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Israeli Death Trip?
TPMCafe — Back in the 1970's, there was a fantastic book about Wisconsin in the late 1890's. It was called "Wisconsin Death Trip." It was not about suicidal political decisions made by the progressive folk of the Badger State. It consisted of photographs of, I recall, dead and depressed Wisconsinites, often in their coffins. It was creepy. The term "death trip" jumped into my head today when I read Fareed Zakaria's Washington Post column on the Israeli election. He writes of Avigdor Lieberman's triumph: "His Yisrael Beytenu party won 15 seats, placing third but ...

It's existential alright
Israel Matzav — ... Writing in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria sums up the rise of Yisrael Beiteinu : Whether or not the new government includes him, Lieberman and his issues have moved to center stage. As fiercely as he denounces the Palestinian militants of Hamas and Hizbullah, his No. 1 target is Israel's Arab minority, which he has called a worse threat than Hamas. He has proposed the effective expulsion of several hundred thousand Arab citizens by unilaterally redesignating some northern Israeli towns as parts of the Palestinian West Bank. Another group of several hundred thousand could ...

Israeli Elections: Worse than a crime....
The Reality-Based Community — ... . As we all know, the kingmaker in Israel now is the racist pol Avigdor Lieberman , whose platform seems to consist of baiting Israeli Arabs (or Palestinian Israeli citizens, depending upon your view) and setting up the conditions for expulsion. What is only slightly less obvious is that Lieberman derives the vast majority of his support from Israel's Russian population, most of which arrived in the early 90's, and much of which does not speak Hebrew yet. But here is the thing: the Russian community's main enemy in Israel is not the Arab population, but rather the ...

The Dangers Of National Unity
TPMCafe — ... called Lieberman (or shall we say even Marty Peretz, as Fareed Zacharia implied). There is the question of what national unity means, or at least how it plays. By 1984, the great danger to Israeli democracy was allegedly Meir Kahane, the caustic, menacing, ultra du jour. But his power stemmed, much like Lieberman's today, from his saying bluntly what a generation of leaders before him had fudged politely: ...