Posted on 01/30/2003 11:30:40 PM PST by JohnHuang2
There is no sound so delightful as the whimpering of leftists the morning after.
There is no message so hope-inspiring as the screams of outrage from the world's Israel-bashers and the accusations that Israelis have voted against "peace."
There are grounds for all of us to recite a collective "Hagomel" blessing, for the Jewish people has just been rescued from imminent danger of (self-) destruction.
The clearest and most obvious conclusion from the election is that Israel's Oslo Left is imploding. The Israeli Labor Party, now led by Amram Mitzna and the Party's radical wing, the same party that once had an absolutely majority of Knesset (Israel's parliament) seats all by itself before adding coalition partners, received only 19 Knesset seats out of 120. Less than one Israeli voter in five voted for the Labor Party, making it about the same dimensions as Ross Perot's party in the U.S. the last time it ran.
But the loss of seats by Labor does not tell the full story of implosion of the Israeli Oslo Left. In the last Knesset, the Oslo Left held 42 seats, counting Labor, Meretz, and the "Center Party". The last was nominally a centrist party, but was clearly pro-Oslo and featured Yitzhak Rabin's daughter as perhaps its best-known leader. In the new Knesset, the Oslo Left is down to 25 seats, a loss of over 40 percent.
The Labor Party itself dropped from 26 seats to 19, losing ONLY a quarter of its seats. I say "only" because after its policies murdered 1,200 Israelis, I was expecting a far greater loss. In part, the loss was "small" because much of the hostility by voters to Oslo was already expressed in Labor's losses in previous elections. Labor also capitalized on "scandals" regarding Sharon and on the unwillingness of the leftist media to report properly Mitzna's own track record of corruption and sleaze. Mitzna benefited from the open endorsement of most of the world's leaders (notably Tony Blair) and from financial resources flowing in from the world, enthusiastically supporting any Israeli leader who promises to lead the country to national suicide. On the other hand, the PLO's and Syria's endorsements of Mitzna no doubt hurt Labor. And its pathetic attempts to stampede Israeli voters into supporting Mitzna by running campaign clips with Yitzhak Rabin were complete failures. Only the halo was missing from Rabin's head in those clips. Israelis can no longer be persuaded to march to oblivion by flashing sentimental camcorder tapes of Rabin.
The "Center" party did not even run. Perhaps the most wonderful piece of news is the collapse of leftist Meretz, a partially Marxist party, losing 50 percent of its Knesset strength. Meretz had 10 seats in the last Knesset, but at the last minute added two more when part of the radical wing of the Israeli Labor Party bolted and joined Meretz, promising to bring over some Labor votes.
Only one voter in 20 voted for Meretz this round. While Meretz supporters have a near totalitarian stranglehold on the Israeli media, the courts, and the universities, this tiny totalitarian elite is now negligible in the Knesset, although still retains its powers because of its those strangleholds.
Clearly Meretz collapsed because the voters, even erstwhile Oslo supporters, understand that Meretz' policies represent national self-annihilation. But my pet theory is that a good part of Meretz' collapse has to do with its adoption of homosexuality as its number two cause. Meretz was banking on that old myth about the "ten percent" being true; not only is it patently false of course, but even the endorsements of homosexual "rights" no doubt drove away many Meretz voters, especially Arab Meretz voters, always a non-negligible portion of Meretz strength. Right after the election, the chairman of Meretz resigned in disgrace.
The contraction of Labor was also delicious comeuppance for the Party that had led the anti-democratic assault on the Israeli voting system. In the last election, Israelis could vote directly for their Prime Minister. The Left was upset because Israelis voted for the WRONG man as Prime Minister in 2000, and so to set things right and to corral the voters back into the Labor Party, Labor led the successful jihad, supported by much of the Likud, to revoke direct voting for the Prime Minister. The result is Labor's pitiful 19 seats.
The Likud doubled its seats from the last Knesset. In fact, Likud strength had been up all along and could have been capitalized upon in the 2000 election. The problem was that for bizarre reasons, Sharon was afraid to reap it. The 2000 election was ONLY a vote for the Prime Minister and NOT for the Knesset. Had it been a general Knesset election, Likud would have shot up higher even back then. But that would have required a Likud primaries campaign, where Netanyahu would have run. Netanyahu had pledged loudly and publicly that he would not run UNLESS there were a general Knesset vote, and Sharon and Labor were able to keep Netanyahu quarantined and out of that election, each for different motives, by restricting it to a vote for the PM vote alone.
