Hotovely has been saying the right things and wants the cabinet ministers to make the government discuss the Levi Report which admits that we Jews have all legal rights to live and build in Judea and Samaria.
In an interview to be published in Friday's Matzav Haruach (State of Mind), Hotovely says, “Ministers who sit in the Ministerial Committee on Settlement Affairs, both from the Jewish Home and the Likud, must take this report and make it written in stone by the Israeli government. Ministers Yisrael Katz, Gilad Erdan and Yuli Edelstein are committed to this report.”She, like many Israelis, doesn't understand that an opposition MK has more independent power than a government minister.
Hotovely notes that "it will be the transformation of the Likud government, if the Likud government tells the public: the settlement is a strategic issue, where we do not settle for a home here and there but are strategically changing the rules of the game.”
The Levy Report concluded that there is no “occupation” and international law allows Jews to live in Judea and Samaria, as its status was not that of a nation in 1967.
The Levy Report was presented a few months ago, and since then Centrist PM Binyamin Netanyahu has preferred to keep in hidden from the public, since it doesn't suit his ideology.
Hotovely is young and still makes idealistic statements, but she should have learned the way politics works by now. The real power to move and change the people comes from the opposition. That's something the Left has realized. Israel's faux "social justice" protest movement from the summer before this one, had always seemed to be professionally organized. And it's no surprise that the leaders are joining Labor Party.
In a move that could have a significant influence on younger voters, a prominent leader of the social protest movement and National Student Union chairman, Itzik Shmuli, announced that he will be joining the Labor Party and running in its primaries ahead of the coming elections.
The Left's biggest problem in winning elections is simple demographics. Small families make fewer voters. Otherwise they'd be in power. The Israeli media has been extreme Left forever. One of the reasons many of us blog is to give us editorial independence. Politicians on the Right must be willing to be in the opposition to also be independent, say what they want and mean and influence the future of the State of Israel. I stay far away from the NRP, because the NRP wants to be in the cabinet, and the cabinet ministers are required to follow the government's line.
3 comments:
Ever since Bibi went berserk against Moshe Feiglin two elections ago, the truth was obvious to those who could see, and it was even more obvious after he took on the Central Committee a couple of years ago; since Sharon defected from the Likud to form Kadima, Bibi has viewed the party as his personal playground. And since he rules the party which rules the coalition, Bibi's velvet fist has been clamped around Israel's throat.
This was painfully clear a couple of weeks ago, as Bibi first threatened to call early elections and then did so. In what kind of banana republic is the decision of if or when the people vote in the hands of one man?! And in what kind of non-representative democracy is going to the polls a threat to be used against politicians?!! The situation is so perversely removed from modern, Western "democracy," to say nothing of the Athenian original, that anyone with a high-schooler's intelligence and education in history should be weeping.
Israeli politicians represent nothing and no one but themselves, and the few starry-eyed idiots like Tzipi (whom I've met in person and think well of, at the personal level,) and Feiglin are only deluding themselves until they'll be crushed by "the System" into conforming, or else be spit out. The Knesset is a stinking heap of sewage, and Bibi is the "cock o' the dungheap." And lucky for them that Tzipi and 9 others are in the building, or else they should be waiting for the fire and brimstone to give them their well-deserved reward, ala Sodom and Gomorrah.
Batya, while it is true that an opposition MK can say whatever he/she wants, there were periods that there were ministers criticizing the PM from within, too. The problem is not that members of the government are unable to speak out, it is that they are afraid to do so. The solution to this problem is not to merely vote for a party doomed to be an opposition ghetto party, but also to vote in the Likud primaries for independent voices who have no fear of speaking out and opposing the PM.
Eliyahu, nice terminology.
goyish, in the Israeli system, if you're not the PM making the rules, you have more power in the opposition. Think of how the Left really controls the govt and how pre-1977 Labor wouldn't have dared to destroy Jewish communities and withdraw the way Begin did, because they were afraid of Begin's strong Right opposition.
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