Israel

[LFC]

Just to recap from the old TPM thread Netanyahu is still under indictment and being tried for corruption plus the election that he thought would hand him a decisive victory didn't.

Benjamin Netanyahu declared a huge right-wing victory after Israel’s exit polls were released on Tuesday night only to discover—as the votes were counted through the early hours of Wednesday morning—that the parties in his bloc had fallen just short.

It was a gut punch to Netanyahu who thought he had achieved an historic and decisive victory with 61 seats narrowly surpassing the 60-seat threshold to form a rare, stable right-wing coalition.

“You gave a huge victory to the right and the Likud under my leadership,” he crowed. “It is evident that a clear majority of Israeli citizens are right-wing, and they want a strong and stable right-wing government to preserve Israel’s economy, Israel’s security and the land Israel.”

With around 90 percent of regular ballots counted, his dreams of an unadulterated right-wing government were crumbling. Neither of the main blocs were on course to win a majority, setting the stage for another protracted round of coalition negotiations or, even worse, a fifth election in two years to be held in the coming months.

Even before another election can be held, Netanyahu could be forced out of office within weeks.

The full results, including half a million mail-in ballots, are expected to be announced by Thursday, but Netanyahu already appeared to have virtually no path to forming a new government.

[LFC]

Haeretz is covering Netanyahu's trial.

[LFC]

Real world consequences of Israel's cluster-f*** of a political situation just hit. I suspect that Netanyahu will never step down willingly. He's dug in until the end even if his country suffers for it.

A simply astonishing confluence of events today in Israel – one that at least temporarily has led Pfizer to refuse to deliver the latest shipment of its COVID vaccine to the country.

After a number of delays, a prosecutor began his opening statement today in the corruption trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu was in court today, with the jarring images you would expect from such a moment going out over the news wires. Meanwhile, party leaders are meeting today with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to formally recommend which party leader should be given the first opportunity to build a government after the inclusive results of last month’s election.

Netanyahu’s future hangs in the balance in both proceedings, in one legally, in another politically. As has been the case for the last two-plus years, with four successive elections, the corruption case and Netanyahu’s continuance in office are umbilically intertwined.

The Pfizer vaccine issue is part of that same Gordian Knot thicket at the center of the destabilizing political crisis. According to The Jerusalem Post (which is thus far the only English language report of this), Israeli Army Radio is reporting that Pfizer has halted the latest shipment of 700,000 doses of the COVID vaccine because Israel still hasn’t paid for the last shipment of 1.5 million doses. Pfizer reportedly said the situation was akin to something from a ‘banana republic’.

[LFC]

Bibi's in trouble and Biden is opening up talks to Iran so what better way to distract people than to attack an Iranian vessel. This dirtbag needs to go. He's a destabilizing force in an already unstable region.

Israel reportedly informed U.S. officials that it was behind a Tuesday mine attack on an Iranian vessel stationed in the Red Sea, a dangerous escalation that came on the same day American and Iranian negotiators took part in European-led talks in Vienna on the 2015 nuclear agreement.

The timing of the attack, which Iranian media outlets reported Tuesday without assigning blame, raised suspicions that it was carried out with the express purpose of undermining steps toward a diplomatic solution on the nuclear accord. In 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump violated the agreement, which Israel's right-wing government has opposed from the beginning.

"Israel appears to be stepping up attacks on Iran to undermine diplomacy," argued Mohammad Ali Shabani, editor of Amwaj.media. "Same Catch 22 for Tehran as before: respond, and get blamed. Don't respond, and invite further attacks. One exit: Statements of condemnation from Iran's counterparts in Vienna."

[LFC]

Netanyahu failed to pull together a governing coalition. Now it's his opposition's turn to try. If that fails they may end up having their fifth election. What a mess.

[AnBr]

Apr 5, 2021 14:25:40 GMT LFC said:

Just to recap from the old TPM thread Netanyahu is still under indictment and being tried for corruption plus the election that he thought would hand him a decisive victory didn't.

Obviously fake ballots were cast.

[pnwguy]

May 6, 2021 13:51:21 GMT AnBr said:

Apr 5, 2021 14:25:40 GMT LFC said:

Just to recap from the old TPM thread Netanyahu is still under indictment and being tried for corruption plus the election that he thought would hand him a decisive victory didn't.

Obviously fake ballots were cast.