Sharon as PM will be trying to get Labor to join a national unity government to take some of the heat from the rest of the world off of him. But the only way Labor can join is if it ousts Mitzna, who loudly pledged never to join. I do not rule that out, as most Laborites are more attached to their perks and pork than they are to Mitzna. That grinding sound you hear is the sharpening of long knives within the Labor Party. But I also do not rule out the possibility that Sharon might "pull a Begin." After Labor collapsed following the 1973 Yom Kippur War debacle, Likud soundly thrashed Labor in 1977, but Prime Minister Menahem Begin then recruited Labor Party's Moshe Dayan as his Defense Minister. Sharon could do the same, to "pretty up" his government in the eyes of the world, and it could even be through recruiting Shimon Peres as Foreign Minister, perhaps the only man on earth who still thinks that Oslo was a peace process. Do not pooh-pooh that horrendous possibility.
The biggest change is of course the growth in the weird Shinui party. Originally Shinui was a party of reformist liberals and leftists in the 1970s. Its more radical leftists left the party when Meretz was formed, combining there with the Marxist MAPAM party and with the RATZ party. That left the flaky Avraham Poraz as the one-man Shinui party. Poraz's main cause was animal rights and protecting the self- esteem of circus animals.
But then Poraz recruited the loud-mouthed vulgar bigot Tommy Lapid and they turned it into a party of anti-religious bigotry. They grew to six seats in the last election. This time however they are 15!!
I doubt that the growth in Shinui has anything to do with escalating anti-religious bigotry in Israel, despite the fact that Shinui does not stand for anything else. The sharp growth was, in my opinion, a huge protest vote by people voting against both Labor and Likud. These were Israelis who did NOT want any party that claimed to stand for anything, people seeking a "Seinfeldian" party, a party about nothing. A party neither left nor right, or perhaps both at the same time. A party perceived as non-corrupt. The problem is that Shinui will be a huge loose cannon on the deck of the new Knesset.
The Arab fascist parties, one of which is nominally Stalinist-fascist, were down to 9 seats from 10, due to low Arab voter turnout. In fact of course, two of these three parties are openly pro-terror and had been banned by the Election Board as treasonous, except that the non-elected anti-democratic leftist judiciary overturned that democratic decision and allowed them to run, equivalent to allowing al-Qaeda run for Congress in the U.S.
The Sephardic religious party SHAS lost six of its seats, down to 11. The main reason was a loss of votes to the Likud, but in part there was hemorrhaging because a second small Sephardic party led by Rabbi Kadori was challenging it (but did not win seats). The National Religious Party retained its 5 seats, but this should be considered a failure. NRP was running the charismatic Effi Eitam as its head, someone who was expected to turn out new voters, but he failed, probably because the rest of the party besides Eitam stands for little more than moldy pork barrel logrolling. The three religious parties together hold 21 seats, compared with 27 in the last Knesset. The loss of so much strength reinforces my view that the large turnout for Shinui had more to do with protest against Labor and Likud than with any sudden fear of the Orthodox bogeyman.
Another surprise was the doubling of strength by the Am Echad Party of Amir Peretz, head of the Histadrut Trade Union federation, from two to four seats. The subliterate Peretz, best known for his Zapatista moustache, had been massively misappropriating union funds to wage his campaign. He is not well-defined ideologically, and his naked vote buying makes him comparable to Samuel Flatto-Sharon, a fugitive wanted in France for embezzlement who bought his way into the Knesset in the 1970s, but stood for nothing else. No doubt part of the jump in votes for Peretz was due to the deep recession Israel is now in and the unfounded belief that Peretz had some thoughts about how to improve things. I suspect he has no thoughts about anything, period.
Natan Sharansky's party collapsed, winning a measly 2 seats, and Sharansky, a one time prisoner of the KGB, also promptly resigned from office. Not a bad role model for Mitzna. The Russian immigrant parties had had 10 seats in the last Knesset. Clearly the immigrants had become Israelis and were voting now as Israelis, mainly for the Likud and the Right. The Ichud Leumi party, the only list unambiguously totally opposed to Oslo, won a mildly respectable 7 seats, although I had expected more. In part, it lost seats because the Herut party refused to merge with it or drop out of the race and drew away voters.
The remaining rodeo clowns, the flock of picayune parties that always plague Israeli elections, did not get in. Besides far-right Herut, the only one even coming close was the pothead Green Leaf party, dedicated to good marijuana.
Israel is by no means out of the Oslo woods. But it has bought time to seek a way to put an end to the Oslo debacle.
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