Lynn's great great uncle trained Bibi for leadership and was also a founder of the Likud Party. When we were in Israel the first time with our two kids Avram hosted a luncheon for us in The Knesset and introduced us to some of the Ministers and we met Bibi at that time.
This was over 25 years ago. It is amazing what this nation has achieved under the most difficult of circumstances.
Now that Bibi has won and has the responsibility of stitching together a new government it will be interesting to see how he finesses his relationship with Obama.
We know from experience Obama does not cotton to people who challenge him and he carries grudges so I suspect he will do everything in his power to make it difficult for Israel over the next two years. How any Jew can remain faithful to the Democrat Party is beyond my comprehension. Frankly, I feel the same about any American other than those who exist off of the Federal Largess, deserved or otherwise.
The party has become radical and attracts mostly the likes of the Soros', anarchist malcontents and chaos activists of this world. How indeed sad..
===
If our intelligence were intelligent they would substitute Obama's name. (See 2 below.)
===
Finally, for those who enjoy sweet love stories I urge you order from Netflix "The Road Home."
It is in sub-titles and is a Chinese movie about a teacher and his wife and the Cultural Revolution.
Just fabulous!
==
Dick
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1)
A HOUSE UNDIVIDED: ISRAEL'S NEW CONSENSUS POLITICS
Israelis go to the polls on March 17, and in a time-honored tradition, international pundits are hoping for a political earthquake. This ballot, they say, will finally and completely determine whether Israel ever makes peace with the Palestinians, whether its inter-communal tension will devolve into civil war and whether it can stop an Iranian nuclear bomb before it is too late. However, it is likely that, like most of Israel’s preceding elections, this one will bring incremental rather than apocalyptic change, and Israel’s domestic, regional and foreign situation will remain largely the same as it had been before.
This is not to say that Israeli elections are inconsequential. The rise of Menachem Begin and his Likud party to power in 1977 brought an end to five and a half decades of Labor-movement dominance before and after Israel’s independence.
The 1977 upset—known to Israelis as the Ma’apach, or upheaval—inaugurated a 24-year period of competition between left and right, where right-of-center coalitions battled with their left-of-center counterparts, and during a six-year stalemate, had to cohabit under grand coalitions aptly named national-unity governments.
The coalition dynamics of that period may appear preferable to the current proliferation of personality cults, short-lived splinter parties and ad-hoc alliances, but it also reflects greater polarization within Israeli politics than at present. During that era, Israel witnessed the rise of the settlement movement and its polar opposite, Peace Now; it launched the 1982 Lebanon War, survived a financial crisis and hyperinflation; and confronted the First Palestinian Intifada, or uprising (1987-1993).
The 1992 elections restored Labor to power and ushered in direct negotiations between Israel’s Labor-led coalition and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The issue was so divisive, however, that it dominated elections in the 1990s to the exclusion of other issues. Israel lived through the drama of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination and, in what became known as the Second Intifada, suffered through the first wave of mass suicide terror attacks inside its population centers.
Ultimately, the Oslo Accords’ peace dividends were elusive. The traumatic impact of the Second Intifada still accompanies Israel’s collective psyche, and the 2001 and 2003 elections delivered a sound defeat to the pro-Oslo leadership. The collapse of negotiations and the Second Intifada undid Israel’s left but did not move Israel to the right. In fact, the dynamics of Israeli politics have since had one constant element in common—gravitation towards the political center.
The prevalence of right-of-center politicians and coalitions is deceptive. For starters, Israelis have reached a near wall-to-wall consensus on the enormity of the Iranian nuclear threat. Netanyahu’s Bar-Ilan speech in 2009—where he grudgingly accepted the notion of a Palestinian state—reads almost like the Labor platform that carried Rabin to victory in 1992 and formed the prelude to the Oslo process. If many voters moved to the right, in other words, it is also because right-wing politicians have met them halfway in the center.
A victory for the left-of-center alliance of ex-ministers Tzipi Livni and Isaac Herzog may change some, but not all, of the parameters of Israel’s regional and foreign policy. Some of their likely partners—the Yesh Atid party of the former celebrity newscaster Yair Lapid, Kulanu of ex-Likud minister Moshe Kahlon, and at least one religious party—are the same interlocutors that Netanyahu would court in his own efforts to form a coalition.