Illegal Muslims

[LFC]

May 6, 2021 14:11:08 GMT pnwguy said:

May 6, 2021 13:51:21 GMT AnBr said:

Obviously fake ballots were cast.

Illegal Muslims

FIFY. The other part is redundant to Bibies and MAGAts.

[goldenvalley]

Send the CyberNinjas to audit the election!

[pnwguy]

May 6, 2021 21:10:40 GMT goldenvalley said:

Send the CyberNinjas to audit the election!

STOP THE STEAL!!!

[LFC]

May 7, 2021 0:24:10 GMT pnwguy said:

STOP THE STEAL!!!

Haven't the Palestinians been saying that for years?

[LFC]

Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing continues.

The third-holiest site in Islam—the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem—was turned into a chaotic battlefield Monday as Israeli police responded violently to Palestinian protesters, injuring more than 300 people.

In recent days, Jerusalem has been suffering its worst violence for years, sparked by incendiary plans to evict dozens of Palestinians from an Arab area in the east of the city and hand their homes to Israelis. The crisis worsened Monday ahead of the nationalist Jerusalem Day Flag March, which marks Israel’s capture of East Jerusalem in the 1960s.

According to the Associated Press, more than 305 Palestinians were injured in Monday’s violence alone, including over 200 who have been hospitalized, and nine people who have been left in a serious condition. Twenty-one Israeli police are reported to have been injured.

The violence centered around the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is located in a complex that is considered holy by both Muslims and Jews. Shocking videos showed stun grenades and tear gas being fired at Palestinian protesters inside the mosque, and police claim that protesters threw rocks at officers, as well as at Jewish worshippers at the Western Wall.

Sounds like Bibi is creating a crisis, again, to hold onto power.

[LFC]

Israel tells Biden administration that what's going on is none of America's business. I guess it's a case of shut up and just keep sending us guns and money.

[goldenvalley]

May 10, 2021 16:34:18 GMT LFC said:

Israel tells Biden administration that what's going on is none of America's business. I guess it's a case of shut up and just keep sending us guns and money.

Bibi is such a destructive force as is the ultra orthodox faction that seeks a theocracy. 

[LFC]

The violence continues. As expected Netanyahu is escalating things. I so wish America would just wash its collective hands of both Israel and the Palestinians.

A confrontation between Israel and Hamas sparked by weeks of tensions in contested Jerusalem escalated Tuesday. Israel unleashed new airstrikes on Gaza, killing a number of militants and civilians, while militants barraged southern Israel with hundreds of rockets, killing two Israelis.

Since sundown Monday, 26 Palestinians — including nine children and a woman— were killed in Gaza, most by airstrikes, health officials there said. The Israeli military said at least 16 of the dead were militants.

Two women were killed by rockets fired from Gaza that hit their homes in the southern city of Ashkelon — the first Israeli deaths in the current violence. At least 10 other Israelis have been wounded since Monday evening.

After those deaths, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said officials decided to “increase both the strength and rate of the strikes” against militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip.

“Hamas will receive blows now that it didn’t expect,” he said.

[LFC]

Ugh. Just ... ugh. I understand waiting for confirmed information but this is just pathetic.

Pressed repeatedly by reporters during a briefing on Monday, U.S. State Department spokesperson Ned Price refused to condemn Israel's killing of children with airstrikes on Gaza, offering evasive and mealy-mouthed responses that members of Congress slammed as unacceptable.

"We cannot just condemn rockets fired by Hamas and ignore Israel's state-sanctioned police violence against Palestinians—including unlawful evictions, violent attacks on protestors, and the murder of Palestinian children."
—Rep. Mark Pocan

Asked straightforwardly whether he condemns the killing of Palestinian children, Price replied that the Biden administration does not "have independent confirmation of facts on the ground yet" and is "hesitant to get into reports that are just emerging."

"Obviously, the deaths of civilians, be they Israeli or Palestinians, are something we would take very seriously," added Price.

[LFC]

Josh Marshall discusses Netanyahu's incentive to keep amping up the violence (paywalled). Roll around in your head just how psychopathic that really is. He's more than willing to slaughter children to hand on to his position.

