“Israeli Election Roundup”
By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO─ It’s March Madness time in Israel. Pundits are crunching numbers and filling out brackets, trying to figure out what the composition of the next Israeli coalition government will be.
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Benjamin Netanyahu declared that Likud had a “great victory.” This bolsters his claim that he speaks for all Jews. After all, his party received twenty-four percent of the votes cast!
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During his victory speech, Netanyahu reiterated the hardline he took in the election’s last few days: “We have nothing to cheer but fear itself.”
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During the campaign Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman maintained that Israeli Arabs “who are with us deserve everything, but those who are against us deserve to have their heads chopped off with an axe.” His party received slightly higher than five percent of the vote compared to nearly eleven percent for the Arab Joint List. Arabs constitute twenty percent of the Israeli population. Perhaps Lieberman needs to receive a letter from American Senators reminding him that the Israeli Declaration of Independence guarantees “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex” and that the only person ever executed by Israel was Adolf Eichmann.
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Looking at the election results, it is obvious that the biggest winner was the real estate agents and construction companies on the West Bank.
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Baron is professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted via lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com . San Diego Jewish World points out to new readers that this column is satire, and nothing herein should be taken literally.