Israel's uninformed electorate

Column One: Israel's uninformed electorate Caroline Glick, THE JERUSALEM POST Mar. 20, 2006

On the eve of the Knesset elections, Israel faces multiple challenges. Hamas, in appointing technocrats and terrorists to run its new government is showing that it is possible to learn from the Nazi model of governance. Even genocidal mass murderers who seduce their societies with delusions of racial and religious supremacy can receive international acclaim if they make the trains run on time.

Israel's political spectrum is divided between the Left, represented by Kadima and the Right represented by Likud. Kadima wishes to contend with the Hamas threat by making a public show of shunning Hamas while surrendering Judea and Samaria to the terror organization.

The Likud points out that surrendering Judea and Samaria to Hamas will make it impossible to defend the rest of the country. Since Likud doesn't think that Israel should surrender its right to defend itself by turning its heartland over to a global terrorist organization which together with Fatah and Islamic Jihad has already murdered over 1,100 Israelis and remains committed to annihilating Israel, it objects to surrendering any territory to Hamas.

It has been repeatedly noted in this column that the Israeli media has blocked all public debate on this issue. The media mollycoddles politicians on the Left - applauding them for mindlessly repeating the talking points they received from their public relations advisers. Politicians on the Right on the other hand are harassed, insulted and forced on the defensive for daring to suggest that expelling Israelis from their homes and transferring their land to Hamas might not be in Israel's best interest.

It isn't just issues related to Israel's national security that are shunted under the rug by our media stars as they obsess over our politicians' relative likeability and body language. All issues of concern are ignored.

A week before the elections, it seems worthwhile to look at a few of these other issues so that we will at least have some idea of what is at stake.

FIRST, WE have the economy. Of all the parties running in these elections, only two have enunciated their economic policies in any coherent manner. Likud, led by Binyamin Netanyahu is a free market, small government party.

Labor, led by union boss Amir Peretz who oversaw the Histadrut labor union as it plunged into bankruptcy taking several workers' pension funds with it, and held the national economy hostage to its illegal general strikes, maintains that Israel must adopt the South American socialist model that has done such wonders for the Argentinean, Venezuelan and Bolivian economies.

The front-running Kadima party has outlined no economic platform. Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert both promises to continue the free market reforms Netanyahu pushed through as finance minister, and to reverse them, while his deputy Shimon Peres promises an end to "piggish capitalism."

Kadima's incoherence serves its needs in the election season because the only question that the media considers relevant or newsworthy is whether a candidate or a party expresses sufficient "social sensitivity." Translated into talking points this means that candidates are judged by the amount of contempt they level against Netanyahu for having implemented free market reforms.

While Netanyahu's reforms caused a large, sustained drop in unemployment and moved Israel from the brink of economic collapse to become the fastest growing market in the Western world, the media barrages the public with unsubstantiated, and transparently imaginary statistics proclaiming that a quarter of Israel's children are starving.

Aside from the invisible hundreds of thousands of starving kids, no one seems to care that workers just barely scraping the borders of the middle class are paying 33-40 percent income taxes, or that VAT - a regressive tax if there ever was one - is 16.5 percent. It doesn't seem to bother anyone that our markets are run by monopolists that overcharge us for everything from food to housing to banking services because they can because they are monopolists.

All the journalists who ooze "social sensitivity" never seem to make a connection between overtaxed business owners and unemployment or low wages for skilled and unskilled, educated and uneducated workers. Given the media's love affair with South American socialism, it should surprise no one that those minor parties that have something to say about the economy generally say that they hate and oppose capitalism and small government.

ASIDE FROM the economy, there is the issue of Israel's constitutional crisis. During the course of the campaign, there have been several notable episodes which illustrated the depths of Israel's constitutional morass.

First we have the interim government's treatment of the Knesset's investigative committee into police brutality against protesters at Amona last month. Acting in clear contempt of the Knesset, Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz barred their senior officers from testifying before the committee. The fact that as government ministers in a parliamentary democracy they are constitutionally bound to uphold the decisions of the Knesset seems to have made no impression whatsoever on the ministers - who have the full support of the media in their law-breaking activities.

Then we have the odd decision by Attorney-General Menachem Mazuz to appoint himself arbiter of what decisions the interim government is allowed to make before the elections. Last week, Mazuz ordered the Health Ministry's medications committee, which is responsible for determining what prescription drugs should be covered by state medical insurance, to desist from convening until after the elections. It never seemed to occur to Mazuz that it might not be any of his business whether the committee convenes since absolutely no legal issue is raised by the schedule of its meetings.

