The American Spectator

Print Email

Text Size

The Spectacle Blog

Interesting analysis by Bradley Burston in Haaretz:

Avigdor Lieberman, the hands-down success story of the election, has repeatedly outraged the far-right by suggesting in the past that some heavily Arab-populated East Jerusalem neighborhoods and refugee camps be ceded to an eventual independent Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. He has consistently alientated the ultra-Orthodox - an essential building block of any right-wing dream coalition - by demanding civil-marriage and modified Jewish conversion legislation favored by Lieberman's ultra-secular constituency.

Netanyahu's Likud, the anchor of a potential rightist coalition, has been on record for years as favoring an eventual Palestinian state in the territories, as long as strict security guarantees were met. The Likud is also the only party ever to have headed a government which dismantled established settlements.

Only two parties, representing just seven seats in the 120-seat Knesset, still argue for a Greater Israel. Not even the fringe-right National Union with its frankly pro-Kahane wing, dares come out in public for a return to permanent Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, stating in its platform only that "There will be no uprooting of Jewish communities and no surrender of parts of the Land of Israel in any subsequent Israeli government led by the party."

Of course, if the "Greater Israel" idea is so marginalized, it's not clear why Burston elsewhere refers to it as a "bedrock right-wing principle."

(Via Jeffrey Goldberg.)