An election that is a choice between life and death
The coming elections in Israel may prove fateful not only for Israel but for the world.
By DANIEL DORONSmoke rises after what forces loyal to Syria's President Bashar al-Assad said were warehouses for rebel fighters in al-Maslamiyeh village(photo credit: REUTERS)
The Middle East is a tinderbox. If Israeli Left wins the elections it is committed, for the sake of peace, to cooperate with US President Barack Obama’s determination to upgrade a dysfunctional, irredentist Palestinian Authority into another criminal Arab state.The Left believes that to respect Palestinian human rights they must be granted self government. They cannot explain, however, how a government that violates human rights, that robs and represses its citizens, as all dictatorial, dysfunctional Arab governments do (especially the PA), advances human rights.The unintended consequence may be that within a few weeks the fledgling PA “state” will be taken over, peacefully or not, by Hamas. Hamas won the last parliamentary and municipal elections in the West Bank by a large margin.See the latest opinion pieces on our page
As in Gaza, Hamas will promptly launch missile attacks on the center of Israel, and may cause thousands of casualties and great ruin. Even a compromising Labor government will be forced to stop the assault by conquering the West Bank.Battles in heavily populated areas are most bloody, with tens of thousands killed and wounded, Arabs and Israeli.Arab civilians will probably flee to Jordan.They will topple the monarchy and extend the Iranian-sponsored Hamas state to the eastern bank of the Jordan. Israel will face an additional existential threat.So much for peace in our time.The other major divide between Right and Left is about social and economic issues. The Right lacks any coherent free-market orientation.
It is in fact very statist. Not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, however, who is the only Israeli leader who understands economics. Netanyahu had the political guts to initiate some bold reforms that saved Israel from continued economic decline. Contrary to the lies that he did not do a thing to improve the economy and even made it worse, during his terms of office the average Israeli income doubled, and so did public savings. Poverty and unemployment were dramatically down.If Netanyahu was the magician some expect him to be , he could perhaps have done more after dealing with Iran, Obama, the conflagration in the Middle East and the time-consuming, heavy burden of dealing with a totally dysfunctional and corrupt Israeli political system that puts through hell any attempt to implement serious reform, as was evident from the bitter fate of the “anti-concentration” bill that a majority of MKs from all parties made a sham of in the hope of being rewarded by the tycoons.Should the Left win the elections it promises to further extend the welfare state. The welfare state, created by the dysfunctional and corrupt Mapai regime, bolstered its political strength by giving the poor a few peanuts to keep body and soul together, making them dependent on the politicians who run the government for three generation already.The price was very heavy. The new immigrants first and then many more Israelis lost their self-confidence and became wards of charity, with all the social malaise that chronic penury creates: broken families, disintegration of communities, crime and anti-social behavior. One has only to compare the achievements of similar Moroccan families who settled in France or Canada, and who made spectacular advances, with those who we forcibly settled in our periphery (determined to transform them, as socialist dogma requires, from “corrupt merchants” into “honest farmers”) without access to education, arable land or capital to see what damage the government of Israel and the Jewish Agency inflicted on these good, hapless people.If this is not convincing enough to prove what a disaster our first socialist, and then statist system wrought, just ask yourself why a nation with the best human capital in the world, in a country in which foreign capital invested over $300 billion, a country that aught to have been one of the richest in the world, cannot afford to pay its capable workers more than an shameful average wage of about $200 while prices are often higher than in Manhattan.The vigorous expansion of the dysfunctional and corrupting welfare state, that Labor proudly promises, will spell disaster for the Israeli economy and endanger our future.Israel already lost over the past three decades close to a million people, many of them young and capable. They could not make a living or advance professionally in our highly corrupt and nepotistic, monopoly- ridden economy.The election campaign just concluded has revealed another troubling, dangerous malady in our democracy: a media that has largely betrayed its vital role by becoming the advocate of its owners, who are determined to topple Netanyahu because he poses the greatest danger to the survival of the corrupt political-economic system that enables them to extract billions in inflated prices and to impoverish Israeli consumers so that hundreds of thousands of families cannot make ends meet.Already in 1997 Ari Shavit, Haaretz’ most esteemed pundit, wrote, “What is happening to us, what is this lynching atmosphere? Why do our editorial writers behave like judges in a kangaroo court whose verdict is predictable? Why is the campaign against Netanyahu so lawless, so acerbic, so blood thirsty, and why have good people become hate mongerers?” A democracy cannot function with a corrupt media that distorts the information based on which citizens make informed decisions.Hopefully the results of these elections will teach the condescending and dishonest journalists the lesson that negative campaigning does not always pay and that citizens cannot be bamboozled. They have a mind of their own
