A new poll released by Israel Radio Thursday showed that the Likud-Yisrael Beytenu ticket is still the favorite to win next month’s elections in Israel with 34 seats in the Knesset.
Labor placed second with less than half the projected Knesset seats of its competitor, with 16.The Israeli left is dead, dead, dead.
Naftali Bennett’s party, Bayit Yehudi, was unaffected by his recent controversial statements and is projected to come in a close third, with 15 seats.
It was killed by Palestinian-Arab hostility and intransigence and by the international left which perpetually excoriates and undermines Israel while ignoring, if not abetting, the rise of political Islam. Meanwhile the diaspora Jewish left seems entirely out of ideas. For so many years the presumption was that if only Israel would put a leash on settlement activity (which it did, anyway, but no one seemed to notice or care) then we could coax the Palestinians back to the negotiating table where a formal end of hostilities could be banged out within a two-state solution.
Progressive-left Jews generally blamed their right-leaning coreligionists in Israel for Palestinian intransigence rather than laying that blame at the feet of the Palestinians, themselves, where it rightly belongs. Decade after decade Jihadis scream for Jewish blood and decade after decade progressive Zionists blame their fellow Jews in Israel, and in the territories, for Arab hostility toward them.
Now that Mahmoud Abbas, with the collusion of the international community at the United Nations, has formally killed off the Oslo Accords, progressive-left Zionism is left with no clue, nothing to say, and near zero political prospects. (Will Meretz even have a presence in the next Knesset?) This has opened additional political space for the pro-Israeli right-wing to make their case and to advance electorally. The Israeli right wants to either annex all of Judea and Samaria or, along with Naftali Bennett, some of Judea and Samaria, namely "Area C." The Israeli center seems to want to maintain the status quo, while the delicate Israeli left is out in the cold, dreaming their fading and delusional dreams of Oslo.
In the mean time, the hostile Obama administration is considering promoting an even more hostile Chuck Hagel to the position of Secretary of Defense which would send a very clear message to both Iran and to the Palestinian Authority that Israel cannot depend on the United States to "have its back." That message, in fact, should already be crystal clear to all but the most left-leaning of ideologues who consistently refuse to acknowledge what is directly in their faces.
2013 is going to be a very challenging year for the Jewish state of Israel and the very last people in this world that they can count on are those progressive Zionists who continue to point the trembling finger of blame at their fellow Jews in Israel. Israelis know this, of course, which is part of the reason that the left has lost so much support within that country. Israeli Jews are not so stupid as to support a political movement, or an American president, that is hostile toward them.
It's just basic common sense.
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