Israel’s Disastrous Coalition Government Collapses Daniel Greenfield
I was in Israel some years back and no one believed that there would be a second election. Now the country is on track to a fifth election that may put Netanyahu back in power. Anything has got to be better than the abominable leftist-Islamist-RINO equivalent nightmare that’s been running the country into the ground.
Israel is based on a European-style parliamentary system. The only unifying theme of the coalition was to force out Netanyahu and the Likud Party.
In the service of that, Communists, the Muslim Brotherhood, assorted leftist parties and a former “conservative” party worked together.
And the only amazing thing is that it lasted this long.
Explaining the insanity is hard, but here’s a sample.
Justice Minister Gideon Sa’ar blamed the downfall of the government on “irresponsible behavior by Knesset members in the coalition,” referring to its multiple rebels. He said the goal of the next election would be to prevent Netanyahu from returning to power and “mortgaging the country to his own personal interest.”
There is still a chance that Netanyahu will succeed in forming an alternate government within the current Knesset. This would happen if members of the coalition, from New Hope and Yamina, switch sides and join Netanyahu’s right-wing bloc.
At a Knesset press conference, Netanyahu did not rule out that possibility. He said he tried to initiate such a move but it was blocked by coalition MKs who rule out a government with him but are willing to sit with Ra’am (United Arab List). The opposition leader said he would not permit Ra’am leader Mansour Abbas in a Likud-led coalition.
Netanyahu took credit for the government’s downfall and called it the “worst government in the history of the State of Israel.”
He vowed he would form the next government and that it would be “nationalist and wide.”
The United Arab List, is part of the Islamic Movement, which is the Muslim Brotherhood’s name for its operations inside Israel.
As Caroline Glick notes, this is the enemy within.
Earlier this week, Channel 14‘s Yaara Zered reported that Abbas spent several days in Turkey last week. Details of the trip are sparse. But what is clear enough is that as the deputy head of the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement, Abbas had plenty of things to do in Turkey.
Last December, Ad Kan, an Israeli NGO that penetrates radical Israeli NGOs to expose their subversive activities, published an investigative report exposing the Southern Branch of the Islamic Movement’s ties with Hamas. Most of the movement’s cooperative efforts with the terrorist organization are carried out by its NGOs. These groups in turn are led by senior members of the Islamic movement, including senior Ra’am Party officials. Beyond their operations in Israel, Gaza, Judea and Samaria, a focal point for the organization’s activities is Turkey.
For instance, a key Hamas-tied NGO controlled by the Islamic Movement is the Igatha 48 Association. Igatha 48 Association is led by senior members of Ra’am. The group has close ties with Turkish NGOs that are directly and indirectly tied to Hamas and to the Islamist regime of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The Ad Kan report showed that Igatha 48 Association cooperates closely with Al Furkan, a Turkish NGO openly supportive of Hamas. Al Furkan members have joined the ranks of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State. One Al Furkan member was arrested by Turkish authorities for planning an attack on U.S. soldiers at Incirlik Air Force base in Turkey. Igatha 48 Association and Al Furkan jointly constructed a town for Syrian refugees on the Syrian side of the Syrian-Turkish border.
Polling suggests that the results of a fifth election might not be entirely straightforward, but Israeli media polls, like their American counterparts, tend to oversample leftists.
If an election were held now, opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud would win 34 seats and his allies in the Religious Zionist Party, Shas and United Torah Judaism 11, eight and seven seats respectively. The 60 seats would be one short of having enough to form a right-wing government.
Yesh Atid would win 21 seats, Blue and White eight, Joint List seven, Labor six, Yamina five, Yisrael Beytenu five, New Hope four and Ra’am (United Arab List) four. Meretz would not cross the electoral threshold.
I’ve seen other polls showing that the Islamist Ra’am list wouldn’t make the threshold. That means wasted votes.
The usual lefty trick has been creating fake third parties to divert votes and using their controlled opposition on the right to create splinter right-wing parties that are incapable of passing the threshold, thus resulting in wasted votes. If the wasted votes go the other way, Israel might have a moderate conservative government.
Of course this solves nothing because Netanyahu’s only real selling point is that he’s better than the Left, but, like so many Republican presidents, he makes some wonderful promises, but he doesn’t do very much once in office. Some of that can be blamed on an activist judiciary and a weak parliamentary system riven by infighting, but not all of it.
Either way, Israel faces a fifth election and more chaos.
Meanwhile Yair Lapid, an inept leftist pretending to be a moderate, who is the Israeli version of Trudeau, will run a caretaker government and meet with Joe Biden.
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