As you’ve likely seen, what began as civil disturbances in East Jerusalem has cycled into a full scale military engagement between Israel and the Hamas quasi-state in Gaza. Every level of these issues trace back more than a century, or decades, depending on which dimension of the interlocking stalemates you look at. But we shouldn’t ignore the way this particular conflagration has been spurred and accelerated by the protracted crisis of government within Israel itself. Having helped drive the crisis, Benjamin Netanyahu, now acting as the caretaker Prime Minister, has little incentive to deescalate it.

Israel has now had four inconclusive elections in which Netanyahu himself is increasingly the central, polarizing issue. In an effort to stay in power and out of jail, Netanyahu has used every ounce of his consider political skill to conjure into being 61 Knesset seats to form a government. He keeps failing to do that, even as his opponents fail to create a coalition to topple him.

In his latest gambit, he has midwifed the ultra-right-wing Kahanist movement into formal politics. This is a far-right, fascist-type movement that was formally banned from Israeli politics more than three decades ago. He brought them back into the fold. He’s now uniquely dependent on them. The current round of violence began last month with youth gangs from a group called Lehava, an ultra-right-wing nationalist group, terrorizing Arabs in East Jerusalem. The head of the ultra-nationalist party Netanyahu is now dependent on has joined himself to the campaign of harassment around the evictions in East Jerusalem.

The dispute over evictions of Arab families in East Jerusalem goes back about a century and then is tied to subsequent events that happened in 1948 and then in 1967. Really too complicated to explain even in outline in this post. But again, the broader crisis of government has made Netanyahu uniquely dependent on these destructive forces. The point is simply that the current crisis is umbilically tied, on several levels, to the crisis of government that has kept Israel in domestic political crisis for the last two years.

Now that Hamas has gotten involved, with Hamas sending rockets into civilian centers in Israel and Israel responding punitive strikes into Gaza, the expanding crisis perversely benefits Netanyahu.

Remember, he’s caretaker Prime Minister. He’s not currently in power because of any electoral victory. He lost the last election. The President gave him the first chance to form a government and he failed. The President then gave the second chance to his centrist rival, Yair Lapid. Work was underway there to cobble together an anti-Netanyahu coalition including Arab political parties either in the government or supporting it from the outside. But the quickening violence has blocked those efforts. The key Islamist party which was likely to be part of that coalition, formally or informally, has now called off negotiations, at least for now.

In other words, the expanding violence has actually helped Netanyahu in domestic political terms. It’s short-circuited efforts to create a government that would remove him from power. On top of this military crisis plays to his perceived strengths regardless. He’s the one who will keep Israel safe in a crisis. That’s how he bills himself and to a great degree the political nation buys that claim. But again, it’s important to remember that he’s not even really in office. He’s just there in a caretaker capacity, minding the shop while the opposition forms a government. But this crisis has blocked their path, at least for now. So what looks like a crisis from the outside and is a crisis for so many is actually key to Netanyahu remaining in power.

Addendum:

Since it’s the central driver in the current crisis, let me briefly explain the issue of evictions in the Sheik Jarrah neighborhood in Jerusalem. Before the 1948, Jewish groups bought various land and buildings in what is now called East Jerusalem. After the 1948 War of Independence, that land came under Jordanian control. Jews living there were driven out as part of the war. The buildings were confiscated from their pre-1948 Jewish owners and given to Arab residents. This is exactly what happened, on a considerably larger scale, on the other side of the armistice line.

In 1967, Israel reclaimed East Jerusalem as well as the West Bank and Gaza and created a legal process by which the owners dispossessed in 1948 could reclaim their confiscated property. That makes a certain formal logic. The problem is there’s no similar process on the other side. Descendants of Arab claimants whose property was confiscated in West Jerusalem, or indeed in other parts of what is now Israel, can’t make similar claims.

So that is the formal context. More broadly though the effort is to build up the Jewish presence in these neighborhoods to help make the control of the territory permanent. And that process has been one that right-wingers and the Israeli government have worked at together for decades. Some governments generally try to slow roll it to avoid inflaming the situation on the ground and others are more aggressive in pressing the claims. It’s a microcosm of the settlement issue in the West Bank, though with different legal specifics.

Again, there’s twenty posts I could write on just this subject. But that is at least the barebones context of what the evictions issue is about.

[LFC]

Godammit. We can never just flat out tell Israel to stop f***ing killing people, not that they'd care.

