November 2022 Israeli Elections – Dispiriting for Moderates (updated with final numbers)

Do not Look for a Silver Lining.

The November 1 Israeli Knesset election results are dispiriting for moderates and centrists. It is a lonely time for non-ideologues, those not swept up by the Netanyahu cult of personality, and those not stridently religious.

Netanyahu’s Likud pulled 23.41% of the ballot (1,115,336) popular votes). The Hardal alignment led by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir drew 10.84% of the poll (516,470 popular votes). The Sephardi Haredim of Shas garnered 8.25% (392,964 popular ballots), and the Ashkenazi UTJ Haredim won 5.88% (280,194 popular votes).

That means 2,304,964 Israelis voted for the Netanyahu + Hardel + Haredi bloc giving it control of the Knesset with 64 seats (out of 120).

Elements of the bloc are committed to undermining representative democracy, gutting the judiciary, and imposing theocratic rule. This dreadful scenario won’t happen anytime soon because of in-fighting within this axis of intolerance and demagoguery. However, the November 1 victory is a roadmap to where Israel could be heading if the Hardal–Haredi alliance holds. 

They are now as powerful as Likud, which will likely wane when Netanyahu falters.

***

By comparison, the centrist or moderate vote, divided between Lapid with 17.79% (847,435) popular votes) and Gantz, with 9.08% (432,482 popular votes), totaled 1,279,917 or 36 seats out of 120 Knesset seats.

So 1,279,917 moderate voters as against  2,304,964 ballots for the parties of God/Netanyahu.

Also on the anti-Netanyahu side is the ethnic Russian-speaking vote (secular and hawkish but demographically diminishing) of Lieberman, who got 4.48% (213,687 of the popular vote). Merav Michaeli’s hodgepodge Labor drew 3.69% (or 175,992 popular votes). This brings the total number of votes against the Netanyahu axis to 1,669,596.

If you also throw in the Arab Islamist pragmatist who got 4.07% (194,047 popular votes), the total is 1,863,643 popular votes against Netanyahu. 

Only if you stretch to include the stridently anti-Zionist Arab Communist/Nationalist ticket, which drew 3.75% (178,735 popular votes), do you finally pull 2,042,378

Of the voters who supported parties that crossed the threshold, slightly LESS opposed Netanyahu than favored him.

Keep in mind that the anti-Netanyahu camp runs at cross purposes. It has no leader around whom to rally. It is politically, ethnically, and religiously disjointed and poses no threat to the Netanyahu axis. 

The best hope for the anti-Netanyahu camp is to pray his axis devours itself in intramural backbiting.

I see little that gives succor to Israel’s moderate and centrist minority.

I expand on this analysis in my private briefings and lectures – so be in touch to arrange one. Ej5@nyu.edu

 

  

 

 

Briefing Wednesday, October 26 – Live and on Zoom – Israel Election

Dear friends,

Israelis will be voting for the 25th Knesset on Tuesday, November 1.

This will be our fifth election in about 2½ years. All have revolved around whether Binyamin Netanyahu should be prime minister.

On Wednesday, October 26 – Live and on Zoom
– I will give a talk in Netanya sponsored by Americans and Canadians in Israel about the political parties, players, and likely consequences of this latest round. The event will last about one hour.

Should your schedule allow, I invite you to tune in via Zoom. Please don’t feel any obligation.

12:30 PM US East Coast (lunchtime)

17:30 in London

19:30 Israel time

You will need to register and pay in advance. Proceeds go to AACI.

For those interested in the topic, this would be a good opportunity to get up to speed.

The fee for non-AACI members is NIS 60 or $17 or GBP 15

Register here

https://netanyaaaci.org.il/event/willwehaveagovernment/

 

Elliot

 

 

 

 

What 9/11 was About

In an erev Shabbat email, a friend in metro-NY commented that he was surprised that al-Qaida’s 9/11/2001 attack on the US homeland had not been repeated.

That got me thinking. Why was that?

I mean, besides the fact that the terrorists who planned it – having lost their safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan – were being hunted down and systematically eliminated. And because America repaired the intelligence holes that enabled 9/11 in the first place.

Yet, in a sense, a mega attack did not need to be repeated because the damage done that day 21 years ago achieved its purpose beyond the wildest dreams of its despicable perpetrators.

