I thought this recent Graeme Wood column in The Atlantic on the situation on the ground in Israel was interesting. An excerpt:
On Sunday night in Jerusalem, near the Knesset, the crowd of 50,000 protesters alternated between moroseness and fury. It was, especially for Jerusalem, a secular crowd. I stood next to two young women smoking a joint, which probably took the edge off the fury. All were united in leveling a charge against Netanyahu: that he would rather hold together his coalition of zealots than cut a deal, even one that would bring hostages home. The fury reached an apex when the mayor of Jerusalem, Moshe Lion, tried to speak. He is a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party but stuck to nonpartisan bromides. Still, the crowd shouted him down because of the association. When he persisted, one of the young women next to me took the joint out of her mouth and spat on the ground.
Netanyahu could extract a kind of disgusted gratitude from these protesters if he offered a deal with Hamas (and the group, in an uncharacteristically conciliatory mood, agreed to it). To some in the crowd, the terms of that deal seemed literally not to matter, because, as one sign read, no price is too high. Surely not everyone in the crowd would go that far. But the hooting and heckling suggested they thought that Netanyahu had empowered negotiators too little, and that he was ultimately responsible for securing a deal, even a temporary one. In addition to repatriating hostages, a deal would allow time to negotiate a more durable peace and avoid a possible Gaza-as-Somalia scenario (lawlessness, warlordism, and endless civilian misery) if Israel continues to drift forward with no obvious plan.
If accepting a deal imperils Netanyahu’s good graces on the right, rejecting a remotely plausible one would probably doom him and his government because of the wrath of the center and the left. They believe that more of the hostages—who have now spent six months in darkness or fending off rapists—would be home already if Netanyahu had told his more extreme colleagues to go pout. Right-wing support has long since reached its apex, and the government is already weak. Public outrage might finally destroy it. The question of who would replace it is, remarkably, almost an afterthought. Whoever comes next could not possibly be worse.
Adam noted a while back that the massive anti-Netanyahu protests taking place prior to the Hamas atrocities weren’t a sign of a healthy democracy but instead signaled the opposite. Tens of thousands were taking to the streets, reservists refusing to serve, etc., to protest Netanyahu’s authoritarian power grab via judicial “reform.”
It’s a more existential struggle now. The protesters want to throw their rotten government out for catastrophic incompetence and prioritizing retaining power over the country’s interests. I hope they prevail.
Open thread.
Baud
This will be us if we don’t turn out.
RaflW
Not to doom-cast, but “It’s a more existential struggle now. The protesters want to throw their rotten government out for catastrophic incompetence and prioritizing retaining power over the country’s interests” could describe us in a few years.
I think we’ll work our assess off and avoid that! But Bibi and Donald are both firmly in the authoritarian-shitlord club.
Captain C
You, me, and a whole lot of people. From your mouth to the FSM’s ears.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
How many times have I heard some variation of this over the years? This man is a fucking vampire and has arisen more times than Christopher Lee.
Old Man Shadow
Don’t say that! The universe is listening!!!!
Bill Arnold
@Baud:
Pretty much.
Israeli voters removed Mr. Netanyahu from the top power position (PM) for about a year and a half, June 2021(election March 2021) through Dec 2022 (+/-). That was a straightforward election. Close, but he lost. He was interfering like crazy with the government during the time he was out of power, but he was out of power.
Then Israeli voters failed to keep him from sliming his way back into power. And he formed a government which includes, to be blunt, religious supremacists. (And that religion is not Islam or Christianity.)
It was close (near 50%), as Geminid often reminds us; a couple of small parties did not quite meet the threshold for proportional representation. (IMO) Israeli voters fucked up, and the removal of this man from his regained position of power has already involved enormous amounts of pain and death.
RepubAnon
@Old Man Shadow: That’s always true, and “it can’t get worse” is always followed by “and then it got worse.”
cain
@Bill Arnold: I agree that Israeli voters got complacent and didn’t ensure that the man didn’t come back.
I hope now that with everything happening that they replace that govt with someone who understands and can negotiate a ceasefire within reasonable parameters.
trollhattan
BBC just did a deep dive and the conventional wisdom among Israelis and analysts was the current protests are predominantly “just the usual people” and that the majority of the population remain war supporters and by extension, not after Bibi’s hide.
I fear the second worst outcome of this battle is that the sides will be irreversibly hardened into their current positions for at least one if not two generations. There will be no two-state resolution; occupied lands will continue being seized by fundamentalist settlers; armed conflicts will resume.
