain itself on the gasoline fumes of the 2014 budget. From the IDF’s standpoint that is very bad news. Not only will the relocation of IDF bases to the south have to be suspended, routine security, training and signed agreements will also be suspended. If Netanyahu wants to use the government to improve his chances in the next elections, he has to fire Lapid immediately. He can’t afford to have an adversarial minister holding the finance portfolio, who will prevent him from doing what prime ministers do on the eve of elections: inundate the voters with gifts. The decision to hold elections will turn the government into a transition government. Transition governments do not necessarily suffer from paralysis. Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert both tried to reach a comprehensive agreement with the Palestinians while they headed transition governments—they tried and failed. No such adventure awaits Netanyahu, probably. He will want to utilize the transition government to woo the voters on the Right. He will have a hard time doing that with Livni and Lapid and their ministers serving in the cabinet. The question of how the different parties intend to package themselves is as yet unanswered. Theoretically, the Jewish Home—either part or it or the entire party—might agree to merge with the Likud; Yisrael Beiteinu might also be able to take part in an initiative along those lines as well. It could be that Livni and her fellow members of Hatnua will join Yesh Atid and the Labor Party, and they might make Amir Peretz’s dream come true by forming a united front among the three parties. Two years ago Lapid reaped the fruits of his own freshness and that of his fellow party members. They were still untainted by any political dirt. Now he is in the opposite situation: he is going to have to invest all of his talent to persuade the voters that he played no role in the failings and malaise of the outgoing government, that he is part of the solution, not part of the problem. The question as to with whom Moshe Kahlon intends to align himself before the elections is also unanswered at this point. The Israeli voting public has grown weary of knights in shining armor who promise to free the Israelis from their suffering with one fell swoop. Kahlon is going to have to work hard to persuade the voters that he is different from his predecessors. Israel is entering these elections at a low point. If you were to ask the Israelis which party they intend to vote for, many of them would reply that they have no intention of voting at all. The only ones who will turn out en masse to vote will be the Haredim and the settler right wing. They will be the real rulers in the fourth Netanyahu government—if he forms the next government. Perhaps the first task facing anyone who fears for the fate of this wonderful country is to establish immediately a movement that will say just one thing: go vote. Anyone who chooses to stay home because of laziness or boredom, because of self-indulgence or a desire to thumb their nose, won’t be punishing Netanyahu or Lapid, Herzog or Bennett. He will be stabbing Israeli democracy in the back. ** Times of Israel – December 2, 2014 ------------------------------------------------------------ ** A Plague on All Their Houses (http://www.timesofisrael.com/a-plague-on-all-their-houses/) ------------------------------------------------------------ By David Horovitz Barely 22 months after we voted this bunch into office, they loathe and mistrust each other so much that they’ve decided to put us through it all again. Iran moves serenely toward the bomb; Hezbollah and Hamas strengthen their rocket arsenals; Mahmoud Abbas accuses us of genocide, dismisses our attachment to the holiest site in Judaism and seeks a UN timetable for our imposed withdrawal from the West Bank; European parliaments chorus their approval for a Palestinian state not at peace with Israel. And the best our politicians can do in our service is get ready to bitch at each other on the campaign trail, paralyze governance for months, and waste hundreds of millions of dollars by sending us back to the polling booths more than two years ahead of schedule. Happens all the time in countries like Greece, Italy and the Netherlands? As a matter of fact, it doesn’t. And, anyway, those countries aren’t perpetually grappling with existential dangers. The first thing you want to say to the dysfunctional rabble who have self-evidently failed to work together doggedly in the wider interests of the state of Israel is: Grow up. There are bigger issues at stake here than your egos. Democracies around the world have tended to provide for parliamentary terms of four years or so because it takes a while for politicians to learn the ropes, and for policies to be formulated, fine-tuned and implemented. Too long between elections, runs the sensible thinking, and elected leaderships tend to forget the voters on whose behalf they are supposed to be working. Too short a government’s term, and the leaderships get nothing done on behalf of those voters. As is emphatically the case with the now-to-be truncated 19th Knesset. And the second thing you want to say is: A plague on all of your houses. Rarely has the old anarchist proverb, “Don’t vote, it only encourages them,” seemed so apposite. Except, of course, that staying away in March or April, or whenever it is our lousy leaders can manage to agree on a voting date, would further weaken our precious, abused democracy. Are early elections going to change anything, or are we going to wind up with much the same distribution of seats across the spectrum and, therefore, the same apparently near-impossibility of effective governance, rendering the entire exercise a giant waste of time? I’d be spectacularly wary of anyone who offers a confident answer to that question. This is the volatile Israeli electorate, making its leadership choices in the impossible to predict Middle East, where just about anything can happen at just about any moment — with the potential to reshape the region, never mind recalibrate Israeli electoral preferences. But one thing has changed since we last voted, on January 22, 2013: The electoral