Sept. 17: Will the Right snatch defeat from the jaws of victory…again?
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Benny Gantz and Benjamin Netanyahu: Rival protagonists in upcoming elections
The continued existence of the Left as a viable force in Israeli politics, despite the manifest failure of its political credo, is the gravest indictment of the Israeli Right.
It appears this week on the following sites (in alphabetical order):
For by… faith more firm in their unhallowed principles, the bad have fairly earned a victory over the weak, the vacillating, inconsistent good. – William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850).
Perhaps the most extraordinary feature of the upcoming September 17 elections is the fact that they are taking place at all—after the “ Right” managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of almost certain victory . But no less astounding is the fact that the “Left” actually has plausible chance of winning them!…
Lack of intellectual depth and daring
Elections in Israel: Twice in less than than six months
Indeed, there can be no greater indictment of the political incompetence and impotence of the “Right” than fact that the Left still remains a viable force in Israeli politics. After all, not only has their entire political credo been proven, beyond shadow of reasonable doubt, to be a disastrous blunder that has wrought death and devastation on Jew and Arab alike, but the Right has been totally vindicated in warning of the calamitous consequences that the “Left’s” patently ill-founded folly would precipitate…Perhaps more than anything, its failure to vanquish the “Left” reflects the lack of intellectual depth of the Right—and even more so, a lack of intellectual daring.
Inexplicable ideological capitulation
Indeed, in the wake of Oslo and up until recent years, the “Right” focused its energies (rightly) in condemning the dangerous defects of the concessionary policy of political appeasement and territorial withdrawal that the “Left” had embarked upon—without ever offering an actionable prescription of its own…This ideological capitulation by the “Right” is totally inexplicable—for it came about after all its censure of the “Left’s” wildly reckless doctrine had proven totally justified.
Lebanonization or Balkanization?
Unwilling, or unable, to base its own strategic paradigm on an independent analysis of Israel’s strategic imperatives and deriving a consequent comprehensive policy prescription from that analysis, the “Right” took the “Left’s” paradigm as a conceptual point of departure and attempted to formulate its alternative as a negation thereof…The result was an unfortunate and unconvincing batch of proposals that were easily exposed to be either a formula for:
(a) The Lebanonization of Israeli society (by annexation of all of Judea-Samaria, together with is Arab residents remaining part of Israeli society); or
(b) The Balkanization of Judea-Samaria (by partial annexation—with the overwhelming bulk of the Arab population left encapsulated in disconnected, quasi-autonomous enclaves, whose orderly administration would be all but impossible)…
Dangerous & detrimental symmetry
…Thus, while the “Left” is prepared to imperil Israel geographically to preserve it demographically; the Right is prepared to imperil it demographically to preserve it geographically…It has been the Right’s inability to eliminate this perceived vulnerability to the charge of promoting a policy that exposes Israel to no less a peril than the concessionary policy of the “Left”, which has breathed life into what should have been, by any rationale criterion, the long lifeless shell of its political adversaries.
Epilogue
Of course, one need not be endowed with exceptional powers of deductive analysis to reach the inescapable conclusion that the only non-kinetic policy that can effectively address Israel’s twin imperatives of geography and demography—in order for it to survive as the nation-state of the Jewish people—is that of a large-scale initiative for incentivized emigration of the non-belligerent Palestinian population to third party countries. ..Happily, the necessity of such a policy seems to dawning on increasing sectors of the political “Right” in Israel—see here, here, here, and here – although, regrettably, it is doubtful whether its promotion will play a significant part in the upcoming elections.
Sadly, until September 17, there is little to do in this regard but to wait and see whether, once again, the “Right” will snatch defeat from what should be, without a shadow of doubt, the jaws of certain victory.
As usual your talkbacks/comments/critiques welcome,
