The Obama vs Netanyahu political bloodbath has a sharp historical edge. When the conservative Israeli Prime Minister won the election during the Clinton Administration, Clinton used his political hit men to force him out of office. One of those hit men was Stanley Greenberg.
Stanley Greenberg helped push Israel’s earlier version of Occupy Wall Street. Now with elections coming up, Greenberg is back in Israel to try and topple Netanyahu one more time.
While Netanyahu’s reelection prospects are looking far better than Obama’s, a major factor in Obama’s Middle East policy is getting rid of Netanyahu.
The Labor party has hired Stanley Greenberg, a leading Democratic political strategist, to direct its campaign in the upcoming elections for Knesset.
Greenberg, along with partners James Carville and Robert Shrum, helped Labor under Ehud Barak defeat Netanyahu in the 1999 elections. Previously, then-President Bill Clinton was reportedly active in creating rifts within Netanyahu’s coalition, hastening its downfall.
The pattern of action may be repeating itself, as Greenberg appears to have played a key role in destabilizing Netanyahu’s present government as well. According to an investigative report by Maariv’s Kalman Libeskind, it was Greenberg who gave directions to an Israeli strategy forum in 2011, on how to engineer the “social protests” that brought hundreds of thousands of Israelis to the streets that summer.
The protests failed to push out Netanyahu, but Greenberg’s strategy was to put pressure on Netanyahu and tear apart his coalition.
Netanyahu obscured the protests by cutting the Shalit deal that free thousands of terrorists. And economic and political issues have moved Israel toward new elections.
The protests – which received free wall-to-wall promotion and coverage from liberal media, and drew crowds by offering free music from top artists – forced the Netanyahu government to abandon its economic principles in favor of “social” legislation, like subsidized preschool education. These economic measures, in turn, slowed down the Israeli economy and forced the government into crafting an austerity budget for 2013. The fact that no party wants to approve such a budget in an election year is what recently convinced Netanyahu he had no choice but to call early elections.
Netanyahu won’t be replaced by the idiotic Yachimovich, but the goal is to keep pushing and undermining him. Rather than going after Ahmadinejad, the Democratic Party establishment is doing everything possible to break Netanyahu.