Tag Archives: Israeli politics

My heart sunk when I woke up Friday morning to the news of riots on the Temple Mount. Flipping through an endless barrage of cell phone videos flooding the many WhatsApp and Telegram news groups I subscribe to, scrolling through reports on social media from those who witnessed the destruction …

The news has been inexorably bad for the last few weeks and I have been in no mood to write anything (in case you hadn’t noticed). The 3rd round of Israeli elections yielded exactly the same results as the second and first rounds (surprise!), i.e. a stalemate. This time Netanyahu …

Israel turned into the Middle Eastern version of Italy tonight as Binyamin Netanyahu failed to form a coalition, and the Knesset voted to dissolve itself – a mere 7 weeks or so after the last elections. As far as I understand (and I may be wrong in which case please …

Not I.  In all of the many years during which I have tracked Israeli pre-election campaigns, I have never encountered a campaign season like this one. I’ve been writing about the multiplicity of new parties, and perhaps that was a clue that I missed: an overt sign of divisiveness.  And …

For weeks I was reticent about the intricacies of Israeli politics as the first stage of the campaign began to heat up.  It was all too complex – with new parties forming, and would-be members of the Knesset switching allegiance from one group to another or simply resigning. It was …

As a rule, on entering Israeli politics, senior military and security figures have played a troubling role, which has—almost uniformly—proved disastrous, both for the country and/or for themselves. Little could have reflected the perversity of politics in Israel more than the ten minute prime-time interview with former Prime Minister and …

It is time for representatives of the Israeli Left to come to terms with the existence of “The Other”, and the idea that people who think differently to them are just as legitimate as those who look different to them.  We are undergoing a process of fascistization of Israeli politics. …

Consider the following remarkable facts regarding Israel’s parliamentary history: 1) For 20 of the 28 years between 1977 (when Likud first won the elections on a platform of “Greater Israel”) and 2005 (when a Likud government withdrew unilaterally from Gaza in stark contradiction to its electoral pledges), the Israeli government …

Israel faces a twin peril, far more menacing to its survival as the nation-state of the Jewish people than the Iranian nuclear program or a Palestinian state. The minute we leave South Lebanon we will have to erase the word Hezbollah from our vocabulary, because the whole idea of the …

The Israeli leadership would do well to bear in mind that commitment to the principle of democratic governance is not a suicide pact. Incredibly, today, except for detail in nuance and tone, the formal positions of the major “right-wing” faction, the Likud, has become indistinguishable from positions expounded by the …