From Ian:
There is no left left in Israel
There is no left left in Israel
That leaves Netanyahu very well placed to form a government quite similar to the solidly right-wing one that has been ruling the country since 2015, albeit with one significant change: Likud's share of the vote looks to have increased from 23.4 percent to a little under 30 percent (with seats in the Knesset expanding from 30 to something around 35 out of 120). And he did it while running for re-election under threat of indictment — by warning ominously that if Likud lost, the left would take over Israel.MEMRI: Saudi Journalist: 'Allah Commanded Us To Love And Respect' The Jews; 'Antisemitism In The Arab World Is The Product Of Loathsome Racist Education'
The left will be doing no such thing in Israel anytime soon. But the fear that it could, and the conviction that this would be disastrous for the country, is a very powerful force in Israeli politics these days, just as the American right hopes it will become in the United States.
Which is another way of saying that what American political scientists call negative partisanship has been extraordinarily effective for the Israeli right. It has done nothing for the Israeli left because, in an electoral sense, there is no Israeli left. It exists now primarily in the minds of the right — as an existential threat, a sort of suicidal impulse toward surrender to Israel's many blood-thirsty enemies that must be resisted at all costs.
Gantz may have campaigned as the anti-Netanyahu, but his disagreements mostly focused on the corruption investigation and domestic issues. On the Palestinian question and Israel's relations with its neighbors, the former commander of the formidable Israeli military came down quite close to Bibi's positions, and he maintains close ties to sharply hawkish members of the Knesset. This would not change if his alliance ends up forming a government, because any governing coalition would need to include at least some of the same right-wing parties that have been Likud's partners for the past four years. And that's assuming Blue and White doesn't join together with Likud itself to form a national unity government.
No matter what happens in the coming days and weeks, the right in Israel holds most of the cards, the center is its only opposition and viable alternative, and the left is well and truly dead. (h/t jzaik)
In his March 3, 2019 column in the leading London-based Saudi daily Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, Saudi journalist and businessman Hussein Shobakshi condemned the deeply rooted hatred of Jews in Islamic culture, in which the term "Jew" is strongly derogatory. Shobakshi mused on why the Muslims do not differentiate between the Israeli Zionists and the Jews in general, even though Allah had instructed the Muslims to love and respect Jews and Christians, and even though the Prophet Muhammad himself had married a Jewess, made pacts with Jews, and maintained relations with them. He called on the Muslims to first achieve peace amongst themselves and with those around them, and to recognize that they have profound antisemitic hatred and racism, and that they are capable nevertheless of carrying out Allah's commandment and respect the Jews.
The following are translated excerpts of Shobakshi's column:
"When the extremists in the political Islam organizations want to carry out character assassination against a leader in the Arab world, they are accustomed to reiterating over and over that 'his mother was a Jewess' or that 'he has Jewish roots.' Often, the supporters of this or that leader respond to this by saying of the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood that 'his mother was a Jewess.'[1] This has made me wonder about the scope of the hatred for Jews in our culture, and about our inability to distinguish between the Jews as People of the Book – whom Allah commanded us to love and respect and permitted us to trade with them, eat their foods, and marry them – and the Israeli Zionist political project that has instilled [in us] schizophrenia [in our attitude towards the Jews] from which we have not yet awakened.
"The intensity of the Jew-hatred disseminated by the media and by art, literature, and political cartoons [in the Arab world] has reached a degree that cannot be ignored. No one, of course, is arguing that the Jewish and Israeli arena itself is free of a culture of hatred within it. In the extremist religious Jewish schools, there is [also] the same takfir [i.e. accusing others of heresy, as there is among Muslims] and differentiation between the [Jewish] people and the 'gentiles,' who are worthless and may be robbed and killed. From these schools emerged the well-known extremist terrorists Meir Kahana and Baruch Goldstein.
"However, antisemitism in the Arab world is the product of loathsome, racist education that is rooted in the Arab mentality that is used to labeling people according to tribal, family, and racial affiliation, and according to the religious school to which they belong. It is this education that prompted thousands of Jews who were citizens of Arab countries to emigrate after the establishment of the State of Israel… (this is the same mentality faced by Christians of the Arab Orient and by all other religious [non-Muslim] streams in the region).


















