After continuous American support for Israel since its founding in 1947, it is time to reassess the relationship.
An article notes that “Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman stated their intention to merge Netanyahu’s Likud Party with Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu”. The writer, goes on to argue that the reason behind the merger is that “the two men had domestic politics at the forefront of their minds”. He goes on to write “In birthing the new Likud Beiteinu, Netanyahu and Lieberman are hoping to create a monolith that will dominate Israeli politics for years to come”.
He mentions the difficultly of gaining a majority in the Knesset with its multitude of small parties. He argues “Netanyahu and Lieberman are gambling that their new Likud Beiteinu party will be an electorally dominant rightwing giant by combining the strength of their two parties while also picking up former Likud voters who have voted for Kadima in the past two elections. The hope is that a bigger party will have the strength to withstand hostage-taking demands from smaller parties”.
However goes on to write that the merged party may not be not as powerful as is hoped, he notes ” the current polls are not looking too promising and show Likud Beiteinu either slipping from its current combination of 42 seats or maintaining the exact same share of the Knesset that it holds now”, adding later on that “Likud Beiteinu might have a real problem with the Russian voters who make up Yisrael Beiteinu’s base. A poll commissioned for Channel 99 showed only 59 percent of 2009 Yisrael Beiteinu voters casting their ballot for the new mega-party in 2013, with 22 percent undecided”.
He concludes “The formation of Likud Beiteinu might even deal the final fatal blow to the Palestinian Authority, as Lieberman has been waging a months-long campaign to discredit Mahmoud Abbas by calling him a diplomatic terrorist and is unlikely in his newly powerful position to agree to keep on bolstering the PA. This will create all sorts of headaches for the United States and means that any remaining optimism surrounding the peace process is misplaced”.
However, America needs to reassess its relationship with a party, and maybe even a country, that seems to be rapidly moving further and further to the right. The result of this is unsurprisingly means treating Palestinians, for all their faults, the way they were treated in the 1930s and 1940s. This obliterates the incessant American talk of Israel being a democracy.
Now more than ever there is a need in America to stand back from Israel and see where its interests and values really point its foreign policy.
Leave a Reply