The last time that Israel had a prime minister from the Labor Party was over twenty years ago. Most military recruits were not even born or were in diapers the last time a member of the leftist socialist movement that had ruled the country in a virtually unbroken line of succession for a generation from Ben Gurion to Rabin last headed the country.
The news is even worse now with Labor, which once dominated the legislature of the Knesset, receiving only 4 seats making it the smallest party, below the Muslim Brotherhood’s Ra’am and the Arab Communist Hadash-Ta’al, not to mention the Jewish religious parties and the parties of Middle Eastern and Russian immigrants.
The last time this happened, Caroline Glick’s Latma, with hilarious cruelty, mocked the Labor Party for having more letters in its name than Knesset seats. “Hello, I would like to request a taxi for the entire Labor Party.” “Don’t bury us, there aren’t enough of us for a minyan.”
As badly as Labor did, Meretz performed even worse, failing to meet the legislative threshold. For the first time in a generation, the radical leftist party won’t even make it into the Knesset.
The parties of the Jewish Left, if you can even call them that, are down to 4 out of 120 seats.
The Left has become unelectable so it disguises itself in a rotating series of fake centrist parties, the latest of which is Yair Lapid’s ‘Yesh Atid’ whose function is to trick Israelis who would never vote for Labor or Meretz into voting for the Left. And Yesh Atid picked up 24 Knesset seats.
Yair Lapid, a television celebrity and the son of a famous father, is Israel’s Trudeau, a convenient front for the same old gang to run things while he mugs for the camera. He’s one of a line of retired generals and public figures fronting fake third parties who hold office only long enough for the public to realize that they didn’t vote for Labor, but got it anyway.
The electoral decline and fall of the Israeli Left was caused by two national revelations, the first was that Netanyahu’s free market economic policies, while not perfect, worked far better than Labor’s socialist monopolies, and that Labor’s signature policy, cutting a deal with the PLO was a murderous failure that threatened Israeli lives and the country on an unprecedented scale.
But the paradox of the Israeli Left is that it has virtually no electoral power, but nearly unlimited political power. There may not have been a Labor prime minister since 2001, but it still controls the machinery of officialdom from local bureaucrats to Supreme Court justices. Even while the media declares that the latest right-wing bogeyman is a “threat to democracy”, it is the civil servants, the prosecutors, judges, brass and administrators who actually run most things.
And who are the real threats to democracy.
There’s a reason Democrats often describe the Israeli Supreme Court with its unlimited power of judicial review and ability to override government decisions on everything from the macro to the micro, from where people can live to who should receive the Israeli Prize, as their model.
Beyond the upper echelons of the judiciary, prosecutors openly collaborate with the media and leftist activists to indict, prosecute and remove conservative, patriotic and Zionist elected officials. It was a bunch of these groundless prosecutions that forced Netanyahu out of office. To understand the Kafkaesque absurdity of the prosecutorial campaign against Netanyahu, it’s enough to mention that his wife was investigated over recycling bottle deposits.
To make sense of what’s going on though, you have to understand Israeli demographics.
While immigration moves the United States leftward, it moves Israel rightward. The conservative Likud’s base of support comes from the Middle Eastern Jewish immigrants who fled Muslim rule. The Russian immigrants, French and even Americans who move to Israel are not universally conservative, but tend to want governments that will protect them from Islamic terrorists.
The media is howling over the newfound influence of Itamar Ben-Gvir described as “far-right”, a “hateful extremist” and a “supremacist”. The Biden administration and Democrats have warned that they will have nothing to do with him and that Israel will alienate the United States.
What they don’t mention is that he’s the son of Iraqi Jewish immigrants.
Israel’s Left derives the majority of its support from the upper class elites of Tel Aviv who were part of the old socialist establishment. Israel’s Right leans heavily on the Middle Eastern and Russian immigrants whom they treated like dirt. They want a strong country and a weak bureaucracy. The old establishment Left wants a strong bureaucracy and a weak country.
Talk to members of that old establishment and you find that they are a small incestuous group. Israel is a small country, but in those circles, everyone really knows everyone else, they went to school with them, served with them, or lived next door to them. They feel that their country, with its cafes and kibbutzim, red flags and membership in an international socialist order, and the more intangible cultural elements, was stolen from them by these disgusting new arrivals.
They complain about the language, the manners, the religion, the superstition and the ugliness of the Haredim, the Middle Eastern and Russian Jews. Give them a few drinks and the rhetoric can turn truly ugly with stories of beating the religious and mistreating immigrants. It was in this vein that Yigal Tumarkin, an artist and co-founder of the anti-war Peace Now, descended from Nazis, wrote, “when I see Orthodox Jews, I understand the Nazis” and “my true contribution would be if I grabbed a sub-machine-gun, instead of a pen and pencil, and killed them.”
Tumarkin spoke for quite a few members of the old establishment who still have their cafes, but feel like they lost their country. Though they can’t win elections for long, they control the machinery of power. And paradoxically they see themselves as underdogs still fighting the ‘Right’ and the influx of immigrants who don’t know their place and have ruined everything.
