Bennett government accedes yet again to Islamist Ra’am Party’s ultimatum

Yet again, the current government keeps on giving in to the ultimatums of Ra’Am or some members of it, that militate against the fundamental interests of Israel, When the government is not doing that it makes major concessions despite the fact that the concessions fail to produce the desired result, as has been the case with the extension of family reunification legislation which did not pass in the Knesset. This pattern is currently the case on the issue of moving the Bedouin Authority to the Social Services / Welfare Ministry.

Personally, I watched with revulsion, first, the political blackmail and extortions of Ra’am; second, a government that keeps on giving in to secure its votes at the cost of major concessions just to remain in power, and last, but not least, the obscene crazed efforts of Netanyahu and his Knesset gang to topple the government including resorting to the ridiculously extreme measure of refusing to support the government’s extension of the Family Reunification legislation, which extension Netanyahu’s successive governments sponsored and insured its enactment year in, year out.

I am sure a substantial segment Israeli electorate experienced the same revulsion. Clearly, things got to change and change expeditiously.

This is no way to govern a country facing a multitude of challenges, difficulties and problems both on the domestic and the international fronts.

And I submit that this dysfunctional state of affairs can only be somewhat fixed by a fifth general election, however costly and annoying this may be for some segments of the electorate.

At this junction, I verily believe that it has become imperative for Israel

a) to hold a fifth general election to give the electorate the opportunity to act in the nation’s best interests and vote accordingly to give one party the ability to form a strong coalition government with like-minded parties to govern for a full term instead of the current government that strikes me as an extremely unsteady ideological zoo, and in the process

b) to remove or politically incapacitate the poisonous presence of Netanyahu -a man whose very many domestic and foreign economic policies and foreign policy successes, I much admire, until the expiry of the full term of the fifth election, and if necessary beyond that.

I would hope that the new government’s mandate and priorities, will include the partial or complete reform of the current dysfunctional electoral system which has required no less than four elections in two years only to produce the current state of messy affairs.

Minimally, the electoral system ought to be amended

a) to raise the threshold for a party to secure seats to 10%., and

b) after the election results are in, to forbid the elected parties to behave in ways that are inconsistent with their respective ideology and electoral mandate, as has been the case for example with the Yamina party, among others,

In the meantime, I verily believe that the Israeli Justice Department has got to get busy and work on drafting new provisions to the Israeli Criminal Code against plain political blackmail and extortion of minority governments and/or of Ministers.

And while at it, I think, it is also high time to attend to the long-overdue reform of the current legal framework of office of the Attorney General, which as it stands at present, has enabled its current incumbent,

a) to keep interfering inappropriately with the operation of the Executive Branch’s exclusive decision-making authority and exercising the powers granted under this authority; and

b) to attempt a coup d’etat of sorts, by charging former Prime Minister Netanyahu with number of offences which leading legal scholars consider to be phony.

I wish my people and the Government of Israel, good fortune in addressing all of the foregoing matters in a manner that they consider to be the right way to deal with them.