And the US among the Arab-Persian world is assigned the role of Israel’s puppet master [as if] and each of their sins is visited 2X upon our heads. We’re going to get fucked high and hard as a direct consequence of Bibi’s actions.
Baud
Hey Betty C, more fun with gender in the Sunshine State
HumboldtBlue
The USS Eisenhower carrier group has been ordered into the Red Sea off the western coast of Yemen to deal with the threat of increased drone and missile attacks against shipping. The USS Ford carrier group returned from the Med and its station off the coast of Israel in January.
That’s Nov. 5, for us.
Baud
Warblewarble
@trollhattan: If the US gets fucked high and hard, it will because of what the US has done. It can’t all be blamed on Netanyahu , That’s aneasy cop out.
trollhattan
@Baud: Pretty nice of us considering we do not yet have a proven working lunar craft nor lander.
“Really, it will be just fine! We’ve been there before.”
dmsilev
@Baud: Part of the deal is that JAXA, the Japanese space agency, will be developing a large long-duration lunar rover. Toyota will be the main contractor (my favorite comment from the article: “Couldn’t they at least pay a few extra thousand dollars to get the Lexus instead of the Toyota model?”).
sab
@dmsilev: Lexus is rear wheel drive. Who wants that in a lunar rover?
dmsilev
@sab: For a sufficiently large sum of money, I’m sure they’d engineer in an all-(six)-wheel drivetrain.
Martin
@Baud: It’ll be worse. Israel is a small country. LA county’s economy is double the size of Israels. Israel cannot completely isolate themselves from the community of larger nations (like the US) because they are dependent on that support at the UN, etc. for their survival.
The US has no such limitation. We can tell everyone to fuck off.
Martin
@trollhattan: The moon is still one of those places that you go without too many proven elements. Overall, I think the US plan is kind of okay – but the starship/refueling component is way harder than a lot of people realize and I think should have gotten some Falcon 9-based test articles up by now. Gating that behind Starship reliably making orbit seems very risky.
Jay
@sab:
Lexus has 7 AWD cars and 2 4WD SUV’s in it’s line up.
Warblewarble
Much as I despise the theocrats in Iran, (and loathe the genocidists in Israel.The US making an honest effort to engage diplomatically with Iran , would make more sense than an “iron clad ” commitment to back Israels reckless provocations of Iran. Which only suit the interests of Netanyahu and his extremist allies.
pajaro
I think it is correct that a majority of the Israeli Jewish electorate would be fine to see Bibi go (since he was the one whose inactions brought them to this point), but also support the war aims of removing Hamas from power.
Baud
@Warblewarble:
Obama tried that and then Trump got elected. That damage isn’t going to repaired anytime soon.
Warblewarble
@Baud: There is no relation between Obama’s diplomacy and tRUMP’s election.
Baud
@Warblewarble:
I have no idea if that’s true. Trump made the Iran deal an issue. But the point is, his election ended any shot of diplomatic progress for a long time.
wjca
Amen. I’ve got no fondness for theocracies. But since the choice is between the Iranians and the Saudis, I’d far rather go with the theocrats who have spent billions pushing their radical fundamentalist version to Muslims around the world.
So what if the Saudis have lots of oil? We’re a %&$#@ oil exporter!
Geminid
@trollhattan: Polls show a plurality of Israelis want to ditch Netanyahu but don’t want elections during wartime. A smaller group wants elections now, and a still smaller group- about 20%- want to keep Netanyahu as Prime Minister.
The “ditch Bibi after the war” position is starting to erode though. This war is no longer the shocking emergency that it was intitially; now it’s a long, grinding crisis with no end in sight. The idea behind waiting is that a caretaker government would be unable to take care of urgent problems, but this government has proven incapable of solving problems anyway so why wait to replace it?
In ways, the government has already disappeared. The Knesset went into a 40-day recess when it could not come up with a compromise draft bill. And Israelis complain that while everyone else in the region anticipates a prospective retaliation by Iran for Israel’s latest Damascus airstrike, their government is providing its citizens almost no guidance on what to expect.
But for this government to fall, there still need to be 5 defectors from Netanyahu’s core of 64 MKs. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir threaten to bolt over a hostage deal and take a dozen more MKs with them, but they’re probably bluffing. This could be- and certainly should be- the last government they’ll ever part of, and they don’t want to bring it down early.
So I think this government will totter into May and possibly beyond, but I still predict that Bibi will be a private citizen by the time Joe Biden thrashes Trump this November.
