The worst way to form a government, except for all the others (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column:

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Earlier this week, Avigdor Lieberman decided, for some reason, that he would not join PM Netanyahu’s coalition (yes, he gave ‘reasons’, but nobody takes them seriously). Coalition negotiations with Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party, the last to get on board, continued until a few hours before the deadline for Netanyahu to present his putative coalition of 61 Knesset members to President Rivlin.

As I make the final update to my post on Thursday morning, the excitement is over. Bennett demanded and got the Justice Ministry portfolio for Ayelet Shaked. There will be a Likud government with 61 mandates, the narrowest possible margin, a government that can be knocked over by the defection of a single member.

There were other possibilities. Netanyahu and Bennett might not have come to agreement, or some other member of the coalition suddenly might have decided to make a new demand despite having signed an agreement. Netanyahu might have chosen to invite Labor’s Herzog into a unity government; given the proper inducements, he would have agreed despite his protestations.

If Netanyahu hadn’t succeeded at the last moment, the President might have given the job of forming the coalition to some other Knesset member, like Herzog, who would probably have had even more trouble than Netanyahu. He might have tried to force a unity government. There is even the possibility that no member of the Knesset could form a coalition, in which case there would have to be new elections.

This is tremendously frustrating. There are big problems — internal and external — that require attention, and the PM and various party leaders who are ministers have spent almost two months negotiating with each other, having meetings (open and secret), hatching plots (Lieberman), etc. This is after the excruciating election campaign that went on from December to March.

I admire PM Netanyahu for being able to carry on at least the most important affairs of state during this protracted period, but this system is dysfunctional. And a 61-member coalition means that it isn’t over — Netanyahu will have to try to broaden the coalition after its inauguration unless he wants even more instability.

The parliamentary system is a good one, because it makes the government highly responsive to the will of the electorate, as expressed by their representatives in the Knesset. An ineffective government can be removed at any time. If only the US had such a system, Obama would be long gone! But the coalition process is problematic.

One suggestion is to simply get rid of the process by appointing as Prime Minister the leader of the party with the greatest number of seats. But this could have unintended consequences, if there are more than two parties in the race. Suppose there were three parties, two on the Right and one on the Left. If the right-wing parties received 39 seats each, and the single left-wing party got 52, the latter would win by a large margin — but the clear preference of the electorate for a right-wing government would be thwarted.

Another possibility would be to elect the Knesset and then have the MKs choose a Prime Minister from among themselves, by majority vote. One problem with this is that it removes the direct connection between the voter and the PM that is important if the people are to have confidence in the PM. Worse, it would produce backroom wheeling-and-dealing similar to what goes on in coalition negotiations, except that there wouldn’t be explicit coalition agreements.

What about direct election of a Prime Minister? Israel tried American-style separate elections for the Knesset and the Prime Minister in 1996 and 1999. This proved unsatisfactory because the elected PM didn’t necessarily have the base needed in the Knesset to form a stable coalition. Other suggestions that detach the PM from the Knesset could bring about the kind of paralysis that has characterized the relationship between the US President and the Congress.

Yet another idea would be to raise the minimum percentage of votes needed to enter the Knesset from the present 3.5% (5 Knesset seats) to a much larger value and then require that each party designate another party that would get its votes if it did not reach the threshold. This would make it more likely that one of the larger parties would get a majority, and simplify coalition negotiations if not. But it would also reduce the representation of minority views in the Knesset, in effect disenfranchising their voters (it could also produce an outcome with two large Jewish parties, each without a majority, and one smaller Arab party holding the balance of power).

Despite the frustration, this isn’t a simple problem, especially since the political propensity is to find ways to exploit unplanned loopholes in any system. Possibly, to paraphrase Churchill’s famous comment on democracy, the coalition system is the worst way to form a government — except for all the others.

Bending the arc — away from Israel (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column:

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Alex, the son of anti-Zionist billionaire George Soros, is starting a Jewish political action committee:

Bend the Arc PAC will back progressive candidates by making direct contributions to their campaign committees. It will focus on issues such as income inequality, marriage equality, social justice and immigration reform.

Alex Soros explained that

There’s an opportunity to launch something that actually speaks to what the American Jewish community cares the most about and to show the narrative of what the real American Jewish experience is.

But what’s the point of creating yet another ‘progressive’ PAC? Why specifically target Jews when there is no specifically Jewish issue that it is concerned with? The answer lies in what it is not concerned with:

Hadar Susskind, who has previously worked for other Jewish organizations including J Street, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life, will serve as director of Bend the Arc PAC…

“We don’t touch any foreign policy stuff,” he said. “One of the reasons behind doing this is that [the other Jewish groups] aren’t really representing the views of the American Jewish community…” [my emphasis]

Does that sound familiar? It’s J Street without Israel! This PAC will undoubtedly fund the very same candidates that the J Street PAC does. But J Street has been losing its appeal, as the Obama Administration’s anti-Israel policies have begun to make even some ‘progressive’ Jews uncomfortable.

Since Roosevelt’s presidency, American Jews have leaned left because of their concern about social issues, as exemplified by the civil rights movement. Reform Jews have even been criticized for acting as though Judaism was synonymous with liberal politics. Most, however, strongly supported Israel — and so did most Democratic politicians. With the advent of Obama, that is no longer the case, and liberal Jews are caught in the middle.

Soros has come along with a brilliant solution to their dilemma: be progressive, but don’t think about Israel.

Bend the Arc will be able to funnel Jewish contributions to the left-wing politicians that support and will continue the administration’s policies, including its anti-Israel ones. But because it won’t “touch any foreign policy stuff” none of those hard questions about Hamas and Iran need come up. Jewish progressives will be able to donate to it with the clearest of consciences, with warm and fuzzy feelings about gay marriage and immigrant rights, without any nagging doubts that perhaps they are betraying their people.

