Tag: Bibi Netanyahu

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Likud Votes to Extend Sovereignty to Judea and Samaria

The Likud Central committee voted unanimously this evening to extend Israel’s sovereignty to Judea and Samaria.

“Fifty years ago we liberated our ancestral homeland, Judea and Samaria, greater Jerusalem, the Tomb of the Patriarchs [in Hevron], Rachel’s Tomb [in Bethlehem], and the Western Wall,” said Minister Haim Katz ahead of the vote.

“But today, unfortunately, after 50 years, when half a million Israeli citizens… are discriminated against when it comes to construction and security.”

“The time has come to end the [requirement] that the army approve the [construction] of every kindergarten, road, or even repair work for [public] lighting.”

Although many Likud ministers including the Prime Minister were not in attendance, the vote is significant as the Central Committee wields tremendous power behind the scenes.  Many observers have noted that Prime Minister Netanyahu has given a tacit nod, but just remaining silent about the event.

MK Yoav Kisch said the following to Arutz 7 before the event “if the Prime Minister were opposed he would have expressed it though his channels. I don’t think his position is against. Far from it. The Likud is a democratic party and there’s great importance to what the members of the Center and the rank-and-file members think. We grant freedom of action in the matter and not everything that comes up conforms to what each senior party official thinks. It’s clear the party head’s position has special status, but the fact that we’re conducting the discussion, and that every discussion must be approved by the Chairman of the Central Committee and by the Movement Chairman, shows we’re not in conflict.”

“I don’t think his position is against. Far from it.” 

So will the vote push the government to institute sovereignty? Perhaps not tomorrow, but it lays the ground work for such a move far faster than most people have believed.

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ISRAEL’S LEARNING DISABLED RIGHT

Why abandoning Netanyahu will not end well for the Israeli Right.

It is an iron rule of Israeli politics regularly disregarded by the political Right that left-wing parties govern from the Left, not the Right; center-left parties govern from the Left, not from the Center.

Despite the axiomatic nature of this rule, time after time, politicians and public figures on the Right have ignored it. Periodically, they make light of the distinction between governments run by their political camp and governments run by their leftist opponents.

To their credit, the converse is never true. Leftist politicians and activists never delude themselves that they are better off in the opposition. They always prefer governments led by their own camp to governments led by the Right.
For several years, this pathology unique to the political Right laid dormant – never entirely gone, but out of sight. Today, the Right’s pathological refusal to recognize that it is better off in charge than in the opposition is making a political comeback.

For the past month, a rapidly growing chorus of columnists and politicians – all of whom dwell on either the right-wing or left-wing margins of the nationalist camp – have decided to join the Left in its assault against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and call either directly or indirectly from his ouster from office.

The Left – like its rightist followers – characterizes its anti-Netanyahu campaign as an anti-corruption campaign.

For the past several months, Netanyahu has been the subject of two dubious criminal probes. The first involves allegations that he received too many cigars as gifts from his personal friends. To date, investigators have found no evidence that Netanyahu provided special favors to his friends in exchange for the cigars. We know no evidence indicating the cigars were bribes has been found, because if any had been found, it would have been leaked to reporters just as every shred of even mildly incriminating findings from the probe has been leaked to the media in real-time.

The second investigation is arguably even less substantive. Netanyahu is being investigated for conversations he held in 2014 with his political nemesis Yediot Aharonot publisher Arnon Mozes. Netanyahu recorded the conversations and they were found on the cellphone of his former chief of staff Ari Harow in the course of a separate criminal probe against Harow for alleged influence peddling. In the recordings, Netanyahu and Mozes discuss the possibility that in exchange for Mozes tamping down his incendiary coverage of Netanyahu at Yediot, Netanyahu’s ally, Sheldon Adelson, would decrease circulation of Israel Hayom, the free daily Adelson owns.

We know that the two men never made a deal because in late 2014, Netanyahu disbanded his own government after his coalition partners voted in favor of a bill drafted by Yediot’s lawyers, that was aimed at shutting down Israel Hayom.

Moreover, during the 2015 election and since, Yediot has led the 24/7 media campaign for Netanyahu’s political destruction.

Given the flimsy nature of the probes, it isn’t surprising that Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit isn’t thrilled with them.

Mandelblit’s reported lack of enthusiasm over the probes led leftist political strategist Eldad Yaniv to launch a massive political campaign against him earlier this year.

