The two Benjamins: Netanyahu and Gantz

The Suspense Isn’t Over in Israel

Israel’s second multi-party parliamentary election within six months ended without a clear-cut winner. President Reuven Rivlin will consult the elected parties to choose someone, presumably either Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu or the Blue and White party’s Benjamin Ganz, to form a new government. Only when (or if) that person succeeds in forming a governing coalition, will the rest of us know who the next Prime Minister of Israel will be.

Melissa Langsam Braunstein makes the case that no matter which Benjamin becomes the next prime minister, Democrats on the left will still be unhappy. She predicts that Democrats who insist that they support Israel -- just not Netanyahu’s policies -- will quickly find other justifications for criticizing Israel and for supporting the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement that seeks Israel’s destruction, if Ganz becomes prime minister. 

Michael Bachner at The Times of Israel explains some of the potential governing coalitions that may take shape in the weeks ahead. The one option nobody wants is yet another election. 

Jonathan Tobin makes the very important point that this election will not, contra rhetoric from the left, decide the future of peace in the Middle East. He writes: 

[T]his question was actually determined in an election held 14 years ago, as well as in one that didn’t happen four years later. By that I refer to the vote that took place on Jan. 9, 2005 when Mahmoud Abbas was elected president of the Palestinian Authority, succeeding Yasser Arafat. Abbas, who was the leader of Arafat’s Fatah party and the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, won with 62% of the vote.

 

…While his elevation to the post of president of the PA was heralded at the time as a step towards peace, all it really did was to further entrench the corrupt rule of Fatah. Though Hamas branded him as a weakling, Abbas had no intention of making peace. The Islamist terror group won a Palestinian legislative election in 2006 and then organized a bloody coup in 2007 that enabled it to seize power in Gaza.

 

So it was little surprise that when it came time for another Palestinian election, Abbas merely stayed in office without holding another vote. As had been the case many times elsewhere in the Third World in the post-colonial era, Palestinian democracy was a case of one man, one vote, one time. There has never been another election for Palestinian president in either the West Bank or Hamas-controlled Gaza; Abbas is currently serving in the 15th year of the four-year term to which he had been elected.

Peace between Israel and the Palestinians requires Palestinian partners willing to live peacefully alongside the Jewish state. They may be hard to find. Arutz Sheva reports on a poll of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza conducted in the days before the Israeli election:

When asked what the best path is for the PA vis-à-vis Israel, a plurality (37%) favored terrorism, or what pollsters called an “armed struggle against the Israeli occupation". Just 32% said they preferred a peace deal, while 10% said the best path is “waging non-violent resistance”. Seventeen percent said they prefer the status quo.

 

Three months ago, 34% backed terrorism as the best option, with 36% favoring a peace deal. A far larger number of Palestinian Arabs say they approve of terror attacks against Israelis – including civilians – however. A whopping 61% of Palestinian Arabs, including 49% of those in Judea and Samaria and 80% of Gazans, approved of the terrorist bombing attack on an Israeli family last month which left 17-year-old Rina Shnerb dead and her father and brother seriously injured.

Sarsour and Mallory

Women’s March Replaces Anti-Semitic Leaders with… Anti-Semitic Leaders

The Women’s March – the radical leftist group that rallies for “resistance” against President Donald Trump, came under strong criticism for the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views of its top leaders. (Tablet Magazine covered this story in detail.) Two of the those leaders, Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour, have stepped down from the Women's March board.

Mallory came under fire for refusing to disavow Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and her connections with him. Sarsour, who is currently a campaign surrogate for Bernie Sanders, is a Palestinian-American and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. She is a virulent critic of Israel and an advocate for the BDS movement.

The Washington Post reports:

A diverse cast of 16 new board members that includes three Jewish women, a transgender woman, a former legislator, two religious leaders and a member of the Oglala tribe of the Lakota nation will inherit an organization recovering from a failed attempt to trademark the Women’s March name and fractured relationships with local activist groups and the Jewish community.

David Rutz at the Washington Free Beacon has details on some of the new leaders chosen by the Women’s March: 

The Women's March announced 16 new board members, one of whom, Zahra Billoo, has attacked Israel as a "terrorist state" indistinguishable from ISIS.

 

Billoo, a civil rights lawyer and executive director of the San Francisco Bay area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, has accused the U.S. and Israel of enabling terrorism in tweets shared by the Daily Wire‘s Ryan Saavedra. Another new board member, Palestinian-American activist Samia Assed, has questioned Israel's existence and declared it effectively illegitimate.

The Women's March pulled an about-face after Billoo's past statements went viral. This afternoon they dropped Billoo from the organization board.

But another new board member, Charlene Carruthers, supports Louis Farrakhan and called Israel an apartheid state. 

It appears that the Women’s March organization still has work to do to rid itself of its "anti-Semitism problem."