threshold has been raised from 2% to 3.25. Two of the current Knesset’s three Arab parties and Kadima would have missed out had that been the case last time. There can no longer be small, two- and three-seat parties in our 120-member parliament. And since there are already no big parties — at 19 seats, Yair Lapid’s Yesh Atid is the largest in the outgoing Knesset — Israel is apparently becoming the land of multiple medium-sized parties. All of which, in turn, means these newly imposed elections are likely to signal not the end of the political jockeying for a while, but just a fresh starting point in our politicians’ remorseless, short-sighted bargaining and extortion games. We may think we know where to place these numerous, likely mid-sized parties — Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home, Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu, Isaac Herzog’s Labor, Lapid’s Yesh Atid, Tzipi Livni’s Hatnua, ex-Likud minister Moshe Kahlon’s as-yet unnamed new party, Zahava Gal-on’s Meretz, Aryeh Deri’s Shas, and the second ultra-Orthodox party, United Torah Judaism — on the political spectrum. But for all the partisan passion with which their (taxpayer-funded) advertising campaign managers will now help them expound their purportedly distinct and incorruptible orientations, wasn’t it the dovish Livni, for instance, having spent the entire election campaign last time warning about the dangers of another Netanyahu government, who then signed the very first coalition partnership with the reviled Netanyahu once the votes were in? The same Livni who, on Tuesday morning, asserted that the new elections will be a choice between a Netanyahu-Bennett “extremist, paranoid government” and the “Zionist, self-confident government” she would hope to lead or dominate? Wasn’t the notion that Livni (“Mahmoud Abbas is a partner”) and Bennett (“annex 60% of the West Bank”) could sit at the same cabinet table thoroughly unthinkable, until it happened? Didn’t we assume that the ultra-Orthodox parties would be Netanyahu’s natural first allies in forging the 2013 coalition, until they weren’t? Wasn’t Liberman Netanyahu’s blood brother, until he assessed that the alliance between their parties was working against him? Wasn’t Bennett a senior cabinet minister bound by the norm of collective responsibility, until he figured that loudly denouncing and distancing himself from his own government’s policy in the midst of a war with the Hamas terror-government in Gaza would raise his profile and potentially yield more votes? Principled politics? Forget about it. If you think that’s too bleak a summation, too unfair, then tell me, please, over what vital principle has the current coalition collapsed? Which issue was so central to Israel’s well-being, so urgent, and so disputed, as to necessitate turning again to the voters for resolution? Yair Lapid’s bill to remove value added tax from some new home purchases? I don’t think so. As the man who opted not to reconcile with Lapid at their “last-ditch, save-the-coalition” meeting on Monday night, Netanyahu, highly skilled political operator that he is, clearly believes that he’ll again come out on top. But it’s a gamble. He must be calculating that Lapid will be discredited by ostensible failures at the Treasury, that early elections will complicate moves against his leadership within Likud, that Liberman will be a reliable post-election partner. He is taking the chance, too, that terrorism and the rise of Islamic extremism all around us will not push too many voters into Bennett’s camp, or that the (less plausible) reverse does not play out, with an alliance on the center-left and a sense among voters of peace-making opportunities being missed, enabling Herzog to mount a prime ministerial challenge. Again, though, what happens on polling day will likely be only part of the story. Those unthinkable alliances will suddenly again become possible, and earnestly justified by their advocates, as the egotists jostle for power. Legislation — some planned, some already passed — will be easily sacrificed on the altar of expediency. That “Jewish state” law Netanyahu deemed sufficiently essential as to risk unsettling Israel’s fragile Jewish-Arab interaction? Well, that’s gone out the window for now. Evidently not quite so urgent, after all. The legislation intended to increase the quota of ultra-Orthodox recruits to the IDF, forced through this short-lived parliament, will be substantively amended if the ultra-Orthodox parties join the next coalition. Cardinal issues relating to settlements, territorial imperatives, peace-making, all of these can be massaged — as they have been in the past — when ministerial positions are up for grabs in the immediate aftermath of elections, only to erupt as insurmountable obstacles to further coalition cooperation when one or more of the players senses a new political opportunity. Israeli voters might be forgiven for thinking that their leaders are more interested in power for power’s sake than in the vital, orderly, effective governance of the state of Israel in a region fraught with dangers. Israeli voters would be correct. The incomparable Winston Churchill observed, rightly of course, that “democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” He is also said to have quipped that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute talk with the average voter.” Actually, there’s a far better argument. He just hadn’t met Israel’s modern politicians. ============================================================ S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace 633 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, 5th Floor, Washington, DC 20004 ** www.centerpeace.org (http://www.centerpeace.org) 2014 S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, All rights reserved. YOU ARE RECEIVING THIS EMAIL BECAUSE YOU SIGNED UP FOR OUR NEWS UPDATES. ** unsubscribe from this list (http://centerpeace.us7.list-manage1.com/unsubscribe?u=232a4a45176fccacab865e520&id=929d521884&e=a7f9100a75&c=eef4b4b477) ** update subscription preferences (http://centerpeace.us7.list-manage1.com/profile?u=232a4a45176fccacab865e520&id=929d521884&e=a7f9100a75)