Several months ago, Yaniv began organizing anti-Netanyahu demonstrations outside Mandelblit’s apartment building in Petah Tikva every Saturday night, demanding that he indict the prime minister.

Not surprisingly, the Netanyahu-obsessed media have given massive and sympathetic coverage to the rallies. Reporters have airbrushed out the protesters’ anti-Zionism while massively exaggerating the number of participants. And while the protests are self-evidently anti-government protests, the media have played along with Yaniv’s conceit that they are apolitical protests by people who simply want to ensure that Netanyahu is indicted because he has to be guilty because they hate him.

The story of Netanyahu’s alleged corruption has led nightly newscasts countless times as breathless reporters present the public with details of investigations that are supposed to be secret. The open bias of police investigators, some of whom have openly called for the public to participate in political rallies against Netanyahu, is ignored.

Recently, the protesters decamped from Petah Tikva to the tony Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. And although most right-wing commentators and politicians acknowledge the leftist agenda of the protesters, last week Yaniv scored a significant victory. Rabbi Yuval Cherlow, one of the rabbinical leaders of the National Religious community, participated in his rally.

Cherlow wasn’t the first public personality on the Right who chose to turn against Netanyahu. Last month rightist attorney and newspaper columnist Nadav Haetzni wrote in Maariv that Netanyahu has become a burden to his political camp and must resign. Last week, Haetzni’s niece Sarah Haetzni Cohen, a columnist at Makor Rishon, and Yehuda Yifrach, Makor Rishon’s legal affairs editor, wrote side-by-side columns arguing that the nationalist camp mustn’t allow the Left to monopolize the fight against public corruption and must support the criminal probes against Netanyahu.

Yoaz Hendel is a columnist at Yediot identified with the soft Right. Ahead of the 2015 election, Tzipi Livni offered soft-rightist Hendel a spot on her leftist Knesset list.

Hendel announced this week that he is organizing an “anti-corruption” rally for members of the nationalist camp at Zion Square in Jerusalem this Saturday night. Since members of the nationalist camp don’t feel comfortable standing with protesters holding massive pro-BDS signs on Rothschild, Hendel said he decided they needed a place of their own to go to show that they don’t like corruption, (or Netanyahu).

Former MK Aryeh Eldad of the National Union Party, and Kulanu MK and coalition member Rahel Azariya, are scheduled to participate at Hendel’s protest.

The members of the nationalist camp insisting Netanyahu is bad for the Right ignore the weak foundations of the probes against him and the political bias of police investigators. They ignore as well the probable consequences for their political camp if Netanyahu is ousted from office due to these investigations.

Some of Netanyahu’s homegrown opponents like Hendel and Azariya are motivated by the belief that Netanyahu is too opposed to the leftist establishment that controls Israel’s legal system. They attack him for not stopping his party members from criticizing Israel’s activist, post-Zionist Supreme Court justices and for calling out police investigators and journalists for their bias against him.

Others, including Yifrach and Eldad, argue that Netanyahu isn’t much of a rightist since he hasn’t actively expanded construction in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and has not enacted significant court reform.

We’ve been here before.

The same groups from the soft and hard Right joined together twice before to overthrow right-wing governments and hand the Left the keys to the realm.

In 1992, the far-right Tehiya party brought down the government of Yitzhak Shamir. Tehiya leaders Geula Cohen and Hanan Porat on the one hand justified their behavior by pointing to the Left’s allegations that Shamir and his Likud colleagues were corrupt. On the other hand, they claimed that Shamir’s agreement to participate in then-US president George H.W. Bush’s “peace conference” in Madrid meant that he was no better than the Left.

Their action facilitated convinced enough right-wing voters that there was no difference between the Likud and Labor to bring about the Labor Party’s electoral victory in the 1992 election. A year later, then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin recognized the PLO and initiated the Oslo peace process.

In 1999, the Likud’s soft-right and hard-right establishment bolted Netanyahu’s first government and formed new parties. Dan Meridor, Yitzhak Mordechai and Roni Milo left Likud and joined with leftist politicians to form the “Center Party.”

Bennie Begin abandoned his father Menachem Begin’s party to form the National Union party with far-right ideologues.

Neither of the two parties fared well in the 1999 election.

But together, they brought down Netanyahu’s government and facilitated the Left’s electoral victory and Ehud Barak’s replacement of Netanyahu as premier.

In other words, the soft Right and the hard Right paved the way for the Camp David summit and the Palestinian terrorist war that followed, as well as Israel’s surrender of south Lebanon to Hezbollah. Those events in turn brought about Israel’s surrender of Gaza and northern Samaria to the Palestinians.

