Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Benjamin Netanyahu

  • Netanyahu on Verge of Losing Power

    Benjamin Netanyahu
    Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits a security check point in the West Bank, February 6, 2020 (GPO/Haim Zach)

    Benjamin Netanyahu is finally on the way out after clinging to power through four elections in two years.

    The Likud party leader has been Israel’s prime minister since 2009 following a three-year term in the 1990s.

    He is facing trial on three charges of bribery and fraud, has disparaged journalists, vilified prosectors and judges, and politicized Israel’s vital relationship with the United States. Republicans adore Netanyahu, but Democrats have become less unanimous in their support of his country.

    It’s why I’ve urged his rivals to do a deal with Arab parties, who have been largely excluded from power in the Jewish state. To deny Netanyahu a sixth term requires breaking that taboo. (more…)

  • Netanyahu Cruises to Reelection on Back of Vaccination Success

    Benjamin Netanyahu
    Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits a security check point in the West Bank, February 6, 2020 (GPO/Haim Zach)

    Parliamentary elections are held in Israel on Tuesday. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative Likud is projected to place first with around thirty seats, down from 37. Twelve other parties are expected to cross the 3.25 percent electoral threshold, including two new parties on the right.

    I asked our man in Tel Aviv, Ariel Reichard, for comment. (more…)

  • First Things First: Vote the Authoritarians Out

    Viktor Orbán Benjamin Netanyahu
    Prime Ministers Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel speak in Brasília, Brazil, January 2, 2019 (Facebook/Viktor Orbán)

    Left-wing Americans weren’t happy when the Democratic Party nominated the center-left Joe Biden for the presidency, but, unlike in 2016, few sat out the election.

    Nor there were major spoiler candidates on the right. Voting for Hillary Clinton was apparently too much to ask of five million Donald Trump skeptics in 2016, who voted for libertarian Gary Johnson or conservative Evan McMullin. They could have tipped the election in Clinton’s favor.

    In 2020, Democrats wisely nominated the least divisive old white guy they could find and anti-Trumpers voted like the republic depended on it. Biden won fifteen million more votes than Clinton and flipped five states, handing him a comfortable Electoral College victory.

    Hungarians and Israelis hoping to get rid of their “Trumps” must take note. (more…)

  • Coronavirus and Corruption: Protests Against Netanyahu

    Viktor Orbán Benjamin Netanyahu
    Prime Ministers Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel speak in Brasília, Brazil, January 2, 2019 (Facebook/Viktor Orbán)

    Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw the largest protests against him in nearly a decade on Saturday, when some 10,000 rallied outside his residence in Jerusalem and outside his private home in the coastal town of Caesarea.

    The protesters are upset about Netanyahu’s handling of the outbreak of coronavirus in Israel and his remaining in power despite standing trial for corruption.

    Similar demonstrations took place in Tel Aviv last month. (more…)

  • Why Netanyahu Won’t Annex the West Bank

    Benjamin Netanyahu
    Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits a security check point in the West Bank, February 6 (GPO/Haim Zach)

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declared intention to annex the West Bank has sparked intense debate in Israel. Although many Israelis seem to favor annexation, the consensus among security experts, including military professionals, is that such a move would have severe negative repercussions for the Jewish state’s security, its standing in the world and the prospects of peace with the Palestinians.

    They fear Netanyahu will pander to right-wing voters, emboldened by the American president, Donald Trump, whose own peace plan would allow Israel to annex up to 30 percent of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley, in exchange for ceding territories on the Egyptian border to a Palestinian state. (A part of the plan Netanyahu has, unsurprisingly, said nothing about.) (more…)

  • Trump’s Middle East Plan Is Not About Peace

    Donald Trump Giuseppe Conte
    American president Donald Trump and Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte arrive to a NATO summit in Brussels, July 12, 2018 (NATO)

    Donald Trump has finally unveiled his “deal of the century” for peace and prosperity in the Middle East — and set the region ablaze with criticism.

    The president’s plan recognizes Israeli control over most, if not all, of the settlements in Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), excludes most of Jerusalem from a future Palestinian state and accepts Israel’s position that “refugees” (the descendants of Palestinians who were displaced in the 1948 war) will be resettled outside Israel.

    In return for accepting these conditions and renouncing terrorism and incitement, the Palestinians would receive a municipality-sized, demilitarized and completely dependent “state.” (more…)

  • Netanyahu’s Miscalculation

    Viktor Orbán Benjamin Netanyahu
    Prime Ministers Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel speak in Brasília, Brazil, January 2 (Facebook/Viktor Orbán)

    When Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu called early elections in December, he was probably expecting to shore up his mandate and escape allegations of corruption.

    But the decision galvanized his opponents. Three former generals set aside their differences and teamed up with the opposition in a bid to oust Netanyahu, who has been in office since 2009.

    It is starting to look like Netanyahu miscalculated. (more…)

  • Support for Israel Has Become a Partisan Issue in the United States

    I wasn’t expecting this to happen so soon.

