Will Netanyahu be the new Israeli Prime Minister?!

The personality that is going to assume power would face enormous benefits; it would at least have to improve the living conditions at the domestic level as well as to monitor the course of the winds of the “Arab Spring” that has not subsided yet, and has not resolve its positions on the historical enemy of the nation. This is what worries Israel at all levels most.
  
Despite the huge range of the responsibilities that should be assumed by the next government, there are tangled partisan atmospheres pervading the election season that indicate that there will be a lot of political inconsistencies and contradictions. Predominantly, they are Zionist right-wing contradictions, including both the traditional and extremist religious ones, which are taken much into account among the various components of the Israeli political assembly. 

The political Israeli step to dissolve the eighteenth Knesset and to hold the elections beforehand was not taken absurdly, but was well thought out and taken according to internal and external data that affect in one way or another the Israeli partisan scene related to the next stage. The internal indicators are likely related to the inability of the Israeli government to be committed to the promises it has made regarding the economic and social fields. 

Israel is suffering from an economic hardship as a result of the global economic crisis. The external data vary between the Iranian nuclear threat, and threatening of the military option to get rid of it, and between those who believe that the most important data came to enclose the fear of the consequences of the U.S. elections. The winds of its results are moving contrary to the path of Netanyahu’s ships, for he is worried about the possibility that the U.S. President Barack Obama might impose real pressure on his government after he turned a blind eye to him for four years during his first term. 

Hence, in front of the data and reasoning found in the Israeli political partisan map, Netanyahu also realized that the Israeli center-left wing could rise back again through the ballot box to the top of the political scene. That is why he established an electoral alliance between the Likud Party and the Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel Our Home) Party. This alliance is considered to be as the “coalition of the entrapped groups”. On the one hand, Netanyahu cannot offer the same promises that he failed to achieve in the past three years. On the other hand, Avigdor Lieberman is afraid of the consequence of failure, for this means being subjected to trial, jail, and imprisonment. Thus, the title of this opportunistic interest-oriented alliance becomes driven by an extremist right-wing ideological crane. Israeli sources collectively name that government a “war cabinet” and the “alliance of extremists”.
 
This step refers that Netanyahu fears that one of the center-left parties could obtain number of seats equal to the seats of the “Likud”, and thus Netanyahu may face difficulties to form a new government, and might be subject to concessions and be blackmailed by the coalition parties. This comes especially after the “Jewish Home” Party led by Naftali Baniet, which strongly opposes a two-state solution, opposed the halting of settlements, and stresses that the State of occupation is a Jewish one, have had a growing strength. This party was also able to attract a number of the men of Netanyahu, who is seeking to obtain 40 seats and more in the elections so that to be a candidate to form a new government as a largest bloc. In fact, the task of forming it will be much easier than if the radical “Yisrael Beiteinu” Party remained to be independent. To ensure a parliamentary majority, he will be having more than one right-wing party competing to join his government. According to the results of a survey published by the Haaretz newspaper, the coalition of the parties that make up the government will maintain a majority that exceeds 61 seats in the Knesset consisting of 120 members, what would enable him of re-forming the government. 

Those following the Israeli affairs believe that Netanyahu considered holding the elections earlier and the alliance made with the “Yisrael Beiteinu” Party came after he became convinced that Washington will play a crucial role on the stage of the Israeli politics through its support for center-left forces. This have been done in the mid-nineties, during when Netanyahu was the prime minister and Bill Clinton succeeded in overthrowing him in 1996 in front of Ehud Barak, and before that with Netanyahu’s predecessor, Yitzhak Shamir, when the U.S. administration froze its financial guarantees because of the settlement, what led to the victory of Yitzhak Rabin. Perhaps this view is certainly what prompted Netanyahu to grab again the chains of the game through those already taken decisions. 

It seems that Benjamin Netanyahu has been lucky ever since he took office, for his government has never been exposed to powerful orgasms and at the same time the parliamentary bloc, which combines Netanyahu with other political parties has never faced influential splits, and things also never reached the level of competing for the leadership of the Likud Party. It is obvious that this government keeps on working from the premise that the Israeli political assembly is unable to create an alternative, and this is likely known by all the political forces that fall within the framework of the government. 

Therefore, Benjamin Netanyahu still leads the electoral scene with a clear absence of the left-wing Party, which suffers from fragmentation, division, and lacks a leading personality. He has not been able to attract the public according to recent polls, based upon which the majority of approximately 52% preferred to adhere to security rather than adhering to “peace”. This promotes the occupation-oriented trends of the successive Israeli governments, which conjure up in their electoral slogans the objectivity of the safe borders as an influential and decisive factor affecting the decision of the Israeli voter in the electoral seasons. 

This has other related racist principles, such as maintaining the unity of Jerusalem, continuing the policy of settlement, swallowing up the Palestinian land, and retaining the Jordan Valley because of its security importance. For this reason, the majority of the voters threatened that they will change their vote if the list that they intend to vote will express its willingness to give zones back in the Jordan Valley, to abandon the Israeli sovereignty in East Jerusalem, or to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank. This refers to the fact that the right-wing has made progress in attracting the Israeli public opinion toward security and has settled its battle with the left-wing parties, especially the Labor Party, which evaded the term “peace” in the (political - security) document issued by it finally. However, this document is considered by many people as having a right-wing spirit more than having a left-wing one, for it did not address the settlement in Jerusalem. 

The head of the Labor Party, Shelly Yachimovich, has highlighted the essence of this contradiction in the Israeli left-wing orientations, when she said that “Our intellectual doctrine is clear and transparent and is on the table; two states for two peoples, because the other option is a binational nationalist state, and this option puts the essence of the Jewish and democratic state at risk, and that is why we should stay away from it completely”. 

The viewpoint of the party that is seen as the core of the Zionist left-wing camp confirms that Israel would become extremist more than before, and that the next government will reveal more right-wing extremist trends when dealing with internal and external affairs. Hence, this means that we will be facing more intransigence with regard to the file of negotiations which will likely be kept in the drawers, and therefore there would be no chance to engage in negotiations on issues relating to the ultimate causes as those related to East Jerusalem, the right of return, borders, and water. 

In fact, the new Israeli government as most of the estimates indicate will not differ at all from its predecessors in terms of the right-wing trends and sticking to the Zionist occupation-oriented principles based upon which the Zionist entity was established, clinging to settlement as the essence of Zionism and as the largest crucial key in the electoral equations. Netanyahu has confirmed that he would not stop settlement projects in his term yet to come in case he was re-elected.