Both in 1992 and 1999, the Left based its electoral campaigns on opposition to corruption and tough talk on terrorism. Rabin pledged in 1992 never to recognize the PLO or withdraw from the Golan Heights. The next year he recognized the PLO and the year after that he offered Syrian dictator Hafez Assad the Golan Heights.

In 1999 Barak assured voters that there was no possibility of reaching a permanent peace with the PLO. A year later, he offered Yasser Arafat the Temple Mount and half of Jerusalem.

We can see the same situation forming today. As prejudicial leaks from the investigation of Netanyahu’s cigars multiplied, and Yaniv received more and more air time for his anti-Netanyahu rallies, Labor leader Avi Gabbay made a series of centrist statements to the media. Last month he said he doesn’t support uprooting Israeli communities in the framework of a peace treaty. This month he said that the Left made a mistake by embracing atheism.

Yair Lapid, head of the center-left Yesh Atid party, for his part has been going out of his way to court the Right for more than a year.

In other words, like Rabin and Barak in 1992 and 1999, the Left’s two contenders for premiership are going out of their way to make members of today’s nationalist camp feel comfortable overthrowing Netanyahu while protesting their ideological purity and commitment to clean politics.

The willingness of ostensibly right-wing intellectuals and politicians to make the same mistake for a third time is stunning. If Netanyahu is forced from office for receiving lots of cigars from his friends, the Likud won’t be stronger without him. An ugly battle for succession in Likud among equally uncompelling politicians will immediately ensue.

The Likud will enter the early election frayed, with a weak leader, under the pall of Netanyahu’s forced resignation.

For their part, the leftist parties, with the full support of the media that will hide their radical Knesset candidates list, will present themselves as incorruptible, moderate centrists who are tough on security and nice to poor people.

And they will win.

Yaniv, Gabbay, Lapid and the media all know that they cannot overthrow the government. They know the government will only fall if its members bring it down.

And that’s where the right-wing intellectuals come in handy. By falling yet again for the Left’s Three-card Monte corruption trick, right-wing media personalities are leading a campaign that if successful, will lead to only one outcome: the rise of the Left. And again, once it is in power, the Left never ever governs from the Right.

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. 
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Is Bibi Losing His Grip on His Government

Whether or not Health Minister Yaakov Litzman’s resignation and subsequent reinstatement after a last-minute agreement with Prime Minister Netanyahu solves the current coalition crisis, one thing is clear, Bibi is beginning to lose his grip on his coalition.

The Prime Minister has always done an excellent job in balancing various interests of sectoral parties within his coalition by explaining to the factions that all would lose with new elections.  While there is still some truth to this, Likud’s falling poll numbers suggest a different story altogether.  Couple this with Avi Gabbai’s rise as Labor leader and the paradigm which saw Likud as the right wing and traditional anchor for those religious parties has fallen away.

This doesn’t mean that Bibi will be dethroned if elections were to be held, but he is no shoe in anymore and what is increasingly becoming apparent is that self-interested ministers within his party are beginning to sense he is weak.

MK Eichler from UTJ claims that it was in fact Transportation Minister Katz who created this crisis.

“There is no explanation that the Likud government will expand the work done on Shabbat except for the attempt by the Transportation Minister and Welfare Minister to topple the government. The traditional Likud voters will not forgive them if Netanyahu’s government falls apart,” Eichler was quoted as saying.

This may be in the realm of rumor, but the facts are in.  The construction took place with the approval of Minister Yisrael Katz who had to know that this would create a crisis.

None of this is important other than to point out that Bibi is finally being seen as weak and this perception is from within the Likud itself.

With a rising Jewish Home and UTJ on the religious right and a revamped Labor under Avi Gabbai who is religiously traditional as well as a centrist when it comes to security and “settlements,” Likud is finally beginning to worry that Bibi has lost his touch and thus his grip.

Once again, none of this means that the Prime Minister’s days are numbered, especially since he has been counted out plenty of times before only to surprise. However, the younger generation in Israel, which has grown up and matured after the Second Intifada, Gaza Withdrawal, and Second Lebanon War has discarded the mistakes of breaking Israeli politics into a polarized relationship revolving around the Two-State Solution and Religious-Secular relationships.  The younger generation has come of age and appears to see things far differently than the elder statesmen of Bibi’s generation.