    Last month, I urged the Israeli right to stop hectoring President Barack Obama and the Democrats lest they politicize support for the Jewish state in America.

    Turns out they already have.

    The Pew Research Center finds that Democrats are now nearly as likely to sympathize with the Palestinians as they do with Israel.

    74 percent of Republicans take Israel’s side. Only 33 percent of Democrats do, against 31 percent who say they sympathize more with the Palestinian people.

    Republicans have for decades been more supportive of Israel, but until recently only one in five Democrats said they sympathized with the Palestinians. (more…)

  • Israeli Right Jeopardizes Alliance by Hectoring Obama

    With less than a month left in his presidency, Barack Obama has managed to infuriate the Israeli right by hardening America’s stance on the construction of West Bank settlements.

    Whatever the merits of their quarrel with the American president, though — and there are leftwingers in Israel and Jewish supporters of Obama in the United States who are disappointed as well — the over-the-top reaction from the Israeli right is unjustified and, more importantly, ill-advised.

    Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who leads Israel’s ruling Likud party, accused the Obama Administration of not only failing to protect Israel at the United Nations (as if it has an obligation to), but of colluding in a diplomatic “gang-up” to pass a Security Council resolution that condemns Jewish settlement activity in territory that the rest of the world considers occupied.

    The same line was trotted out by lower-ranking officials and the same conspiracy theory was peddled in the Israeli right-wing press.

    It is also a distraction. The “how” (and Obama officials maintain they were only marginally involved in drafting the resolution) is less important than the thing itself: the fact that the United States, for the first time in 35 years, allowed a UN resolution criticizing Jewish settlements to pass. (more…)

  • The Trouble with Electing an Outsider

    What made Donald Trump seek the presidency?

    A bit of armchair psychology is required to answer that question. Based on the way way he conducts himself and the many profiles I’ve read about the man, I think it’s safe to say that a powerful motivator was his desire to prove himself.

    It helps to understand where Trump came from.

    Matthew Yglesias reports for Vox that the president-elect of America inherited a real-estate empire in the outer boroughs of New York City and used his father’s money to move into Manhattan and join the island’s cultural elite.

    “It never worked out for him,” writes Yglesias, “basically because he has terrible taste.”

    Trump’s gold-plated condo and other ostentatious ticks are considered horrifically gauche by his fellow Manhattanites.

    Trump never understood this. He spent his entire life trying to get into an upper class that wanted nothing to do with him. The harder he tried, the more ridiculous he seemed to them.

    That made Trump who he is. The rejections, the contempt and the mockery of his poor taste have made him a vindictive outsider.

    That’s not going to change now that he is two months away from becoming the most powerful man on the planet.

    And that could tell us something about the way he will govern. (more…)

  • Israel’s Netanyahu Battered by Scandals, High Living Costs

    With polls predicting a narrow victory for his left-wing rivals in an election next week, it seems Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s magic may have worn off.

    The Likud party leader called snap elections in December, hoping for a fresh mandate after spending nine years in power.

    Now it seems Israelis would rather make a change at the top and much of it has to do with Netanyahu’s personality. (more…)

  • Israel’s Netanyahu Could Emerge Stronger from Early Elections

    Recent political tensions and strife in Israel culminated on Tuesday, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced he had fired his finance and justice ministers, Yair Lapid and Tzipi Livni, whom he accused of undermining the government and plotting a legal “putsch” against him.

    The announcement came after days of rising tension between Netanyahu and his top ministers and means Israelis will go back to the polls less than two years after this government took office. (more…)

  • Netanyahu, Barak Considered Iran Strike Two Years Ago

    It has become something of a parlor game in Tel Aviv and Washington DC to speculate about when Israel will finally strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.

    There have been a number of controversial articles in the last few years about this very question, from Jeffrey Goldberg’s “The Point of No Return” to Ronen Bergman’s “Will Israel Attack Iran?”

    Most argued that, at some point, Israel’s leaders will decide that Tehran’s nuclear program is too dangerous to ignore and that military action is the only way to stop it.

    They may have been more right than they imagined. (more…)

  • Expanded Coalition Gives Netanyahu More Leeway

    Just a week ago, members of the Israeli parliament were debating whether or not to disband the legislature in order to usher in early elections in September. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, seen today as one of the most popular politicians in the country, was a vocal backer of the idea. Worried that right-wing parties in his coalition were beginning to splinter over the divisive issue of military service for religious students, early elections could have reaffirmed Netanyahu’s domestic support and consolidated his power.

    But in a last-minute change of heart, Netanyahu managed to strike a deal to avert early elections entirely. (more…)

  • Netanyahu, Obama Split on How to Deter Iran

    Their personal and professional relationship is defined by pundits in both Israel and the United States as “frosty,” but that could become a whole lot worse on Monday, when President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sit down together at the White House.

    The issue that has put a stain on the relationship the most — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — will most likely receive little attention. Iran’s nuclear ambitions are at the top of the agenda. (more…)