“Bibi” may be a convicted criminal by then. His trial on 3 corruption counts has been going on since April of 2021 and some observers think it might be ready to go to the 3-judge panel for a verdict by summer’s end. Then the appeals will begin.
Steve in the ATL
@sab: well played
sdhays
@Geminid: With the goals as defined, the war in Gaza will never be over.
Martin
@Warblewarble: I think that is objectively untrue. Obama tried to pull down a lot of old, calcified global problems. Inviting Iran back to the national stage was a clear effort to try and get them to be a bit more globally cooperative and less confrontational – and Irans agreement to that suggests they weren’t opposed to it. Same with overtures to Cuba and a number of other nations. Obama did push against Israeli settlements, albeit gently. Trump campaigned *directly* on those issues and immediately reversed those policies, even earning a settlement with his name on it.
We don’t know how much of an impact that had, but you can’t say there was no relationship there.
Sister Golden Bear
@RepubAnon: As they used to say on Mythbusters: “Failure is always an option.”
Frank Wilhoit
@Geminid:
The only way Netanyahu leaves is if, and when, someone else can get 61. His brief hiatus out of power a couple of years ago was preceded by, if I recall, four rounds of elections, spanning more than two years, after the first three of which the attempt to form an alternative government (months-long in each case) ultimately failed. My $0.05 says that that history will repeat itself. This is the downfall of scrutin de liste: if there are too many parties, you do not get stable governments. I think the threshold has already been raised once: it needs to be raised again. And some of the parties have experimented with joint lists, but the incentives go the other way.
sab
I love Israelis, but if they follow their current course their country is not internationally sustainable.
But they live in the Levant. So it might work. But not okay on my country. Can they survive okay in the Levant but banned in Europe and North America? Probably yes.
Martin
@sab: I wouldn’t be so sure. It’s a small economy. Those nukes are carrying a LOT of deterrence value, which is why I think Israel is the nation most likely to use their nukes – because they have such importance in the minds of the nation. So far, the US has been willing to stand behind Israel and keep everything on a pretty low boil, but I don’t think that would hold if they lose the support of the EU and US. I think an isolated Israel starts to behave a lot like North Korea – not in the domestic police state sense, but in the defiant ‘we will take 100 of yours for each of ours that we lose’ sense. I think they are very close to seeing using those nukes as a defensible policy. Nobody else in the world sees it that way, except for some fringe Republicans cheerleading for the rapture.
Geminid
@Frank Wilhoit: The first 2 of the 5 elections since 2019 did not produce governments. The third one, around March of 2020, resulted in a coalition government that lasted about a year. That’s the government where Benny Gantz brought his Blue and White party into the coalition. Netanyahu brought it down even though he was Prime Minister after he tried and failed to remove the Attorney General. He wanted to “fix” his criminal case.
Israeli governments typically are formed within three weeks of an election. That’s the time allotted the leader whose party won the most MKs. Last time, Netanyahu got an extension and finally formed his government in late December. The election was held November 1.
The last government took almost ten weeks to form, I think from April to mid-June of 2021. Netanyahu took a shot and came up short after an extension and a 2-week hiatus when war with Gaza broke out in May. When Netanyahu failed, Yair Lapid was given the mandate because his party, Yesh Atid, came in second. Lapid cobbled together an 8-party coalition that included an Arab party as well as Naftali Bennet’s party (I forget the name of that party because it fell apart and is now defunct). As an inducement to join, Lapid let Bennett take the first rotation as PM. Lapid got to be Prime Minister from July to December of 2022, as a caretaker.
Bill Arnold
@Warblewarble:
????
The JCPOA was an election issue, in an extremely close election. Warmonger and anti-Iran B. Netanyahu was supporting D.J. Trump in that election cycle. It was the early phase of making support for Israel a partisan issue in the USA. It ripped apart many Jewish congregations, and boosted the USA evangelical right, who want Israel nice and strong before it is destroyed in their eschatology.
Geminid
@Frank Wilhoit: Joint lists are more than experimental. The main Ashkenazi Ultra-Orthodox party is a joint list of two different sects. In the last election, Gideon Saar formed a joint list with Gantz, and Netanyahu talked Smotrich and Ben-Gvir into running a joint list.
One difference-maker was Labor’s refusal to run a joint list with Meretz. Labor leader Merav Michaeli caught so much crap for that she is retiring.
There is an Arab Joint List that’s composed of two parties; a third one split off before the last election, but it drew only 2.85% and was blanked. Meretz was also blanked with 3.24%, when another tenth of a per cent would have won it 4 MKs.