Mazuz's decision to turn a committee of civil servants into a matter under his purview is just the latest in a series of dubious if not downright unacceptable maneuvers on his part that have served to empower him far beyond what any reasonable person would deem reasonable.

Following Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's massive stroke in January, Mazuz invented a bit of Orwellian legalistic gobbledygook by defining Sharon's condition as of one of "temporary incapacity of a permanent character."

Mazuz had good reason to act as he did. If he had simply declared that Sharon was "permanently incapacitated" - which he is - then a complicated, multi-step procedure for selecting and approving a new prime minister and government would have been set in motion, the results of which are unclear. But by declaring Sharon "temporarily incapacitated on a permanent basis," Mazuz blocked that procedure from taking place. In so doing, he seized the power to select the prime minister from Israel's elected officials, effectively anointing himself the prime minister's sole elector.

Israel's constitutional crisis has two central characteristics - the Knesset is emasculated and the legal establishment as represented by the Attorney-General and the Supreme Court is disproportionately empowered. By all rights, this state of affairs should have been a major issue in the election campaign. Yet, it has received no attention.

Before his temporary incapacitation of a permanent nature, Sharon and his PR consultants began espousing support for constitutional reform that would transform Israel from a parliamentary democracy to a presidential democracy. Since Olmert replaced Sharon, Kadima has been all but silent on the issue.

For its part, Labor members have repeatedly voiced their satisfaction with the current imbalance of powers. This makes sense because in constitutional matters, the state prosecution and the Supreme Court routinely rule in accordance with their members' leftist political beliefs thus empowering the Left well beyond its numerical support among the public.

NETANYAHU HAS stated his preference for a reform of the method of electing Knesset members. The Likud supports splitting the ballots so that 60 members of Knesset will be selected directly by voters on a regional basis while the other 60 will continue to be elected by the proportional party lists.

There can be little doubt that a movement away from proportional elections will not only increase accountability by tying parliamentarians to their constituents, it will also eliminate some of the smallest splinter parties and so stabilize Israeli governments.

In the next few years, Israel's security, economic growth and constitutional order will all be challenged in both familiar and unfamiliar ways. Sadly, because of our media's temporary bias and superficiality of a permanent nature which causes it to squelch all public debate on all the issues of the day, as we go to the ballot box next week, we will be casting votes that will influence how those challenges will be met without the least awareness of either the issues at stake or the manner in which the political parties will contend with them.

Then again, since they have never been challenged on any of these issues, most of our politicians are also unaware of them.

You and Ms. Glick are the insane ones. Polls show Prime Minsiter Olmert and Kadima will do about as well, maybe better, than Prime Minister Sharon did in the last election. Likud is competing for third place.

Also, Kadima is not the left. I realize people who only see things in black and white have a major problem with grey, but Kadima is the center.

Iraeli politics:

Far left: Meretz, Ale Yarok, Arab parties
Left: Labour
Center: Kadima, Shinui
Right: Likud, Yisrael Beitenu, NRP/National Union
Religious: Shas, Yehudat haTorah (United Torah Judaism)

Of course, if you are on the right fringe the center looks like the left from there.

Caroline and the rest of the right need to consider that the Israelis are getting what they ask for. They have elected Begin, Shamir and Nethanyahu in the past. Perhaps now they just favor appeasing terrorists, avoiding tough issues and having the government and the Americans take care of them. They are not fools they know what the candidates will do. Kadima has allowed Hamas and Al Queda free reign in Gaza, have brutally beaten people in Amona with little provocation and have been extremely vague about what they will do. The people know this and are voting for them anyway. It can't all be explained by media bias.

"media stars as they obsess over our politicians' relative likeability and body language"

Sounds like the American "media stars".

Remember how gaga they were over arissstocratic (in fact, parvenu) John Kennedy? How weak in the knees they got over the oh-so-charismatic Bill Clinton? How they flipped over the sophissstocated John Kerry who just accidentally fell in love with two megarich heiresses?

Is a prerequisite that news reporters be brainless and live in a fantasy world?

I vividly recall the Six Days War. The Israelis had their backs to the wall, Arab UN delegates were on the TV licking their chops, and it looked as if the Israelis might get wiped out the first day or two, but AT LEAST THEY WERE FIGHTING BACK.