Who would have imagined the ease with which 19 Jihadist terrorists could hijack four American airliners? And while Islamist suicide bombers had struck many times previously – who would have guessed that they would use civilian planes like bomb-laden dump trucks?

Who would have dreamt that both NYC WTC Towers would collapse in the resulting infernos?

Who would have thought that the Pentagon was so vulnerable? Who could have imagined that America would suffer nearly 3,000 fatalities in one day?

Who could have predicted that the attacks would forever alter the entire experience of air travel?

9/11 still boggles the imagination.

A comparatively small band of Muslim fanatics were able to plot and implement an attack that ensnared the US in two dead-end wars.

So, beyond the initial shock and destruction of the day itself, America was stampeded into occupying two Muslim countries, Afghanistan (starting on October 7, 2001) and Iraq (March 20, 2003).

Occupations that only added fuel to Muslim ire, victimization, and grievance.

The long wars in these lands sapped American willpower and confidence once and for all.

Victory might have been an option had the US been capable of making a WWII-like investment – in personnel (reinstating the military draft), material, treasure, and a willingness to stay for as many decades as it would take to reshape these fragmented Islamic polities into Western democracies. In other words, victory was never an option.

At least in Afghanistan-Pakistan, al-Qaida 1.0 was destroyed.

However, the invasion of Iraq proved to be a strategic blunder of historic proportions. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. It had no weapons of mass destruction. Washington’s presence empowered Shi’ite Persian Iran to flourish and pursue its imperialist designs in the Middle East. As a consequence of the Iraq debacle, the US is psychically powerless to stop Iran from fielding nuclear weapons when it chooses to do so.

Iraq/Afghanistan-Pakistan exposed the desperation of both the Obama and Trump administrations to withdraw America from the quagmire of endless unwinnable (on the cheap) wars (undeclared) in the Near East.

***

What motivated the 9/11 attacks was Osama bin Laden’s anger that Saudi Arabia had allowed debased Westerners to set up militarily in his adopted country. What made the attacks achievable were the skills of Ayman al-Zawahiri. What united the two was the decision to take the war for Islam’s soul to the West.

The Islamist war against the West did not begin on 9/11 but with the first WTC bombing in February 1993, accelerating with the East African embassy bombings of August 1998.

Al-Qaida has served as a terror incubator – others like ISIS, regional spinoffs, and freelancers took up the banner of jihadist imperialism, among them the July 2005 London attackers and the May 2017 Manchester fanatics, plus those who carried out smaller-scale explosions and stabbings in the UK, Europe and around the world. Let us not forget that British authorities thwarted scores of other attacks, such as the planned blowing up of St Paul’s Cathedral in 2020. 

Meanwhile, in America, while there have been “no more 9/11’s,” there have been many jihadist attacks in the US since 2001. Here is a partial list https://www.newamerica.org/international-security/reports/terrorism-in-america/who-are-the-terrorists/

***

The danger will continue because the threat of violence is largely the result of an internal struggle within Islam over coming to grips with modernity. By that, I mean the notions of tolerance, respect for minorities, and democracy. Islam has yet to experience civilizational reform (like Christianity and Judaism). 

But let us allow ourselves to imagine what a reformed Islam might look like: It would be comfortable sharing space with other peoples and faith traditions literally, spiritually, and symbolically. It would no longer seek to spread Dār al-Islam over what it considers Dār al-Ḥarb (the West and Israel).

We are not there yet.

 

 

Further Reading

Partial Listing of Muslim Terror Attacks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks

 

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, by Lawrence Wright

https://www.pulitzer.org/winners/lawrence-wright

 

 

 

Et Tu Ernest? Discovering (belatedly) that Hemingway didn't like Jews

I’d meant to give Ernest Hemmingway (1898-1961) another shot. I read For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) in an edition I inherited from my mother for my all-men’s book club in Jerusalem and found the narrative about the pre-WWII Spanish Civil War slow-going. 

Yet I knew that Hemmingway, known for his spare old-school newspaper writing style, is considered one of the great authors of the 20^th century. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1953. 

When I stumbled upon a copy of The Sun Also Rises (1926) at one of our free neighborhood book libraries, I decided to give him another try. The story is about a group of mostly Paris-based literary types, American ex-pats, who go to Madrid to watch the bullfights.