New parties have risen, triumphed, and disintegrated so quickly that it is hard to keep track of mergers and splinters. Despite the erosion of support for both Likud and Labor, Israeli politics have developed around a new national consensus that wants cautious leaders to navigate the geostrategic horizon prudently. Israelis are keen to reach a compromise with the Palestinians but despair of having one given ongoing Palestinian incitement and terror, the presence of Iranian proxies at Israel’s borders, and regional turmoil left unchecked by a retreating American superpower.
Increasingly, Israelis regard more ideological proponents of the settlements project with suspicion, but are loath to renounce strategic settlement blocs and the Jordan Valley to a Palestinian society increasingly dominated by Islamic extremists. Crucially, they have little faith in the Palestinian Authority’s ability to prevent a West Bank a replay of the scenario that followed the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip ten years ago—with thousands of rockets indiscriminately launched at its civilian centers. That is why, ultimately, whoever wins will have to embrace that consensus and govern from the center.
There’s the rub. Those who view Israel’s elections as a clash of titans on which the fate of Zionism depends fail to see how stable the Israeli political system is. The truth is less exciting and more mundane.
The upcoming elections are unlikely to usher in another upheaval. A victory for either the Likud or Herzog-Livni camps will more likely occur by the thinnest of margins, and will have to rely on a broad coalition of centrists and possibly religious parties to keep afloat. Gone are the days when Labor or Likud could, alone, win at least a third of Knesset seats. Whoever emerges victorious will have to strike deals with the plethora of small parties occupying Israel’s center, while accommodating their natural allies to their right and left.
Emanuele Ottolenghi is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
1a) After the Election, I Have a Dream
By Sherwin Pomerantz
In my opinion, the Israeli parliamentary elections on Tuesday could not have turned out better.
The electorate was faced with a very difficult choice in this election the calling of which, I might add, was a huge tactical error on Netanyahu’s part. As voters we had to choose which was more important, voting for hard liners who would stand up to international pressure and be tough on the issue of Israel’s security or for those who understood that while this was an important issue, the socio-economic issues that beset us (i.e. the high cost of living, skyrocketing home prices and a growing gap between the haves and the have not’s) needs serious attention as well.
Clearly the Likud headed by “Bibi” Netanyahu pushed only the security issue which culminated in his earlier address to the US Congress while never bothering to even draft a party platform for this election referring to any other issue. On the other hand, the Zionist Union headed by “Bougie” Herzog, while acknowledging the importance of security, took pains to create a party platform and speak often about the social and economic issues that affect our daily lives as citizens here.
What the electorate said yesterday, in giving 29-30 seats to Likud and 23-24 seats to the Zionist Union (n.b. final results are still being tallied ergo the range indicated) is that we want both pieces of the pie. Yes, we do want a strong leader in the area of security but we also want a government that will seriously address those issues that not only impact our daily lives but also speak to the issue of whether our children and grandchildren will choose to remain here and raise their offspring here as well.
The vote, therefore, provides an opportunity that we have not seen for many years. That is the possibility of creating a national unity government without the participation of the myriad of small parties who, because of our tradition of coalition governments, generally wield much more power than that given to them by the electorate at large.
It now falls to the President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin to decide whom he will ask to form the next government. In the spirit of bi-partisanship and for the good and welfare of the country and the people of Israel, he must use all the power of his office to convince the Likud and Zionist Union leadership to form a national unity government. Between them they will not have enough seats to do so (they have roughly 53 and need at least 61) but they could easily add a third party, either Kulanu with its 10 seats of Yesh Atid with its 11 seats. With either one of those they have the majority needed and with both, they would have a strong governing majority of 77-78 seats in the 120 seat Knesset.
There are those who will read this and say simply: impossible! Yes, of course, there has been a lot of hateful and derogatory rhetoric between the candidates in the run-up to the election. And yes, in many ways the approaches to peace, to the international community and to the Palestinians differ widely between the two major parties. But so what? We are living in a region of incredible tumult and upheaval where what we took for granted for the last 40 years is no longer to be taken for granted. No one knows where the chaos in Syria will end, how many more satellites of Iran will be established in the region, whether ISIS can be contained or even if we could sustain an onslaught from multiple directions in 2015 as we did in the past. Under these circumstances responsible leadership is obligated to listen to the populace which spoke yesterday, put their personal animosities aside and come together to ensure our collective safety, security and economic growth.