The traditionally liberal Jews who have been forced to choose between their progressive domestic agenda and their love for Israel will now have a home.

And it won’t be a lightning rod for criticism by Zionist Jews the way J Street was. Anyone who opposes Bend the Arc can be dismissed as a right-wing ideologue, or even a Republican.

Finally, it is a diversionary tactic. It will work to focus the Jewish community on domestic issues. The less any American, Jewish or otherwise, thinks about the radically anti-Israel and anti-American policies of the Obama wing of the Democratic Party, the better it will be for them.

I doubt that any of the Democratic presidential candidates — yes, I expect challenges to Hillary — will explicitly campaign on the foreign policy record of the Obama Administration (it’s too gruesome), but I do expect that at least one will embody the same philosophy of helping America’s enemies and hurting its friends.

And you can bet that that candidate will be the favorite of Bend the Arc.

Stop foreign subversion of the Jewish state! (Vic Rosenthal)

Vic Rosenthal's weekly column:

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Are Israelis paranoid? Much of the world is out to get us, and I’m not talking about the Arabs.

In his travels about Israel and the Palestinian Authority, Tuvia Tenenbom (Catch the Jew) tells of encountering massive European-funded projects, costing millions of Euros. They arrange propaganda tours (including one to Yad Vashem that is all about how Israelis are the new Nazis), pay for illegal Arab construction in Judea/Samaria,  fund lawfare against the state and IDF personnel, support dozens of NGOs that work overtime generating material to demonize Israel, interfere with IDF soldiers and try to provoke violence, bring international volunteers to act as human shields in violent protests against the security fence, encourage boycotts and divestment, and — above all — support those Jewish left-wing extremists that are so important to the overall objective: to take down the Jewish state of Israel.

Ah yes, those Jewish left-wing extremists. Tenenbom interviews many of them, some well known like Gideon Levy and Arik Ascherman, and others that you never heard of, like tour guide Itamar Shapira, whose job is to take Europeans to see how Jews have ‘stolen Palestinian land’ and are the new Nazis. Tenenbom sometimes calls them ‘self-haters’ and sometimes ‘narcissists’, but I think the second description is better. These are people whose pathological obsession — there’s no better description — is to present themselves as great moral beings, saints as it were, by virtue of their unique ability to perceive the inherent evil of the Jewish state in which they live and take action against it.

Tenenbom interviews numerous Arabs, including Hanan Ashrawi, Jibril Rajoub, taxi drivers, university students and professors. All of them appear secure in their belief in the rightness of the ‘Palestinian cause’ (getting rid of the Jews) and in its ultimate success. In fact, he finds them much more appealing in their straightforwardness — for example, for the way they make up outlandish stories to support their position, and are completely unfazed when they are shown to be false — than the anti-Zionist Jews, who are self-absorbed, hypocritical, angry, bitter and consumed with hatred.

He also talks to Haredim, members of the Knesset, whores, journalists, soldiers, etc. But the one theme that recurs — in addition to how annoying the Israeli left-wing intellectuals are — is the presence of foreign money put to destructive purposes.

The line between criticism of Israel and Jew-hatred is a fine one which has long since been crossed by the anti-Israel establishment. Tenenbom’s book is anecdotal, but there is hard evidence, collected by the NGO Monitor organization, that the anti-Zionist project of the European Union, its member countries, church groups, the American New Israel Fund and other foreign sources have done much to ignite and fuel the wave of Jew-hatred and Israel-hatred that is sweeping the West today. When European football fans chant “Jews to the gas,” behavior that their governments officially deplore, they are only expressing the logical outcome of the demonization that these governments are paying for.

Recently, it was revealed that the group Breaking the Silence, which travels the world telling exaggerated, decontextualized, undocumented and plain made-up stories about IDF behavior has actually contracted to provide such ‘testimonies’ in return for payments from European government funded charities! BTS reports are used as ‘evidence’ for UN condemnations of Israel, to demonize her and to provide justifications for actions to limit her ability to defend herself.

The degree of irresponsibility shown by the governments — or maybe the out-and-out evil motive behind their project — is shocking. While the EU ambassador to Israel tells Tenenbom about solving conflicts and improving the lives of all the residents of the Middle East, Jews and Muslims alike, the concrete actions that Europeans and Americans are buying with their taxes and donations, if successful, will be the violent destruction of Israel and its replacement by an Arab Muslim entity.

Although we can do little to prevent the dissemination of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda in the West, in Israel we still have the ability to rein in the pervasive anti-state groups operating here.

Naturally, the Left in Israel, many of whom depend on foreign money for their livelihoods, oppose any such action as “anti-democratic” and claim that it restricts free speech. But I fail to see how ‘democracy’ extends to inviting hostile foreign elements to operate in our country and paying home-grown traitors to subvert it.

Israel’s new Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, has made the control of foreign money one of her highest priorities. This is probably one of the reasons that she has been viciously attacked with fabricated accusations of racism and support for genocide (as well as crude sexist insults). As a result of death threats, it has been necessary to provide her with bodyguards. Even her sworn political enemy, Zahava Galon of the left-wing Meretz party, found it appropriate to defend Shaked from the slime being thrown at her.

There have been attempts to put limits on foreign-financing for left-wing NGOs before, which have been bitterly opposed (and derailed) by the Left. In 2011, a bill was passed that required NGOs in Israel to report foreign donations, but enforcement has been spotty.

I’m hopeful that the new government will strongly support a law to control this practice, and to limit access of foreign activists to the country. What other country in the world would permit this?

We don’t have to. Let’s stop the flow of money and kick out foreign saboteurs.