The United States is delaying United Nations Security Council efforts to issue a public statement on escalating tensions between Israel and the Palestinians because it could be harmful to behind-the-scenes efforts to end the violence, according to diplomats and a source familiar with the U.S. strategy.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, the source said Washington is "actively engaged in diplomacy behind the scenes with all parties to achieve a ceasefire" and was concerned that a council statement might be counterproductive at the moment.

The Security Council is instead going to meet privately on Wednesday to discuss the latest violence, diplomats said.

The Security Council first discussed on Monday clashes in East Jerusalem around al-Aqsa mosque. The holy city has been tense during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, with the threat of a court ruling evicting Palestinians from homes claimed by Jewish settlers adding to the friction.

Before a further upsurge of violence, the 15-member Security Council began discussions on a draft statement that would express concern about the clashes and the potential evictions, call on Israel to cease Jewish settlement activities, demolitions and evictions, and urge general restraint.

Such statements have to be agreed by consensus. But diplomats said the United States, a close ally of Israel, told council counterparts that the body should not issue a statement at the moment.

The U.S. mission to the United Nations said: "The United States is engaging constructively to ensure any action by the Security Council is helpful in de-escalating tensions."

[LFC]

Josh Marshall on Bibi's Big Win (paywalled). He'll retain his position as caretaker PM as long as the nation is in turmoil and there are multiple forces dedicated to doing just that.

All of Israel-Palestine is on fire today. There is a recurrence of the mix of Hamas rockets from Gaza and overwhelming military response from Israel which we’ve seen episodically over the last 15 years. It’s as horrible as it was each earlier time. You can choose who you think is more to blame. But it is not new. Violence is now erupting in the West Bank. But most novel is outbreak of what the Israeli police chief is calling an ‘internal intifada’, widespread inter-communal violence within Israel proper, particularly in cities with relatively mixed populations, especially Lod.

In these towns there have been Jewish mobs attacking Arab civilians and Arab mobs attacking Jewish civilians. This isn’t unprecedented in Israel proper. But it is certainly at a different and more widespread level than anything seen in many decades. Each dimension of the crisis is distinct but deeply related. They all grow from the century-old conflict over who controls the land between the Jordan River and the sea. But the immediate trigger was violence by far-right Jewish groups against Arab civilians in East Jerusalem and related efforts to evict a group of Arab families from homes allegedly owned by Jews in East Jerusalem. That in itself was, as I’ve argued, tied to the on-going political crisis within Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu’s increasingly desperate reliance on the far-right Kahanist movement and its electoral leader, MK Itamar Ben Gvir, to remain in power.

What I want to focus on is a clear political reality. This may look catastrophic but it is actually an unalloyed win for Prime Minister Netanyahu. Open and shut. Not even close.

As the evictions and Lehava marauding gangs were going on in East Jerusalem, Netanyahu was in the process of losing his job. Israeli President Rivlin had just chosen opposition leader Yair Lapid to form a new government. He seemed likely to do that by gaining the support of one of the right wing anti-Netanyahu parties by allowing its leader, Naftali Bennett, to share the Prime Ministership with him. Bennett would in fact be allowed to go first.

This new government involved a wildly delicate and ungainly bit of maneuvering that illustrates how much Israeli domestic politics are now freed from all ideological commitment beyond supporting or opposing Benjamin Netanyahu. Lapid would bring in the right wing Bennett and also, either formally or informally, the small Islamist Ra’am party into the same government.

First the leader of Ra’am, MK Mansour Abbas, canceled negotiations indefinitely in light of the spiraling pattern of violence. That’s probably temporary. His strategy is to get into an Israeli government of either the right or the left to secure funding for the Arab sector and a seat at the table of power. So that’s likely not a permanent withdrawal. But for the moment there’s no longterm and barely any medium term in Israeli politics.

Soon Bennett abandoned the anti-Netanyahu coalition and went back to negotiating with Netanyahu. (The two are in fact ideological soulmates and Bennet is actually an erstwhile Netanyahu protege. As I said, in today’s Israel ideology is secondary to pro- or anti-Netanyahu.)

In other words, the enveloping cycle of violence has effectively barred any path to a new government without Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Can Netanyahu himself form a new government? That’s not totally clear but it doesn’t really matter. He’s caretaker Prime Minister. So in the absence of a new government, he remains Prime Minister. That’s all he really needs and effectively the situation he’s been in for the last two years of inconclusive elections.

