Only the Police Squad detective could figure out this mystery.
Picture Ahmed and Abdul. They are cousins living outside of Jericho. They work on a Jewish moshav near the ancient town when the 1948 War of Independence strikes. After the battle, the two relatives find themselves on opposite sides of the 1949 Armistice Line (the “Green Line”). Ahmed is given Israeli citizenship while Abdul retains his Jordanian identity. Neither likes Jews very much. Ahmed lives in Israel but does not serve in the army or support his new country. Abdul joins the Fedayeen, who attack Israelis as much as possible. When Israel takes Abdul’s town in 1967, he flees to Jordan. When Yasir Arafat takes it back in 1993, he returns. In 2026, Ahmed is a member of an Arab Knesset party while Abdul is a senior PLO figure in the Palestinian Authority (PA). They both hate Israel, and the only difference between them is the color of their passports.
Israel had its much-ballyhooed elections, and as expected the results were muddled. As in the US, the media lied about popularity, and as such Bibi Netanyahu’s Likud came in first with 27 seats, and his bloc led the “change bloc” of Gadi Eizenkot by around 54 versus 47. My AP math training tells me that those two numbers don’t add up to the 120 seats in the Knesset. Oh, there are also 19 Arab Knesset members pulling down 48,000 shekels ($15,000) a month. Israeli Arab politicians are Hamas without weapons.
Does that statement sound extreme? Mansour Abbas, not to be confused with the never-leaving PA president Mahmud Abbas, sat in the previous Lapid-Bennet government. Eizenkot supposedly set four terms for any party that wanted to join him. One of those conditions was to declare Hamas a terrorist organization. Israel’s Abbas will not do so. He was given multiple opportunities after the election, with his eight mandates, to say with a clear voice that Hamas is a bunch of psychotic murdering terrorists — and he refused. The Arab Knesset members are more and more resembling the Democrats in Congress: they hate their own country, cannot find one good thing to say about it, and plot how to destroy its foundations through their official activities in government.
The results of the election are apparently a major effort of the Muslim Brotherhood to get out the vote in Israeli-Arab towns, where voting was running at over 80 percent. There may have been many claims of voter fraud, but nothing to date has changed the outcome of the Knesset going from a 120-seat body to a 101-person operation. The Arabs do not want to govern; they want to end the state of Israel. Even the change bloc has to swallow real hard to imagine either bringing them into the government and committing political suicide or forming a minor government with the Arabs giving backstop from outside. Do you want a cyanide pill or a bullet to the head?
The responsible thing to do obviously would be for there to be some form of compromise: Bibi is prime minister, and Eizenkot returns to minister as he was shortly after October 7, 2023. But big egos and even bigger promises make such an outcome seem unlikely. The change bloc is the “never Bibi” crowd, and most of the leaders of the relevant parties swore on a stack of telephone books that they would never, not in a thousand years, sit in a government with Bibi Netanyahu. Now Israeli politicians have often had amnesia or invented reasons why what was said yesterday no longer applies today. Naftali Bennett famously swore he would never sit in a lefty government until they offered him the job of prime minister, and voila, there he was in a lefty government. So maybe someone will defect to Bibi’s side or will grow up and make for a unity government. And maybe the Iranians will make peace with Israel and the sun will rise in the west.
It would appear that Bibi is presently in the driver’s seat, though he does not have anything close to 61 seats. From the sad faces of the media folks after 10 PM on Tuesday, Bibi definitely is the winner — by defying all of their predictions. He bested Eizenkott by 5 seats party-to-party. The polls promised exactly the opposite.
It would be one thing if the two Arab parties were okay with Israel and just wanted more money and resources for their sector; that’s pretty standard for political parties. How did Johnson Space Center end up in Texas if not for the man for whom it is named? But the Israeli Arab parties have not shied away from showing their support for terrorist organizations and states. They would love to receive their fat salaries from a country that would magically disappear and be replaced by “Palestine”. So what do you do when 15 percent of the Knesset wants the building and its country destroyed? How do you get to 61 from 101 and not 120? We’re in lousy new territory, and if we had better people as politicians, they would figure out how to work together and sideline the Arabs. While the Arabs claim that their large turnout was due to Internal Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir being tough on Palestinian prisoners, the truth is that the same Ben-Gvir rushed enormous resources into Arab towns when their killing each other got to be too much to ignore. They are ingrates, and their lives would suck in Jordan, Syria, or Egypt. Wow, sounds like lefties in Europe and the US: they have it great but scream and yell that they want to destroy the country that gives them such good lives. Losers.
As I write these lines, the last of the votes are being tabulated. Apparently, President Herzog will give Eizenkot the first shot at making a government. I get a laugh out of the “Bibi Bloc” nonsense: the 13 ultraorthodox members left his government because they couldn’t come up with a draft law that was acceptable to everybody, most importantly to the left-wing High Court. So if Bibi is given the baton second, he will have his work cut out for him to get his regular partners back in the stable and then try to peel off half a dozen from Eizenkot’s orbit in order to get to 61 seats. I remember Ariel Sharon having so many ministers due to his promises to his partners that they had to add eight inches to the table used for ministerial meetings. Likud members in the past have groused that Bibi gives the good stuff to other parties while leaving them the Ministry of Felafel in order to get other parties to join. Sometimes it gets quite unseemly as a heavy-hitting Likud stalwart bellows that he wants to run the defense ministry and not the tourism bureau. Politics can be ugly.
So stay tuned. I doubt that the lefties will want another round of elections in April. They fell backward, and there is nothing to suggest that they are out of room to lose even more mandates — especially as a few failed right parties will not try to run again. Something may work out, officially or otherwise. Shamir and Peres and other pairs held their respective noses and worked things out because the alternative was worse. I think that most Israelis would like to see some type of unity government with so many threats still facing the country. But egos are bigger than this small country, and we may just glide along with a Bibi Netanyahu caretaker government for some number of months. It happened before, and no budgets could be passed. People working at governmental ministries said that they could do nothing meaningful during that period. Israel is politically neutral.