There is no genuine anti-Oslo party for Israelis to vote next week. All there is is the lesser of two evils and Kadima will win for that reason. Labor normally would stand a chance but Amir Peretz would destroy Israel with misguided socialist policies long before Oslo did the country in. So that's why it will not win for the third successive election since 2001. The Likud's Netanyahu has no credibility on national security since he himself met and negotiated with Arafat as Prime Minister and handed Hebron and one third of Judea and Samaria over to the PLO at Wye. There's little to believe he would act differently in office. Israel's media is a captive of the Far Left. You wonder if its leaders are up to the job of confronting the Hamastan their own policies helped to install in power. We'll see after the elections.

(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")

Its more that Israelis saw the Right never did anything to solidfy Israel's hold on the territories or reverse Oslo while in power. So Israelis are voting for a Seinfeldian party. They know Kadima doesn't really stand for anything but it least it won't make things worse than they are.

(Denny Crane: "I Don't Want To Socialize With A Pinko Liberal Democrat Commie. Say What You Like About Republicans. We Stick To Our Convictions. Even When We Know We're Dead Wrong.")

This is not an election, it's a national competency test. If Kadima wins, the US should convert all aid into straight jackets for the voters.

Maybe the polls are wrong. They could be representing wishful thinking by Israel's leftist and destructive media.

"I vividly recall the Six Days War"

As I do - I was in Japan at that time - I saw many Japaneese wearing buttons that said 5-10-5 - finally I asked my host what it meant -

It turned out to be a play on words - English and Japaneese - 5 is pronounced - "Go" in Japaneese- ten is pronounced "Jew"

Go Jew Go - Nuff said!

... The Likud's Netanyahu has no credibility on national security since he himself met and negotiated with Arafat as Prime Minister and handed Hebron and one third of Judea and Samaria over to the PLO at Wye. ...

"Give me a real war on terror," Albright reportedly advised Arafat, "and I will push Netanyahu on settlements."
Netanyahu did not rush to implement anything, but Clinton wanted that peace process joke show to go on and Netanyahu was pushed into implementing what others signed away. Interesting what Shlaim writes about Netanyahu:
"Netanyahu was a bitter opponent of the Oslo accord, viewing it as incompatible both with Israel?s security and with its historic right to the Biblical homeland. He spent his three years as prime minister in an attempt to arrest the exchange of land for peace that lay at the heart of the Oslo accord. This Israeli retreat from the historic compromise struck at Oslo called for a reassessment of the American role but no real reassessment took place. President Clinton maintained an active personal involvement in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks but he only achieved very modest results in the shape of the Hebron Protocol of 15 January 1997 and the Wye River Memorandum of 23 October 1998."

ROFL! Yehuda, I remember when I was a kid and the Six Day War happened, and I remember the years when Golda was PM. Labor was in charge then, and those pioneer Laborites would fight! At least with that generation, there was no question of appeasing the Philistines and handing territory over to heathens who vowed to murder every Jew in Israel. Whatever the faults of that generation of Laborites, Golda and Dayan were clear, Israel would fight terrorism without question and territory for terrorists was not an option! The last Israeli leader with any stones was Begin; Shamir was hamstrung by Daddy Bush and James (I hate the Jews) Baker. Netanyahu has more stones than any other mainline party Israeli politico, but honestly, if I woke up tomorrow and saw that there had been a coup in Israel and those Israeli generals with big brass ones had taken over to stop the insanity, I'd be fine with it. The generals could hand things back to the civilians once there are civilians with the stones of Begin or Golda.

Bret

Still they know what they are voting for and what they can expect to get. The right in Israel has become delusional. Many believe in Barry Chamish conspiracies, now they don't believe polls or believe it is all being manipulated by the media. They need to roll up their sleeves and do some of the hard work instead of retreating into fantasies. Caroline Glick is one of the better writers and realists but on this one she is joining the delusional crowd.

Yes, ironic. Netanyahu was the Man, but he had to deal with clinton not not-too-bright. Then, when we got a President willing to stand up for Israel, Sharon betrayed the people who elected him and started implementing a surrender plan.

Bush seemed to be a real friend of Israel in his first term, but seemed to turn against Israel in his second term. Condi Rice, too. I suspect that the reason for this is that Sharon told Bush this was what he wanted. Bush had to pretend to lean on Israel a bit, for political and diplomatic purposes, but I don't think he would have pushed so hard if Sharon hadn't told him to. Sharon, after running as a conservative, wanted to pull out of Gaza and the territories. What a lost opportunity!

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