Television reports out of Israel say that the country’s police commissioner told Netanyahu yesterday that each time police start to get the violence under control in mixed Israeli cities Ben Gvir and his gangs show up to fan the flames. For him the situation is clear cut. His long term goal of driving Israel’s Arab citizens out of the country matches perfectly with his immediate goal of ensuring a new Netanyahu government in which he and his party are the critical kingmakers.

If he is going to be Prime Minister Netanyahu will have a country to run. So it doesn’t serve him to have endless escalation. But he also has no incentive to calm the waters. Because the climate of crisis is keeping him in power.

[goldenvalley]

Israel, Palestinians, Hamas...it's all a tangled up mess made worse by hardliners on either side refusing to accept a two state solution. Hamas puts Palestinian civilians at risk knowing what the world stage will see if something happens to them. Some Palestinians groups do the same things. Israeli hardliners don't care and those Israelis who do care are outvoted in the multiple elections they've had over the past 18 months. Bibi in the meantime is off the hook for his corruption charges because everyone is too busy running for bomb shelters to pay attention to him.

[LFC]

UN agency: 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza have left their homes

[LFC]

I continue to be unhappy with Biden's support of Israel.

Human rights advocates warned Monday that the Biden administration is deepening U.S. complicity in the Netanyahu regime's ongoing massacre of civilians in Gaza by attempting to push through a $735 million sale of so-called "precision-guided weapons" to Israel.

"[The] Biden administration must be held accountable for being complicit in escalating the violence and failing to prevent civilian deaths and suffering."
—Jamil Dakwar, ACLU

Of course it's just long-standing policy to shovel money at them. Some Democrats are standing up, though.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said Sunday that lawmakers must "take a hard look" at the nearly $4 billion in military aid the U.S. sends to Israel on an annual basis as the Netanyahu regime continues its devastating assault on Gaza and attempts to forcefully expel Palestinians from their homes in occupied East Jerusalem.

"The devastation in Gaza is unconscionable. We must urge an immediate ceasefire," Sanders, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, tweeted Sunday. "The killing of Palestinians and Israelis must end. We must also take a hard look at nearly $4 billion a year in military aid to Israel. It is illegal for U.S. aid to support human rights violations."

"Now is the time to send a clear message to the Israeli government: Not one dollar more of U.S. military aid can be used to demolish Palestinian homes, annex Palestinian lands, and torture or kill Palestinian children."
—Rep. Betty McCollum

[pnwguy]

Ironic, isn't it?

[pg]

"The problem with irony is that not everybody gets it"

[LFC]

Bye, bye Bibi. (Paywalled.)

Never say never and all that. But it looks like Benjamin Netanyahu’s dozen years as PM may be on the verge of ending. He was on the same precipice two weeks ago when his erstwhile ally and protege Naftali Bennett was negotiating to form a government with opposition leader Yair Lapid. Then the outbreak of inter-communal violence within Israel and another shooting war with Gaza led Bennett to foreswear that option and go back to negotiating with Netanyahu. Now Bennett is back to apparently finalizing that deal with Lapid.

Netanyahu is pulling out all the stops, going so far as to offer Bennett and the head of another breakaway faction of Likud a three-way Prime Ministership sharing arrangement. But that guy, Gideon Saar, has rejected that offer. Netanyahu seems to be running through his final options and the timetable to form a new government – Wednesday – means it can and probably will all happen very quickly.

Netanayhu has been the dominant force in Israeli politics for more than 25 years. His personal dominance has been so great that, as I’ve argued here previously, Israeli politics is increasingly organized not around ideology but around the perpetuation or termination of his Prime Ministership. And you can see this nowhere more clearly than in the composition of what looks likely to be Israel’s next government. It would include or be supported by roughly 20 Knesset members who are not only on the political right but all in different ways breakaway factions of Likud. Indeed, this possible coalition “change” government will be led for the first two years by Bennett, a pro-settler, pro-annexation religious nationalist. His party party came in fifth place in the last election with only seven seats. Nothing better captures the power of the Israeli right and center-right and how essential they are to removing Netanyahu from power.

The logic of power sharing agreement is that Bennett becomes PM for two years and then turns over the position to Lapid for two years. But Israeli governments, especially recently, often don’t last four years and often don’t even make it two. This possible new government will be a coalition stretching from the right to the left united pretty much only to remove Netanyahu from power.

That last sentence. It looks like there's a lot of people who agree that Israel can't move forward as long as Netanyahu is around so dumping his ass is priority one.