One set member is the character Robert Cohn – his name is the only thing Jewish about him. Cohn is the ex-lover of Lady Brett Ashley, the only woman in the group over whom he continued to pine after. The narrator, Jake Barnes (Hemmingway’s alter ego), loves her too but can’t consummate the relationship because of impotence. Everybody hates Cohn outright or just about tolerates him. The word “kike” and "Jew" is bandied around. It all shocked me as I had no idea that Hemmingway loathed Jews. בוקר טוב אליהו

It put me off. Later, I learned that his Paris ex-pat circle of mentors included the self-hating Jewess Gertrude Stein, the certified antisemite Ezra Pound, and the prejudiced Ford Madox Ford. That may be where he caught his case of antisemitism that existed alongside friendships with Jews.

Hemmingway was a super-masculine womanizer who routinely slurred gay people. Some scholars presume he was a latent homosexual. He killed himself at age 61.

Hemmingway wasn’t born an antisemite; scholars suggest he may not have died as one. I suppose his antisemitism was rooted in his social milieu, not racialism or theology. If he weren’t a writer, it might have expressed itself more subtlety as mere prejudice. No human is without bias; it is something we can work to overcome. In contrast, hatred rooted in racial or religious contempt is far more potent and pernicious; a matter of identity and belief system. 

Jew-hating was apparently not essential to Hemmingway’s personality, as far as I can tell. He did not embrace it as a meta-conspiracy theory that explained the entire world.

In other words, he's the kind of antisemite we need not get overly exercised over. 

Book Review: An Alternative Scenario for World War II

On December 8, 1941, the day after Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, it was not self-evident that the US would enter the war in Europe being fought between Britain and Nazi Germany.

The potent isolationist "America First" camp was reluctantly reconciled to battling Japan. They were not pacifists, and this was a war of no choice. However, nowhere was it foreordained that the US needed to go to war with Hitler. Indeed, who needed a two-front war?

British prime minister Winston Churchill was praying and lobbying for America to enter the European war because Britain was barely holding on against the Hitlerian onslaught. Recall the war began in September 1939. London and the British islands were mercilessly bombed by the Luftwaffe between July 10, 1940 – and October 31, 1940.

Despite strong isolationist opposition, since March 11, 1941, the US had been formally providing a near-bankrupt Britain with weapons. Some of which were channeled to the USSR, which since June 22, 1941, was also fighting Hitler. None of this would have been enough to turn the tide in Europe, and all sides knew this. The December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor by Japan put Lend-Lease into doubt, at least temporarily, because the US would need to focus its energies on Japan. London and Moscow would have to tread water.

As Brendan Simms and Charlie Laderman remind us in their riveting Hitler's American Gamble: Pearl Harbor and the German March to Global War, it was Hitler who declared war on the US, not the other way around.

Therefore, the day that arguably deserves to go down in history is December 11, 1941, when the Nazi dictator – seeing a brief window of opportunity – made his fateful miscalculation. Only the American economic engine and the manpower of the American armed forces ensured Hitler's (and Japan's) defeat.

"The Fuhrer was convinced that 'the Jews' had suborned Roosevelt, who had manipulated the United States into such a hostile attitude toward the Reich that Germany had no choice but to declare a preemptive war," the authors argue.

By December 7, 1941, the Nazis had been waging frenzied war against the Jewish population of occupied Russia. With Hitler's declaration of war against the US, the Holocaust would now go into high gear to annihilate the Jews of western and central Europe as well. The authors remind us that on Pearl Harbor Day most European Jews were still alive. "The world war is here, and the extermination of the Jews must be the necessary consequence," Hitler told his subordinates after his December 11, 1941, declaration of war on the US.

That is the context in which the Wannsee Conference of January 20, 1942, is best understood. This was the crucial bureaucratic planning meeting addressing the nuts and bolts details of the systematic industrial destruction of Europe's Jewish people

This book is not primarily about the Shoah, but the authors so effectively weave Hitler's twisted motivations showing how central his obsessive hatred of the Jews was to his reason for going to war and how he waged it. All his economic and diplomatic grievances against Britain and the US interlocked with his warped belief in a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

History is not linear, and nothing is foretold – it only appears orderly or sensible after the fact. Had Hitler not declared war on the US, the Roosevelt administration might not have found the political nerve to come to Britain's aid in WWII with boots on the ground.

Hitler's American Gamble focuses on five crucial days in the history of WWII – practically hour by hour. The book's pace is gripping, and the angle the authors take is distinctive. Highly recommended.