Herzog and Livni Can Still Win the Last Election

Amnesty International’s British contingent had its annual convention the other day, and they had votes on a bunch of mostly innocuous resolutions. One of these was to denounce the rise in anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic incidents since last summer. It failed by a vote of 468 votes to 461. Even by that tiny margin, Amnesty’s declaration that anti-Semitism is good is shocking.

How did we get here and is there anything that can be done about it? Besides firing everyone in the Hasbara department that is?

Yeah there is. Encourage Naftali Bennet and Avidgor Lieberman to hold fast in their contradictory positions on cabinet posts and crash the current negotiations. There’s only a week and a half left in that extension that Rivlin gave Netanyahu before it goes down in flames.

That way, Herzog will get to form a new government and win the last election. Yeah, the one where Bibi just got that “decisive victory.”

The simple fact is that the left plus Kulanu has a majority.

The reason why a retroactive Zionist Union victory is necessary is that there is only one reason that Israel’s international reputation is down the toilet. One reason alone and that reason is Benjamin Netanyahu. One guy only: get rid of him and everything will fall into place.

Give Bibi the title of “Minister without Portfolio” as a consolation prize and a national unity government becomes possible. It’s necessary to rebuild Israel’s reputation in order to bring genuine peace.

The only reason the left lost the last couple of elections is the security thing, Bibi’s good at lying about things like that. If the center-left were soft on security Tzipi Livni and Yair Lapid wouldn’t have voted for last year’s war. Livini wasn’t able to travel to Britain for a number of years because the Palestinians and their supporters there claimed she was a war criminal and got a judge to put out a warrant for her arrest.

That doesn’t sound like anyone being squishy soft on security to me.

Netanyahu is the poster-boy for the BDS movement. He’s the Israeli Nixon and easy to hate from afar. True he’s done some good here and there; and his actions in France earlier in the year were perfect and necessary. But for everything else PR related, he’s been worse than useless.

His speech before Congress was a disaster. It made Israeli security a partisan issue in the US and ruined relations with the Democrats. Israeli relations with Western Europe are at a low point it hasn’t been at since Shamir was power.

While European anti-Semitism isn’t totally, or even mostly Bibi’s fault, he partly to blame, and a rightist government with Bennett and Lieberman where they want to be would make things even worse.

He needs to go, and soon. The election is over but it’s not over, Herzog can still win it, he must.