In a small country, their hateful views are no secret. It’s why they can’t win elections.
Israel’s politics are a struggle between an emerging multicultural conservative majority and a supremacist European leftist minority holding on to power. It’s a mirror image of how American liberals see our politics and yet when given a choice, they side with the European minority.
In this struggle, the media, both theirs and ours, depicts coalitions of Middle Eastern Jewish refugees, Russian immigrants, and Orthodox Jews as if they were all interchangeable “right-wing extremists” while painting a leftist fringe that consists of upper class elites who all know each other and look like each other as the liberal tolerant heroes of tomorrow.
That reveals as much about our media and political elites as it does about the Israeli Left.
Democrats and the media never actually ask why Israelis seem to insist on electing so many conservatives and few lefties, or why Netanyahu broke Ben Gurion’s record for the longest consecutive term in office. Instead, we’re told that Israelis are supremacists and bigots. It’s a convenient projection by the real supremacists and bigots who are smearing Israel.
Why did the Israeli Right win while the Left lost? For all these reasons the media won’t discuss.
Decades of Islamic terror, failed socialist politics, corrupt monopolies, an abusive bureaucracy, and outright bigotry and discrimination of the ugliest kind somehow never come up in these conversations even though the majority of Israelis are painfully acquainted with all of them.
The Left lost badly in Israel. Our Left is terrified that they’re about to lose just as badly here.
Thanks Daniel! Fascinating and enlightening political analysis.
What do to about the Apparat and the apparatchiks? I don’t know.
Two reasons why Israel’s left can’t win.
1- Today’s Israeli left has no allegiance to lefty founding generation. Ben Gurion may have been a socialist but he
was Jewish Zionist first socialist second. Sadly the same can’t be said for today’s Israeli left. When Ben Gurion
associates decried his decision to cede to rabbinical demands. He replied. If it weren’t for Jewish
religion and the Rabbis none of you would be here today.
2- The founding Ashkenazi generation always saw The Sepharadi and Middle Eastern Jews as an inferior and
kept them out of government machinery. Now that lefty Ashenazis no longer are the majority of Israeli
Jewish population they became resentful and angry. Hence they are drifting farther and farther left. to a point
of being hostile to the very idea of Jewish nationhood.
You’re correct. Unfortunately, Israels’ “Basic Law” system (a substitute for a real constitution) ensconces the corrupt, self-serving system that said leftists have put in place for themselves. Entities such as the Histadrut (which protects Israels overbearing bureaucracy), the ILA (Israel Land Authority) and the Supreme Court, are almost immune to change. Making any changes to Basic Law requires a 2/3 super-majority in the Knesset. Try getting 80 MK’s to vote to vote in unison on something so critical. The one thing Basic Law overlooked, was that Israels Central Bank, like all Central Banks, leaves it to the sitting PM to appoint the banks governor. It was that oversight that enabled Bibi to appoint Stanley Fischer to make deeeeep changes to monetary policy.
Anyhow, I hope the incoming government finds a way to reform Basic Law or get rid of it altogether and write a new, real constitution.
The “rigjtwing extremists” in Israel are treated similarly to how the MAGA Republicans are treated in America.
Intolerant, hateful incitement from the left perpetuates this, with help from the leftist media
Just remember the staged handshake between Rabin and Arafat with Bill Clinton looking down for the whole fake event
When I was in high school, Ran Cohen, Shulamit Alonis’ #2 in a party called Ratz (precursor to Meretz) was brought in as a guest speaker to give us dumb kids a pep talk. We laughed at and mocked him. He left the room mumbling curse words under his breath at us. Guela Cohen got a respectful hearing.
Ive lived long enough to see Meretz get its comeuppance.
“The Biden administration and Democrats have warned that they will have nothing to do with him and that Israel will alienate the United States.”
That alone is a great reason to vote for him, the hysterical woke hate him.
Israel doesn’t need the U.S. It doesn’t need any nation on Earth as long as its inhabitants love and serve G0d with all their hearts and souls. (Does that mean no more “Pride” events marching through Jerusalem? You decide.) If they do, G0d will give them all the protection they need.
That’s generally a clincher, if they don’t like him, he’s good.
Mr. Green is almost perfect in his analysis but one comparison to the USA is flawed. Immigration is not driving the USA leftward.
It’s leftism that is driving open m immigration. But the surprise is that immigrants are tired of the immorality of leftism, socialism, fascism, and totalitarianism. That’s why they come to the USA and why they are much more conservative than the Democrats realize.
It seems immigrants are assimilating faster than leftists thought. By the time they are eligible to vote they are joining their fellow working class “deplorables” in voting Republicans.
The cultural craziness on the left doesn’t fly. Most immigrants know how to define “woman” before they can even speak English. I’ve seen leftist articles complaining that immigrants are become “white” … code for right-wing.