Israel is a vibrant democracy which gives its citizens the right to vote. The purpose of that vote is to convey to those who are pursuing office the demands of the people. As Churchill said in a speech to the British House of Commons on November 11, 1947 after his party had lost a parliamentary election, “"Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
If democracy is to be served, Netanyahu should not now run off and think he has won a great victory. Achieving 30 seats in a parliament that needs at least 61 to govern can only be described, at best, as half as victory. His job now, on behalf of the people of Israel, of the State of Israel, and of the Jewish people in whose name he often claims to speak, is to join forces with the other party that achieved almost the same victory and realize the vision of the founders of this country, to permit us to live as free people in our land.
To quote another line from Churchill: “Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.” The question then remains: Are our leaders imbued with sufficient courage to consider them up for the task? I certainly hope so for the future of all of us.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)
U.S. OMITS IRAN AND HEZBOLLAH FROM TERROR THREAT LIST
Author: Jack Moore
An annual security assessment presented to the U.S. Senate by James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, has excluded Iran and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah from its list of terror threats to U.S. interests, despite both being consistently included as threats in previous years.
The unclassified report, issued by Clapper on February 26 and entitled the Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Communities, was published by the Times of Israel amid Israeli concerns that Iran was omitted simply because of Tehran’s efforts to combat ISIS.
In a previous report from January 2014, Clapper included Iran and Hezbollah in the ‘Terrorism’ section, writing that both “continue to directly threaten the interests of U.S. allies. Hizballah [sic] has increased its global terrorist activity in recent years to a level that we have not seen since the 1990s”. Iran was also given its own sub-heading in the ‘Terrorism’ section of such assessments in 2011, 2012 and 2013.
Yet in the latest report, Clapper omits both Iran and Hezbollah from this section, only mentioning the Shiite Muslim militant group once in reference to the threat it faces from radical Sunni groups – such as ISIS and the al-Nusra Front – on Lebanon’s borders. In regard to Iran, the report names it as both a cyber and regional threat to the U.S. because of its support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.
However, the report speaks of Tehran’s assistance in preventing “ISIL [another term for ISIS] from gaining large swaths of additional territory” in Iraq. It adds that the Islamic Republic has “intentions to dampen sectarianism, build responsive partners, and deescalate tensions with Saudi Arabia”.
The report fails to mention that Hezbollah is labelled as a terrorist organisation by both the U.S. and the European Union, while it receives the majority of its funding from Tehran. The omission comes as Washington and other world powers continue to negotiate with Iran to strike a deal over its nuclear program and capabilities.
The assessment adds that Iran has “overarching strategic goals of enhancing its security, prestige, and regional influence [that] have led it to pursue capabilities to meet its civilian goals and give it the ability to build missile-deliverable nuclear weapons, if it chooses to do so.”
The Israeli thinktank Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has claimed that the removal of both actors from the U.S. terror assessment comes amid Iranian support in the fight against ISIS, where Tehran’s shadowy former spymaster Qasem Soleimani is directing the offensive on the Sunni-majority city of Tikrit.
“We believe that this results from a combination of diplomatic interests (the United States’ talks with Iran about a nuclear deal) with the idea that Iran could assist in the battle against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq and maybe even in the battle against jihadist terrorism in other countries,” the NGO’s assessment of the report said.
Max Abrahms, professor of political science at Northeastern University and member at the Council of Foreign Relations, believes that the omission signals a “quid pro quo” between Washington and Tehran.
“I think that we are looking at a quid pro quo, where Iran helps us with counter-terrorism and we facilitate their nuclear ambitions and cut down on our labelling of them as terrorists,” says Abrahms. “The world has changed. The Sunni threat has gotten worse, the Islamic State is a greater danger than al-Qaeda ever was, and the Iranians have really come up big in terms of helping us out in combating the Islamic State.”
Hezbollah has been accused of responsibility for a number of terror attacks against U.S. or its partners interests, such as the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and American military barracks in the Lebanese capital, Beirut; the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Argentina and the 2012 Burgas bus bomb on Israeli tourists in Bulgaria.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No comments:
Post a Comment