Caroline Glick: Israel’s Real Election Is Between Its Politicians and Its Deep State
The headlines regarding the Israeli government’s decision to move towards early elections in April were a textbook case of fake news. “Netanyahu’s government collapses! Israel heading for early elections,” was the basic gist of most of them.
Israel’s last general elections to the national parliament, the Knesset, were held in March 2015. According to Israeli law, elections had to be held no later than November 2019. This week, Netanyahu and his coalition partners decided to hold them on April 9 – seven months before the legal deadline and more than four years after the last ones.
In other words, the decision to move elections from November to April isn’t a very big deal.
At his press conference announcing the move on Monday Netanyahu said he expects to form more or less the same coalition government after the April elections. So far, the polls indicate that the results for Israel’s center-right parties, which make up Netanyahu’s current government, will be more or less what they were in the last election.
Israel’s leftist parties will continue to wallow in the minority, with no chance of forming a governing coalition.
So despite the elections, Israel’s political environment remains stable.
Of course, anything can happen in elections. And as Netanyahu told a group of mayors from Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria on Wednesday, the media can be expected to continue its longstanding practice of pushing the scales as hard as possible in favor of the left – and, really, anyone they believe can oppose him.
Political NGOs, funded by foreign governments and radical donors and foundations in the U.S. have made it a practice to finance negative “non-political” campaigns against Netanyahu, and they are expected to repeat their attempts to unseat him and his coalition partners in the current election cycle.
The fact that Netanyahu is expected to win his r-election bid also will work to suppress voter turnout among his own voters. His great challenge then will be to motivate his supporters to vote while selling his message wholesale directly to voters, bypassing the media through social media and other nontraditional platforms, as he has in the past.
But assuming projections are correct, the great challenge Netanyahu faces today is not winning re-election. Rather, governing after the election will be his greatest challenge.
In Israel today, there are effectively two governments – one elected and one unelected. And as things stand, the unelected government has more power than the elected government.
Israel’s unelected government is its legal fraternity. Israel’s legal fraternity has two arms – the hyper-activist Supreme Court, and the attorney general.
https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2018/12/30/caroline-glick-israels-real-election-is-between-its-politicians-and-its-deep-state/
What to make of this???