There is no left left in IsraelSOURCE:
THE WEEKURL:
https://theweek.com/articles/834287/there-no-left-left-israel
(EXCERPT) Don't be fooled by misleading stories about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's disappointing showing in Tuesday's election in Israel. Even if the centrist Blue and White alliance of former military chief Benny Gantz were to eke out a very narrow victory over Netanyahu's right-wing Likud Party, sending Bibi into retirement to face a near-certain indictment on corruption charges, the story of this election is not at all about the retreat of the right.
On the contrary, the most far-reaching consequence of the 2019 Israeli election may well be that
it verified, beyond any reasonable doubt, that there is functionally no left left in Israel. It has become
a country with a center, a right, and a far right, but no electorally viable left to speak of.Center-left social democratic parties have been in sharp decline in recent years across the Western world. But nowhere has the collapse been more stunning than in Israel, whose founders and ruling class for the first 30 years of the country's existence were very deeply linked with the labor movement. Labor has been in retreat ever since the collapse of peace negotiations with the Palestinians in 2000. But its showing on Tuesday was truly astonishing: With 5 percent of the vote, the Israeli Labor Party is now less than two percentage points away from failing to clear the minimum threshold (3.25 percent) for winning seats in the Knesset. The party is approaching the possibility of extinction.
And it's not as if another left-wing party has benefited from Labor's eclipse. With 94 percent of the votes counted, Meretz, a social-democratic and green party, had pulled in a barely viable 3.3 percent of the vote. The Arab parties, meanwhile, suffered from record low turnout (the largest came in at 5 percent), and they are forbidden from joining governing coalitions regardless.
And that's it for the left. Gantz's upstart centrist alliance and the right-wing Likud effectively tied at 29.2 percent of the vote, with two ultra-orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, both coming in at 6.7 percent; and an alliance of far-right Zionist parties, United Right and the secular nationalist Yisrael Beiteinu, both finished with 4.2 percent. (One additional party, the centrist Kulanu, barely scraped by with 3.3 percent of the vote.)
That leaves Netanyahu very well placed to form a government quite similar to the solidly right-wing one that has been ruling the country since 2015, albeit with one significant change: Likud's share of the vote looks to have increased from 23.4 percent to a little under 30 percent (with seats in the Knesset expanding from 30 to something around 35 out of 120).
And he did it while running for re-election under threat of indictment — by warning ominously that if Likud lost, the left would take over Israel.CLICK ABOVE LINK FOR THE REST
