Well there goes any hope of a peace deal, looks like a third intifada might be coming.
hoped the asshole would lose
Trump will take the credit. Get ready for Kutchnerās peace plan that will further fuck the Palestinians and move toward war with Iran.
If the Likud cheats like the Republican Party here, I guess itās no surprise.
Apparently being corrupt doesnāt just work in the U.S. There will never be peace with the Palestinians with this guy continuing in office. Disgraceful.
The last count was at 97% of reported votes. The Likud lead dwindled from 3% in the early count at the start to 0.31%. Likud 26.28%, Blue & White 25.97%. That would yield each party 35 seats, but as the polls predicted, the right leaning parties are on track for 65 seats while the center left is at 55 seats. Everyone in Israel is acting like Bibi has won, even though the last 3% is yet to be counted and the trend line has been that Blue-White and the left parties have been picking up steam in the second half of the vote count.
It would appear, for the moment, that achieving a tie with Gantz was enough for the right leaning parties to stick with Bibi.
Another key factor is the over performance (over the polling averages) of two right wing parties Shas/UTJ by 2 seats each and the relative underperformance of two left leaning parties (Labor/Hadash Taāal) by 2 seats each. Bibiās ability to cannibalize far right parties to increase from an average of 29 seats in the polls to 35 seats while still getting the overall right coalition to reach 65 seats (it was just horse trading at the end of the day) seems to have made the difference. Blue-White over performed the polls by 3 seats, but it might have come at the expense of other parties and the overall center-left total was unchanged from what the polls had predicted.
My view was not that the right coalition would not be larger than the left coalition, but that if Gantz beat Netanyahu straight up, 1 or 2 of the right leaning parties might decide not to form a govāt with Bibi and turn to Gantz. Weāre at a tie. Right now, it looks like 2 of the right leaning parties are non-committal to Bibi while Gantz has not been able to at least draw formal interest. The reality is that Netanyahu is thought to have the best chance to form a govāt, but itās so close that Gantz could pick off a right leaning party to join a coalition if any of these right leaning parties decide to stick it to Bibi in negotiations.
Getting that last 3% recorded in the vote count would matter. If the right leaning parties pick up another few seats from it, then itās game over, Bibi wins for sure. If the center-left continues to make gains as they have throughout the latter half of the vote count, then Gantz would still have a shot at this if one right leaning party were to abandon Bibi and work with Blue White.
Bibi, like Trump, is staying in power to avoid jail. Anyone that joins his govāt will have to make a commitment to protect him from trial and prison. In addition, like Trump, Bibi has been making wild promises of drastic action. In Bibiās case, itās about annexing the West Bank, a wet dream for people on the religious Israeli right, and a near certain demographic and international disaster for Israel and for Israelās existence long-term. But to stay out of jail, Bibi will do anything. Now that he has Trump in office for 2019-2020, heās likely to take his shot to annex the whole of the occupied territories.
Fun times (not).
His attacks on the Arab sector fueled calls for a boycott and appeared to result in relatively low turnout by Arab voters.
Netanyahu has voter suppression down to a science. Act so odious that the 20% of the population that loathes you sits out the election in protest.
I fear that Israel has decided to commit slow-motion suicide. Re-electing this corrupt, selfish, intolerant, cynical SOB is the last thing that the country needed.
The only good part of this is that, once again, a stereotype is disproved. This time, the stereotype that Jews are smart.
Can we now say that Israel is a Apartheid state de Jure? Itās been de Facto for a long time.
Welcome to Israeli Apartheid.
The West Bank will be formally annexed and the Palestinians driven out by force (and by the unchecked terrorism of the ultra-orthodox settlers.)
Gaza will be bombed out of existence on the flimsiest of pretenses, and Trump will cheer all along the way.
Theocratic Governments (and there is no longer ANY pretense that Israel is anything but) ALWAYS resort to violence to get their way, and Emperor Netenyahu will be no different.
The only silver lining is that Israel will not be able to play the Holocaust card anymore,.
So thereās an upside to this. Good.
Can we now say that Israel is a Apartheid state de Jure? Itās been de Facto for a long time.
Actually, Iāve long considered it an Arab state as it basically is no different from the others. After all, they call themselves ārepublicsā as well.
Just ran across this:
Meanwhile - Pompeo is before the senate foreign relations committee - and some of exchanges have sounded testy/worrisome.
I have been following Laura Rozenās twitter feed this morning - where she is highlighting tweets about the exchanges. https://twitter.com/lrozen
Here are a smattering of items that caught my attention - as things to keep an eye on:
A comment and the embedded tweet to which it responds:
and another comment in response to an embedded tweet:
Busy day - and too easy for things to get lost in the news cycles.
Israel is always accused of being an apartheid state, but āmondfledermausā and ākhaaannnā conveniently overlook:
- Palestinian demands for a Jew-free West Bank.
- Twenty years prior to the recreation of Israel, there were two massacres carried out by Arabs against the small Jewish population of Hebron, one of the oldest Jewish areas in the world. Apparently 600 Jews were too much of an affront for the thousands of Muslims.
- Then in 1948, Jordan occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem and expelled all the Jews.
- When Jordan lost the 1967 war, Jews started moving back into those areas. Many of those Jews had been ethnically cleansed from other Middle Eastern countries (another fact you manage to overlook).
Hey, look. I have some descendants of the Canaanites who want a word with you about that area being Promised by God to the Jews. How does the world look to you through those one-way glasses?
You conveniently ignore the work of Jewish Terrorists (some of whom went on to high positions in the Israeli government) in English Palestine from 1938-48. The massacres on BOTH sides of the situation all over the middle east (Lebanese Christians massacring Palestinian refugees for sport during the 1980 war under the direction of the Mossad for example.)
Israeli snipers specifically targeting and killing children during demonstrations just last year. Indiscriminate bombing of CIVILIANS by Israeli forces multiple times in Gaza.
There is plenty of outrage to go around, but the refusal of the Israeli Government to recognize the rights of their own Arab ISRAELI CITIZENS is Apartheid. There is no other word for it. If you are not an Ashkenazi Jew, you basically have no rights in Israel. You are a second-class citizen, BY LAW. (ask the Ethiopian Jews, who have been Jewish for millennia, how they were āwelcomedā in Israel.)
Israel is now, OFFICIALLY a Theocratic State. There is no argument in this.
Pompeo flounders on why annexation is good for the Golan but not for Crimea
Trumpās decision to recognise Israeli sovereignty over territory it seized from Syria sets a troubling precedent, experts fear
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/11/golan-heights-crimea-pompeo-us-state-department
Under intense questioning about why the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights was good but the Russian seizure of Crimea was bad, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, told senators that there was an āinternational law doctrineā which would be explained to them later.
It turned out there was no doctrine. The state departmentās clarification of Pompeoās remarks contained no reference to one, and experts on international law said that none exists.
Donald Trumpās decision last month to recognise Israeli sovereignty over the Golan, captured from Syria in 1967, took the state department by surprise, and it has been struggling to catch up since.