Hillel Schenker: The View From Tel Aviv (good background on the political situation.)

[laststeamtrain]

The View From Tel Aviv
By Hillel Schenker

<snip>

The current military campaign is being led by the trio of Prime Minister Olmert, Defense Minister and Labor Party leader Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister and Kadima Party prime-minister-candidate Tzipi Livni, with IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi being the fourth spoke in the leadership wheel.

The key player here is Barak (our Barak, not yours). Ehud Barak, the most decorated soldier in Israeli history, a man who brought tremendous potential to the prime minister's office in 1999 only to bring the Labor Party down to its lowest point ever. The party that essentially established the state, and at its height had fifty-one members in the Knesset (out of 120), was only expected to get between eight to eleven seats in the next Knesset, down from nineteen in 2006. Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who was considered a failed and discredited leader when his term as prime minister ended in 1999, brought his party down to only twelve seats in 2006, but he has been considered the most likely winner of the February elections.

To turn Barak's image around, his PR geniuses decided to launch a reverse psychology campaign, with billboards stating, "He's not nice, but he's a leader," and other variations on the theme. Barak is notorious for keeping his cards close to his chest, so nothing can be certain about his motivations. Until recently he wanted to demonstrate that he was the responsible one, withstanding pressure to do something foolhardy, unlike the hotheads on the right. However, once he decided to go ahead with military action, he clearly used deception to draw Hamas into the trap, even appearing a week before the attack on the opening show of the season of our very own version of Saturday Night Live, "Wonderful Israel," making a fool of himself.

Olmert was playing the peace card till the last day of his term, hoping to have a public meeting with the Syrians as part of his legacy, alongside far-reaching statements about the need to return to the 1967 borders and divide Jerusalem. Livni was making more hawkish statements, trying to fend off the threat of Netanyahu from the right. And Chief of Staff Ashkenazi, who's low-key persona is a relief after his three hyper-macho predecessors, seemed to be cautiously applying the lessons of the Winograd Commission, which investigated the failures of the 2006 Lebanon War.

After December 19, all of the current leaders--Olmert, Barak, Livni and Ashkenazi--saw a window of opportunity and decided to use it. They also took advantage of the twilight between the end of the discredited Bush administration and the entrance of the Obama administration to act, under the assumption that the international community would find it difficult to intervene rapidly and coherently.

<snip>

In the short term, one of the political outcomes of the operation is that, for the first time since the elections were declared, the center-left combination of the Kadima, Labor and Meretz parties, backed by the Arab parties, is predicted to gain a majority of Knesset seats. If that happens, Livni, not Netanyahu, would become prime minister. But public opinion can be very fickle, particularly if the number of Israeli casualties goes up.

<more>

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090112/schenker

[Idealism]

1. And Israel slides more far-right than before if Livni gets elected

Welcome to the Shock Doctrine, see Thatcherism.

[enid602]

2. Israel

The second major country (in less than a decade) to lose its moral imperative, thanks to bad leadership.

[laststeamtrain]

3. It seems to be a Right vs Far Right contest. Sounds familiar to me. n/t

[Idealism]

4. Sadly, it is

And Far-Right wingnuts are winning, thanks to this recent 'unexpected' push in the polls

[Doctor_J]

5. This was planned (or has developed) along the same lines as 9/11. US and Israel are the

only ultra-right countries that are also bellicose.