When Benjamin Netanyahu needed an external enemy to cement his power, the Sheikh Jarrah eviction crisis provided it. Now it’s not just local, politics is house to house.
Benjamin Bibi Netanyahu has taken the old adage that all politics is local, and reduced it still further. Politics is now house-to-house. Dispossession and evictions on an individual basis in East Jerusalem, that wind up resulting in targeted destruction of apartment buildings in Gaza. There is a hideous symmetry to that, and it is most likely intended as such.
The current attacks on Gaza by the IDF are all about survival — the political survival of Bibi Netanyahu. After four elections in two years, he has been unable to shift the needle in such a way as to give him a stable majority. He has been able to patch together temporary coalitions in between elections, but Israel’s crazy electoral system, which offers no sufficient “threshold” to disincentivise parties becoming ever smaller operations, has failed to deliver any sort of decisive change — and there’s little chance of it reforming itself.
Israelis will put up with election do-overs, but four has really been pushing it. After the last go-around, the other major contender — Benny Gantz, of the Blue and White coalition — was close to putting together a government, which would have included the Israeli Arab joint-list group for the first time in the country’s history.
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