Time for a military coup in Israel?
The bad news for past and present members of Israel’s defense and intelligence establishments who are aware that Netanyahu is leading Israel and quite possibly the region and the world to disaster is that all the signs are that he, the deluded Netanyahu, will win Israel’s next election and remain prime minister. As the Ha’aretz headline put it, Netanyahu the clear favourite heading into Israel’s upcoming elections.
The analysis and comment under that headline was written by Yossi Verter. As he put it:
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can rest easy after reading the results of the latest Ha’aretz-Dialog poll. Not only does he trounce all his rivals on the question of who is most fit to lead the country, but an absolute majority of Israelis reject the aspersions cast on him last week by former Shin Bet security service chief Yuval Diskin. Judging by this poll, Netanyahu is the only candidate with a realistic slot of becoming prime minister after the election slated to take place in another four months. Asked which candidate is most suited to hold the job, 48 percent of respondents said Netanyahu. That is considerably more support than the other three candidates received put together.” Shelly Yacimovich, Labour’s leader. got only 15 percent support; Avigdor Lieberman, Yisrael Beiteinu’s leader, only nine percent; and Shaul Mofaz, who recently replaced Tzipi Livni as Kadima’s leader, only six percent.
Also worth noting are some of the statements Livni made in her resignation speech.
Israel’s leaders, she warned, are putting the country’s existence at risk by choosing to ignore the mounting impatience on the part of the international community. She said: “Israel is on a volcano, the international clock is ticking, and the existence of a Jewish, democratic state is in mortal danger. The real danger is a politics that buries its head in the sand, and it doesn’t take a Shin Bet chief to know that.” (In my view the fact that Israel is neither a Jewish nor a democratic state does not rob Livni’s warning of all of its significance. And I imagine she is in complete agreement with Verter who wrote in an April article for Ha’aretz that “Israel is becoming a pariah state because the extreme right has taken it over almost entirely.”)
It is possible, even probable, that Livni was forced to stand down by Mofaz because of her unwillingness “to sell the country to the ultra-Orthodox” (her words). She was not sorry, she said, for her refusal to give in to “political blackmail” on that account.
She also said: “And I’m definitely not sorry for the main issue I promoted – even if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict isn’t in vogue right now, there’s an urgent need to reach a permanent agreement with the Palestinians as well as with the Arab world,”
A good and necessary question is the one posed by Yoel Marcus in his latest article for Ha’aretz. He wrote:
“The big riddle is what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was thinking when he decided to move up the elections. Why not elections at the scheduled time? After all, another year and a half in a safe government is nothing to sneeze at. In addition, he is running the country with a solid majority of 65 seats. Nobody can bring him down.”
Marcus’s conclusion was this:
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