Comment Re:Fake news (Score 1) 42
While I understand what you're referring to in regards to my own country I'll admit to being wholly ignorant of what you're getting at in regards to Israel here. What about Israel's election process has resulted in two decades of right wing, nationalist governance? We were able to vote our own nationalist out of power after only one term in office, why has Israel not only kept theirs but actually turned more nationalistic (at least as far as I've seen) over the last two decades?
Israel's government is picked by coalition. This has positive aspects. For example, since the elections are state-wide, there is no room for gerrymandering. With that said, it does have its own problems.
There are a whole bunch of elements that introduce inaccuracies into the process. For example, there are 120 members of Knesset, so you'd expect that any party that got 1/120 of the votes will get a representative in. You'd be wrong. There is a minimal percentage below which the party lose all of its representatives, and all the votes it got are tossed. That is, in fact, the main reason Netanyahu was elected this time: Meretz party didn't pass, and all of its votes were lost.
The members of Knesset then elect the government through simple majority. Since no party gets 61 MKs, this is done by coalition. The coalition, by its nature, is a compromise. What's more, there is nothing binding a party from voting for a PM with any relationship to what they promised before the election.
For example, three elections ago, several parties united for the sake of the elections to one group. This belonged to the "anti-Bibi" group. But Bibi is very smart, so he managed to lure one of the parties in the group, headed by Gantz, to leave the group and join him, with the promise of rotating the PM job, so that Gantz gets it after a while. Bibi, being the scorpion that he is, betrayed that, obviously.
Which brings me to another reason: there are very few leaders of stature in the Bibi opposition. Those who are there keep breaking their own word, and are punished by the voters. To my eyes, they are just too afraid to do what's right, thinking the voters will punish them. The actual elections, BTW, seem to indicate that is precisely the wrong thinking. Several members of the aforementioned group refused entering the government, and the voters definitely rewarded them.
But the end result is smaller turnout on election day for the sane camp than for the corrupt one
After that, I'm struggling to understand how a government that is sympathetic to the peace process has a chance at being elected when by your own account (and my own assessment as well) the one government that we've seen as an alternative to Netanyahu's wasnt terribly interested in the topic, only less antagonistic.
Like I said, that government was composed of different parties, and their views on this particular topic was the most diverse. In addition to that, they took the helm when many aspects of Israel's government were literally falling apart. There was a lot on their plate, and this was a topic that was easy for them to neglect, because it is controversial in Israel itself.
With that said, I do believe that had Mahmood Abbas approached with a serious offer, I do believe they would have allocated the resources to look at it.
That's a point I feel that most of Israel's criticizers completely ignore. All the criticism I hear of Israel on the peace front seem to assume, if not downright assert, that the Palestinians have no agency at all. That they bear no responsibility for the sorry state things are, and that there is nothing they can do moving forward. I think there is enough blame here to go around, covering everyone. With that I mean, of course, Israel and the Palestinians, but I also mean the US, Europe, as well as the way the media covers the conflict.
And I think that is also a factor in Israel's public moving away from willingness to talk to the Palestinians. Some of it is brainwashing and demographics, for sure, but some of it also honestly giving up on the prospects of this ever succeeding, regardless of what Israel does. There is a very prevalent sentiment that, between Rabin, Barak and Olmert, Israel has put on the table everything it reasonably can put on the table, and was met with nothing but playing blame games and dismissal.
My point is that looking at current willingness to negotiate in the Israeli public may be misleading. If Abbas put forward a serious offer of his own, even one that is, in itself, not one acceptable to Israel, but one that shows true willingness to actually reach an agreement, I believe that that sentiment will change.
Israel and the Palestinians have been in talks since 1991. In all of that time the Palestinians have put forward precisely zero official suggestions of their own on how the conflict is meant to end. As recently as Obama, Abbas stated that he will never acknowledge Israel as the home of the Jewish people. I believe that that feeds the shift away from willingness to talk you see in Israel. "If we're destined to live in war, might as well have the land".
For the record: I don't subscribe to that last sentence. I think Israel's best interests are served by having the Palestinians independent and prosperous. With that said, I see zero way to reach that point through bilateral moves. It's not only the Israeli society that have moved away from reaching an amicable solution.