Britannia Radio

Israel's Banana Republic

FRIDAY, 13TH FEBRUARY 2009

The frantic political horse-trading in Israel to form a government in the wake of this week’s general election continues. Ha’aretz reports:

Kadima will head for the opposition benches if Benjamin Netanyahu forms the government, Tzipi Livni said Thursday, adding that her party has no intention of accepting a right-wing, ultra-Orthodox government.

However, a senior Kadima official said the party probably would join Netanyahu's government eventually, and would demand the foreign and defense portfolios for Livni and Shaul Mofaz, or the foreign and education portfolios for Livni and Knesset Speaker Dalia Itzik.

The Jerusalem Post reports that Avigdor Lieberman, head of the extreme nationalist and highly secular Yisrael Beiteinu party,

was ready to endorse Netanyahu rather than Kadima leader Tzipi Livni, provided that Netanyahu pledged to push through his demands for civil unions and an eased conversion process, but that if those two demands were not met, he would back Livni.

... Vice Premier Haim Ramon, who heads Kadima's negotiating team, met with his Israel Beiteinu counterpart, MK Stas Meseznikov, on Thursday and gave him the impression that no portfolio was off limits for Lieberman, despite the multiple ongoing criminal investigations against him. He also agreed to Lieberman's demands on civil unions and conversion.

The words ‘banana’ and ‘republic’ come irresistibly to mind.

It is simply astounding that at this fateful juncture in Israel’s history, when what is needed above all is a strong and stable government to take the excruciatingly difficult decisions that are required to meet a geopolitical crisis of unparalleled and extraordinary complexity, such bargaining has to go on with cranks and marginal lobby groups who hold the balance of power. Israel has the most extreme form of proportional representation in the world. As a result, the most threatened nation in the world produces governments least able to cope with such a systemic existential threat, because they are permanently in hock to some fringe group or other plugging its own parochial agenda and holding everyone else to ransom.

Madness.