The Recent Election Is a Nail in the Coffin of Israel’s Labor Party

April 12 2019

Surveying the results of the Tuesday’s election, Liel Leibovitz draws several lessons, including one about the demise of the country’s left:

In 1992, the year before the Oslo Accords were introduced with much fanfare, Labor and Meretz, the twin pillars of the Zionist left, won a staggering 66 seats in the Knesset, giving them a strong mandate to pursue their peace plans. This week, Labor and Meretz eked out a combined ten seats, far less than the ḥaredi parties, which won sixteen, and exactly the same as the two Arab parties, Ḥadash-Ta’al and Ra’am-Balad. Considering the fact that Benny Gantz’s party, Blue-and-White, had very few, if any, substantive disagreements with Netanyahu’s Likud, the meaning of this is stark and simple: the left, as it has existed for generations, is thoroughly, unequivocally, and irreversibly dead.

Having run for decades on poses rather than policies, [the Israeli left] failed to produce a coherent answer to the question that was foremost in most Israelis’ minds, namely, what to do when the so-called partner for peace, the Palestinian Authority, giddily and unabashedly cheered on and paid for the murder of innocent Israelis. Instead, the left talked about identity politics—a favorite of Meretz’s new leader, Tamar Zandberg—and invested more and more of its communal resources in addressing audiences in Berlin, London, and New York but not in Netanya, Petaḥ Tikvah, and Beersheva.

It’s likely that the slew of nongovernmental organizations that make up the contemporary left’s beating heart—many with robust funding from European governments and other foreign sources like George Soros’s Open Society Foundation—will continue to campaign anywhere but at home, with the political parties that support them continuing to pay the price.

Read more at Tablet

More about: Israeli Election 2019, Israeli politics, Labor Party, Meretz

Oil Is Iran’s Weak Spot. Israel Should Exploit It

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].

Read more at UnHerd

More about: Iran, Israeli Security, Oil