peace, prosperity are intertwined السلام والإزدهار متلازمان
To win, Herzog must convince Israelis that peace,
prosperity are intertwined
Voters
need to be made to realize that if not for the settlements, the huge funding
that flows to the territories would instead be invested in education and
welfare.
An interesting question is coming up
in this election campaign: How long will it take before the descendants of the
Mizrahi residents of the immigrant transit camps of the 1950s get rid of the
sorrow of those hard years and stop placing all the sins of Mapai at the
doorstep of today’s Labor Party? How many election campaigns will it take
before their grandchildren understand that taking advantage of their hatred for
the left and fostering the memories of discrimination are a rude means of
making them forget real discrimination, the kind that Likud’s economic policies
generate, which absolve the state of responsibility for the fate of society and
abandon the weak to market forces?
And by the
way, does anyone know how the people being thrown out of public housing these
days are going to vote? Why don’t they remember the key role Ran Cohen’s Meretz
had in the Public Housing Law and the battle its current leaders are waging for
same goal? And what else needs to happen here before people in Dimona and
Ofakim realize that if not for the settlements on the West Bank, the huge
funding that flows to the territories would instead be invested in education
and welfare, their schools, enrichment activities for their kids, more math and
English lessons, all of which would open the gates of the universities to them?
How is it possible to let the memories of the past, hard as they are, mortgage
the future?
It’s true
that to this day the Labor Party has not learned how to present a credible
social and economic program that makes people enthusiastic. Their security
program is also limping and stuttering. It’s also true that the Labor Party
cannot, or perhaps does not want to build on the experience of the second Rabin
government, which invested in education and social issues more than any other
government, and was also the government that, with the Oslo Accords, laid the
foundations for an agreement with the Palestinians.
It’s
furthermore true that Labor’s candidate for finance minister, Prof. Manuel
Trajtenberg, a fine academic economist and a fair man, does not get people
excited – neither the middle class nor in the disadvantaged neighborhoods.
People don’t feel that he burns for social justice. Worse yet is the fact that
their candidate for defense minister, retired Gen. Amos Yadlin, is a conformist
and banal military man who has never voiced even one original idea. He is not
the man to say that the Palestinian issue is much more important than the
Iranian nuclear program.
The truth is
that Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni should have long ago shouted it out: Israel’s
existential problem is the occupied territories, because our relations with the
Palestinians are what will define our future and the future of our children,
not Iran. Iran, if worse comes to worst, can be bombarded; Iran’s regime could
change; in any case it does not seem that, incendiary rhetoric aside, the
Iranians tend blithely to take risks. In contrast, we will have to live with
the Palestinians in the coming generations, and nothing will change the
Israeli-Palestinian reality except the desire of Israelis to save their country
from the destruction that the right is waging.
To win these
elections, Zionist Union must invest in those naïve people who could still follow
the charlatan Yair Lapid in droves. These people must be persuaded that Zionist
Union has a credible plan to reach a peace agreement as well as the desire to
truly improve quality of life. In any case, it is the size of the bloc that
will determine who gets a majority in the Knesset. Meretz’s support for Herzog
is assured in any case, while Lapid’s support is something both Netanyahu and
“brother” Naftali Bennett can buy, and not at a very high price.
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