"Have You Heard The News?"

That's what my husband asked me when I spoke to him last night at work.

"What news?" I replied.

I had been in Jerusalem since early morning checking out possibilities for a new washing machine, then met his visiting cousin for lunch and then I had to run/rush to work in Sha'ar Binyamin.  Since I have neither a laptop computer, ipad, "kindle" nor a smartphone, I'm pretty ignorant of anything going on when not home, unless it happens right where I am.  And nowadays the buses don't have the radio on with news reports every few minutes.

Actually, after the first "huh" I wasn't surprised about hearing that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman are combining their political parties, forces and futures.  Both are extremely intelligent, pragmatic politicians.  There are former Likud members in Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel is Our Home) party.  So, Bibi's aim to get former Likudniks, most notably Uzi Landau, to return "home" to the Likud, which has been more publicly focused on Kadima, hit the bulls-eye when he changed targets.

Similar to Bibi's short-lived "marriage" with Shaul Mofaz of Kadima, this match/merge took people by surprise.

Considering how the media is trying to broker, encourage the Israeli Left, Kadima, Labor, Lapid, Olmert etc to merge as a counter to Likud, it's rather interesting that  Netanyahu and Lieberman didn't need that sort of help.  No doubt that this is a sign of leadership versus mindless nebichness aka incompetence of the Left. 

As a student of the Bible, I see those Leftists as more like a King Saul figure, who had to be led around by his servant and eventually was deposed by G-d because every time he made a policy decision on his own it was the wrong one.  Samuel The Prophet finally gave up and retired after appointing David to replace Saul as king of the Jewish People.  David was in direct communication with G-d.  I've been taking Bible classes on that very subject of King Saul, Samuel the Prophet and King David at Matan taught by Dr. Yael Ziegler.

There's a big question here in terms of real policy and the Likud in general.  Netanyahu has shown himself to be a master at controlling the Likud's internal departments.  It's hard to forget how he played around with the primary results just before the most recent elections to make sure that Moshe Feiglin and others more to the Right wouldn't make it into the Knesset.

During that campaign I had no doubt that Lieberman did well, because he campaigned uncompromisingly Right.  Will Bibi and Lieberman play "good cop, bad cop," one aiming for Center voters and the other out to attract the Right?  Lieberman is as wily as Bibi, and it's hard to know what he really stands for, but that's for another post.

The big loser will be the only truly Right party on the Israeli political spectrum, that's the one led by Dr. Arye Eldad and Dr. Michael Ben-Ari.  The question is whether they'll be able to effectively promote my idea of the importance of parliamentary and ideological opposition in Israeli Government.