Time will tell if the current flare up with the Chareidi UTJ is the beginning of the end for Bibi or a tremor of a far bigger earthquake to come.

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PERMANENT INVESTIGATION: HOW THE MEDIA USES THE ANTI-NETANYAHU PLAYBOOK AGAINST TRUMP

And how to resist it.

The latest news from Israel’s left-wing media outlets is that Ratan Tata, an Indian billionaire, testified to the Israeli police about Prime Minister Netanyahu. The story turned out to be fake news. And that’s true of most of their anti-Netanyahu hit pieces along with the police investigations that accompany them.

But that doesn’t matter.

Americans are just now being introduced to the permanent investigation and its scandal rolodex. Israelis have been living with this Deep State assault against their democracy for much longer. Over eight long years, leftists in the judicial system and the media have manufactured a non-stop campaign of scandals and investigations against Netanyahu. The investigations and the scandals fall apart, but it doesn’t matter because there are usually several being rotated in and out from the scandal rolodex.

The scandals and investigations fall into two categories that should be familiar to Trump supporters.

Category one scandals link some random billionaire to Netanyahu through a chain of connections. The random billionaire in this case is Indian. Then there’s an Australian billionaire in Mexico, German shipbuilders and whatever part of the globe the media-judicial alliance throws a dart at next.

The fake news media in this country is following the same game plan. The latest media hit pieces target Wilbur Ross, Trump’s Secretary of Commerce, in much the same way. Indeed the Russia scandal developed out of media hit pieces that used Trump’s international network of businesses to build up very similar conspiracy theories about foreign interests and influences.

These types of scandals constantly imply corruption without ever actually proving it. But by generating a whole lot of them, they create the sense that Netanyahu or Trump must have done something wrong.

Though no one can say what, because no one can keep track of all the fake scandals.

Category two scandals are character attacks. “He’s a bad person.” Typical examples are Trump’s condolence call controversy and accusations that Netanyahu’s wife is mean to employees.

These types of scandals are straightforward gossip. But lefties have tried to transform them into legal cases. Just about anyone who has ever worked for the Netanyahu family can walk out of the door and have a standing offer to file a lawsuit and do a tour of the media alleging horrible treatment. And the left is trying to advance similar lawsuits against President Trump.

There are lessons to be learned for Trump and Trump supporters from Netanyahu’s experiences.

First, permanent investigations don’t resolve. Trying to wait them out doesn’t work. They never go away until the left wins. An investigation that doesn’t pan out gets swapped out for another one. There are three investigations targeting Netanyahu. If none of them get results, there will be three others.

Everyone knows that.

Second, the purpose of a permanent investigation isn’t to get results. The left would love it if their investigations finally brought down Trump or Netanyahu, but they know that’s a long shot.

The permanent investigation’s real goals are to inflict electoral and policy damage: tying down a targeted politician in scandals so that the public loses confidence in him and preventing him from focusing on his policies. What the left wants is to win elections and stop conservative policies.

The scandals and investigations are political sabotage. And should be treated that way. They’re not about Trump or Netanyahu. They’re about protecting illegal immigration and Islamic terrorists.

Third, the investigations isolate their target by harassing staffers, friends, donors and political allies.

The investigations are a political operation. And so their targets are political. The purpose of the attack is to take out loyal staffers and force allies to keep their distance out of fear that they’ll be next.

Taking out Flynn left Trump with few options except McMaster. And that allowed the swamp to reclaim the National Security Council and protect the eavesdropping operation against Trump. The likely Flynn charges have little to do with the reason he was forced to resign or any accusations against Trump.

But that doesn’t matter. The real goal was to remove Flynn. The details don’t matter.

Thinning out a target’s inner circle makes it harder for him to find competent and loyal replacements. And that makes it all too easy for the swamp to plant its own people in his inner circle. And even if the staffers and allies stay loyal, the investigations make it harder for them to get anything done.

And that too is the point.

This may seem like a grim picture of what the next term or two will look like. But it’s not all grim.

Netanyahu made it through eight years by not letting the scandals drag him down. Even when the attacks against him and his family were as vicious, nasty and personal as the left could get.

He even turned the constant scandals and investigations into a hilarious campaign ad.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has accepted them as a fact of life in a political system where the left’s anti-Israel extremism has made it toxic to voters even while it still controls much of the establishment.

