The 12-year consecutive term of Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel's prime minister likely came to an end last week when Yesh Atid Party head Yair Lapid and Yamina Party head Naftali Bennett announced that they had secured an agreement to form Israel’s next government.
"According to Lapid, Bennett and their media chorus, Israel is about to get a 'unity government.' Once it is formed, all will be sweetness and light. The political fights that have afflicted us will fade away as the nation undergoes a collective therapy session," journalist and author Caroline Glick wrote in a scathing analysis for Israel Hayom.
What really happened in Israel in 2021 parallels what transpired in the U.S. in 2020, that is a concerted effort to remove Netanyahu much in the same way the Democrat/media/Big Tech alliance schemed against President Donald Trump.
"If Lapid and Bennett were really forming a unity government, their supporters on Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t be banning right-wing voices or censoring and banning right-wing opinion pieces," Glick noted.
Since last week, Facebook and Twitter "have banned information about a scheduled protest outside the home of Yamina Knesset member Nir Orbach. They also suspended the accounts of Netanyahu’s son Yair Netanyahu and several other well-known right-wing writers and activists. Whatsapp banned the accounts of an entire community of right-wing political activists," Glick noted.
The new Israeli government "will be unprecedented in its composition, consisting of seven parties spanning the entire Israeli political spectrum, plus the backing of an Arab party for the first time," David Isaac noted in a report for Jewish News Syndicate (JNS).
Many questions remain over the ability of such an alliance to successfully govern.
“This looks to me like a car with four different wheels, and every wheel is going in a different direction,” said Lt. Col. (res.) Dr. Mordechai Kedar, senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. “The only thing today which they agree upon is the need to get rid of Netanyahu. This objective will be achieved in the first minute of this government. So what will keep it together in the second minute?”
Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, told JNS that the United States will be pleased with an Israeli government that includes left-wing members.
Pipes, however, cautioned that Team Biden could well be "disappointed if the right-wing parties — which are, in fact, more right than Netanyahu — have their way.”
Pipes said he expects the right-wing coalition partners to dominate, noting that in the negotiations on forming the coalition, the three right-wing parties — Yamina, New Hope and Yisrael Beiteinu — “have been in the driver’s seat,” and Yamina, with only seven seats, has been given the premiership.
Glick noted that, if the seven parties actually were forming a unity government, "Yamina MK Ayelet Shaked wouldn’t have felt it necessary to lock Orbach in a room in the Knesset and ban him from speaking to anyone who opposes what she and Bennett are doing with Lapid and the rest of their coalition partners."
"If this were a unity government," Glick added, "we could reasonably expect that Bennett and Lapid would eagerly put all their agreements on the table and let the public read them. And we could expect the multitudes to rush to join and support their great Zionist effort to restore tranquility, happiness, sweetness and light to the people of Israel."
"Unfortunately, Lapid and Bennett refuse to publish the contents of those agreements until after their government is sworn in."
Glick continued:
Beyond hiding information from the public about what they have agreed to do once in power, Lapid, Bennett and their friends in the media and the permanent bureaucracy are also working hard to silence their critics.
Over the weekend, in a gross overstep of his powers, Israeli Security Agency (Shin Bet) Director Nadav Argaman placed his thumb on the scales on behalf of Lapid-Bennett and their controversial government. Resonating leftist propaganda that delegitimizes all criticism of leftist policies from the right as “incitement,” Argaman released a statement Saturday where he insisted, “the incendiary discourse [around the Lapid-Bennett governing coalition] is liable to lead to physical harm.”
For more than a year, leftist activists and leaders have been calling openly for Netanyahu and his family to die. Repeated death threats against the Netanyahu family have been made publicly by leftist activists. Despite repeated pleadings from the Netanyahus and their supporters, Argaman has refused to issue a statement against the mass incitement from the left.
Likewise, for the past decade and a half, Israeli Arab politicians and religious leaders have issued a steady stream of incendiary and often openly anti-Semitic statements rejecting Israel’s right to exist and demonizing its people. Ahead of the Arab Israeli pogroms in mixed Jewish-Arab cities countrywide last month, those statements escalated. But Argaman never had anything to say about any of it.
So the first time the security chief decided to issue a warning about political violence is now, at the height of a heated and completely legitimate public debate around the formation of a government dominated by leftist parties that will not reveal whether or not it has pledged to effectively end Israeli sovereignty over Israel’s non-Jewish citizens and cede the Negev to irredentist Bedouin who openly seek the destruction of the state and are aligned with extreme Islamist elements.
If Lapid and Bennett were really forming a unity government, their supporters on Twitter and Facebook wouldn’t be banning right-wing voices or censoring and banning right-wing opinion pieces. And yet, since last week, Facebook and Twitter have banned information about a scheduled protest outside the home of Yamina Knesset member Nir Orbach. They also suspended the accounts of Netanyahu’s son Yair Netanyahu and several other well-known right-wing writers and activists. Whatsapp banned the accounts of an entire community of right-wing political activists.
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