El Cruzado
@Geminid: I still maintain that “Bibi stays while the war is going on” is the main reason the war is still going on. And I predicted that when it started.
Lyrebird
@Baud: For my mental health I’m mostly not looking at comments here, just coming to thank Betty Cracker (THANKS!!!), but you spoke for me as well with that.
Geminid
@El Cruzado: This dynamic has been obvious from the start and it is one of the reasons Netanyahu’s was forced to subordinate himself to a three man War Cabinet where he has only one vote. It was common knowledge that Netanyahu’s legal problems compromised him, and even his political allies knew that “Bibi” is a liar.
Right now, though, I don’t think the war is being extended to save Netanyahu’s hide. They can’t figure out their political goal in Gaza. I read that Shin Bet has recommended bringing Fatah to run the place, but that’s a political decision, not Shin Bet’s.
This is what Israel’s Arab neighbors including Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt want and are working towards, and it tracks with U.S. policy, so I think that it will be the eventual outcome. But the Israelis won’t accept it right now so they’re stuck, without a better solution of their own because there really isn’t one.
I am not sure Netanyahu can drag this war out for too long though, because Israelis can tell. This is not like Iraq, where the Bush administration could sweep bad news under the rug for a while because it was 6,000 miles away. Too many Israelis serve in or have served in the IDF for their government to pull the wool over their eyes in this matter. And the war directly impacts almost everyone, economically if in no other way.
suzanne
If they don’t prevail, I predict Israel is gone in 10-15 years. The only way for Israel to survive is to either create a separate state(s) of Palestine, or provide full citizenship to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The status quo is not sustainable.
sab
@suzanne: That is what I think also, but others don’t agree. Also too that is the two state solution that Israel has already rejected.
Jay
@Geminid:
They can’t even figure out how to “defeat” Hamas, or even what “defeating” Hamas means.
The PA, if they are smart, will pass, no matter how many “incentives” they are offered.
Any “deal” will have to include Israel, and Israel won’t quit stealing land in the West Bank, or is willing to return any of it.
All the pain and suffering Israel has inflicted on Gaza just means that sooner or later, Hamas, or those like them, will be back, and will find willing support in Gaza.
kindness
I remember after Reagan’s term, even though Bush I won, we told each other ‘No one could be worse than Reagan!’. Well, Bush I was better than Ronnie but boy were we wrong about that whole ‘no one could ever be worse’ nonsense. Shame on me.
sab
@Geminid: I have opinions on Israel. You have facts. Thank you for all the work you do tracking their politics.
Geminid
@Jay: Have you followed recent developments with the PA? The new “technocratic government” put in at Saudi Arabia’s and the UAE’s behest? They seem to be going along with the plan.
If the Arab plan goes forward, it will be under a Security Council resolution. In that event, I think the PA will go along despite your recommendation.
Geminid
@sab: I appreciate the compliment, but with the caveat that a broader knowledge base does not mean I am correct in any of my conclusions.
sab
@Geminid: Yes, but more correct than I am.
Jay
@Geminid:
I think that the PA will jaw, jaw, jaw, but:
a) there will be no enforceable Security Council Resolution
b) the PA will be trading all but a few villages in the West Bank for the mess in Gaza,
c) there is a reason why Gaza wound up in Hama’s hands and almost the West Bank as well. The PA has never represented Palestinians. They used to just represent themselves, now they represent Sawdi Arabia and the UAE.
Geminid
@Jay: Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations want to live in a peaceful region and they have a lot more at stake than Americans 5,000 miles away and Canadians 7,000 miles away. They also know the players and the problems better.
Now, you may have a better and more realistic plan, but at some point I think you ought to state it.
Jay
@Geminid:
I don’t have a better or more realistic plan,
there isn’t one.
Great for Sawdi Arabia and the UAE for trying, but it will fail like every previous attempt.
Kosh III
baud said ” ‘Teacher Wood’
Sounds like someone on Grindr
Paul in KY
@RepubAnon: Me back in 2009 watching Batshit McChimpy fly off to his fake ranch & laughing & jeering & being so, so happy and some stranger sidles up beside me and remarks “One day you will beg to have him back in power…”
so, you’re correct. Unfortunately.
Paul in KY
@dmsilev: That would be a ‘Space Lexus’.
Paul in KY
@suzanne: I think it is sustainable. Horrible for the Palestinians, but unfortunately ‘sustainable’.
This absent some Arab great who takes over Egypt and basically redoes Nasser, only betterer.