The Hispanics, long-established as an American minority, are moving towards voting Republican. So are east Indians and some east Asians. But I doubt that the Somalis are doing that, or Muslims in general, though there are signs that some Muslims are moving towards the Republicans because of the Democrats’ sexual freakishness regarding kids. There are scores of nationalities in the current migrant wave, not just Central and South Americans. And in addition to the drug carriers, human traffickers, and general thugs who are , there are plenty of immigrants so uneducated, even primitive, that they don’t have a clue about our government. None of these latter groups have loyalty to any party. I don’t think the parallel to Israel is with immigrants. Rather, it’s the native deplorables who are playing the part that immigrants are in Israel.
One hopes you’re right about the people pouring through our borders. I worry that they’re here for free stuff and that’s what the left excels in giving them, so they might feel obligated to vote for their benefactors. Hopefully most of them are more intelligent than the left realizes.
Leftism always carries within itself the seeds of disgust with it. Just allow enough time for everyone else to experience the left, and it really does appear that the majority of Israel reached this with its leftists. May we also do all we can to educate our people about what the left really is, and that it never changes.
If only more young Americans would listen to people who come here from Venezuela and Cuba and North Korea and other communist hell-holes. But they don’t; they listen to their favorite movie stars and “influencers” because they are really, really dumb.
I hear you. Some people need pain to wake-up from their day-dreams. And then -some will never wake-up. Certainly those who ‘live’ their lives with that ‘smart-phone’ in their faces have much to recover from… (But yes – really, really dumb has too much a place in society today. As a non-traditional college student – I ended feeling that I already had an PhD. education around the majority of these special ones.)
They need to ‘hear’ from people who have directly lived the horrors of the left.
The left is evil, evil never changes except that it gets more evil. The left follows evil with everything it has, sadly, the left will never change either.
This comes as no surprise because in Israel, it’s all about security and the people ONLY trust Netanyahu for that. He’s old school like Gibbs. And for good reason. They tried hanging crimes on him and their handling of the Covid vaccines was over the top. They “tempered” on security and it blew up in their faces. Netanyahu has to look like a God to them today and they don’t care if he’s a crook. It only takes one attack to wake everybody up to what’s really important. And they’ve had to endure countless attacks since they tried tempering their approach and listening to NY Liberals. What’ amazing to me is just how easy Donald Trump and Netanyahu were able to handle Mideast security. Irony is Trump appointing his son in law Jared Kushner to run this operation and this kid knew nothing about any of this. But with Trump, it was either sink or swim to the top fast. And the kid came through. With NO experience with foreign affairs of any kind. I can just hear Trump. “Well you’re a jew and you were stupid enough to marry my daughter, so fix it.” LOL
By and large, what it all boils down to, whether you’re a Christian or Jew, American or Israeli, is that there are two kinds of people in this world; those who answer to God, and those who don’t.
A very thoughtful analysis.
As a Christian who considers himself a Hebraic Christian, that is, my belief system is anchored in the Torah and the Prophets (the Tanakh, or the Old Testament as Christian’s call it), but I accept Yeshua HaMashiach as the Messiah. Torah is still the bedrock of Israel. But it seems it has been relegated to a status of irrelevancy – completely ignored – by both Jew and Christian’s. Israel, even its conservatives, no longer seems to conduct itself as Yehoveh has instructed them in the Tanakh. God set aside His land of Israel for His Chosen, but they were to be caretakers – not owners. So, when I hear Israeli politicians negotiating land for peace, it’s has to be an insult to the Father. I’d say the Gaza debacle was a prime example of His anger. Not one square inch of Israel is to be negotiated away. In my studies of Torah and the Prophets, I see so much that the leaders of Israel are completely ignoring, and sadly, have done for decades. Every Israeli should go back and read Hosea because I see God’s wrath coming as it was then. Remember, Hosea chronicles the lead up up Him scattering the peoples of the northern kingdom throughout the world – they were exiled for nearly 2000 years, and just now as promised, He is orchestrating the return of their descendants. My point, all Israelis need to go back and seriously study the Tanakh and start living by it before it’s too late. I love Israel, and I say these words in hopes they will not offend. Be blessed.
As a Christian who considers himself a Hebraic Christian, that is, my belief system is anchored in the Torah and the Prophets (the Tanakh, or the Old Testament as Christian’s call it), but I accept Yeshua HaMashiach as the Messiah. Torah is still the bedrock of Israel. But it seems it has been relegated to a status of irrelevancy – completely ignored – by both Jew and Christian’s. Israel, even its conservatives, no longer seems to conduct itself as Yehoveh has instructed them in the Tanakh. God set aside His land of Israel for His Chosen, but they were to be caretakers – not owners. So, when I hear Israeli politicians negotiating land for peace, it’s has to be an insult to the Father. I’d say the Gaza debacle was a prime example of His anger. Not one square inch of Israel is to be negotiated away. In my studies of Torah and the Prophets, I see so much that the leaders of Israel are completely ignoring, and sadly, have done for decades. Every Israeli should go back and read Hosea because I see God’s wrath coming as it was then. Remember, Hosea chronicles the lead up up Him scattering the peoples of the northern kingdom throughout the world – they were exiled for nearly 2000 years, and just now as promised, He is orchestrating the return of their descendants. My point, all Israelis need to go back and seriously study the Tanakh and start living by it before it’s too late. I love Israel, and I say these words in hopes they will not offend. Be blessed.