The permanent scandal has been met with permanent scandal fatigue by the public. Israelis have been living through years of hysterical headlines about Netanyahu’s ice cream eating (CNN did its own version of a Trump ice cream scandal with “Trump gets 2 scoops of ice cream, everyone else gets 1”), his wife’s bottle deposits, their children’s misbehavior, their nannies and his bed.

Hardly anyone outside the media bubble cares. Netanyahu’s reputation has been damaged with the media’s low information voters, but he’s still Israel’s longest serving consecutive prime minister.

The Israeli lefty media reacted to its narrative failures the same way that its American counterparts did.

After Trump’s win, the media launched a crusade against “fake news” enlisting Google and Facebook to censor results based on the opinions of the media’s “fact check” operations. Their Israeli counterparts were even more brazen. After a previous Netanyahu victory, they rolled out the “Law for the Advancement and Protection of Written Journalism in Israel”.

The law “advanced and protected” written journalism by banning the distribution of successful free newspapers. The real purpose of the law was to ban the pro-Netanyahu paper, Israel Hayom.

But the media’s censorship crusade didn’t accomplish anything.

The media has an exaggerated sense of its own power and of the gullibility of the public. The two fallacies are interrelated. When people don’t listen to it, the media assumes that since they’re too stupid to have their own ideas, they must be getting all their ideas from some other source. Stamp out this other source, online or offline, and the people will go back to believing what they’re told.

It doesn’t work so well when the media has a worldview and interests that are at odds with the people.

Netanyahu is still around because he represents the public better than the establishment does. The same is true of Trump. And the establishment can’t look in the mirror long enough to understand that.

In free countries, the left operates on two tracks: the democratic and the undemocratic. When it loses democratically, it redoubles its undemocratic efforts to retain power. Scandals and investigations are the tools of an undemocratic establishment. But they can’t overthrow the will of the people.

When conservative leaders stay strong, the scandals and investigations blow away like the wind.

Originally Published in FrontPageMag.

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Who Is Trying to Stall the Greater Jerusalem Bill?

0As of late last week, the cabinet was scheduled to discuss and push forward the landmark Greater Jerusalem Bill this week. Yet, last night Prime Minister Netanyahu unexpectedly took the bill off the table citing the need to consult with America first.

The Prime Minister said the following: “We are in contact with the Americans; the Americans turned to us seeking to understand the essence of the Law. As we have cooperated with them so far, it is worthwhile talking with them and coordinating them. We are working to promote and develop settlement rather than to promote other considerations.”

However, Transportation Minister Yisrael Katz insisted the bill we brought up today.

“This is a historic law that will guarantee the Jewish majority in Jerusalem and strengthen our hold on the city.”

Despite the Prime Minister’s rhetoric, the Americans do not seem phased by the bill, which begs the question of who really is behind the stalling of the Greater Jerusalem Bill?

Bibi Netanyahu has long derided sudden changes in the status quo.  He like manageable situations and although he is not particularly against the Greater Jerusalem Bill his in ability to carve a new paradigm under the Trump administration is increasingly leaving him behind his own Likud Colleagues and other right-wing parties.  Netanyahu’s insistence to clear the move by the Americans is another sign of his disconnect with the fast pace of actual change on the ground.  Israelis have by and large moved beyond the conflict with the “Palestinians” and by doing so understand the need to create a new bottom up approach that includes safeguarding Jerusalem and the Jewish communities throughout Judea and Samaria.

Now where is this more clear than the new Labor leader Avi Gabbai’s courting of the right-wing by stating “I will not remove communities in Judea and Samaria.”

So Does Bibi Want to Annex or Not? 

The Prime Minister has been very clear for 15 years that he views the solution to the Israel-“Palestinian” dispute within the guise of Lichtenstein or Luxembourg.  This would essentially mean a Palestinian State in area A and B, but with no real need to have an army since its security is given over to Israel. It would seem that for Bibi, one can have overlapping sovereignties within the same land similar to certain areas of Europe since the final agreement would leave “Palestine” confederated to Israel.

This is ultimately why the Prime Minister relishes the status quo. Yet, reactions by the ultra-orthodox over Shabbat desecration and Jewish Home’s response to the lack of movement over the Greater Jerusalem bill as well as a bill cancelling disengagement may force Bibi to break the status quo in order to stave off new elections.

Throwing his coalition issues back at Trump may work in the short-term, but Israel needs to move forward in annexing municipalities in order to properly administer the Jewish population in and around Jerusalem will not go away. The future is catching up with Netanyahu and his inability to part with the status quo maybe his undoing.