Latest update June 7th, 2019 10:54 PM
Latest News
- RESERVISTS ON DUTY FIGHT FOR ISRAELON COLLEGE CAMPUSES by Daniel Greenfield
- UK Jewish Groups Decry Election of ‘Antisemitic’ Labour Candidate to Parliament
- Trump and the Jews: A Fascinating Look into American Jewry and the US-Israel Relationship Under Trump T
- ARAB-ISRAELIS TODAY And why they prefer to live in a Jewish democratic state. by
- AN AMERICAN PRESIDENT IN LONDON by Bruce Bawer
- Religious Parties Hurt Their Religion BY DAVID SUISSA
- Knesset Member Calls for Israel to be Governed by Torah Law By Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz
- Netanyahu Should Talk to European Nationalists by Alan M. Dershowitz
- Jerusalem: The Beating Heart of Jewish History BY RABBI PINI DUNNER
- Israel Using Holocaust to ‘Blackmail’ Germany, Palestinians Claim in Response to Bundestag Condemnation of BDS
After Election Flop, Meretz and Labor Consider Merger by Jonathan Lis and Jack Khoury
Left-wing leader considering linkup with Arab party too, ‘to have a more significant left-wing element, Jewish and Arab’ ■ Hadash rules out partnership with ‘hypocritical’ Meretz
Labor chief Avi Gabbay and Meretz leader Tamar Zandberg.Ilan Assayag, Olivier Fitoussi
Who’s in and who’s out of Israel’s new Knesset? The good, the bad and the newly unemployed
The downfall of Naftali Bennett and Ayelet Shaked
If there’s one conclusion from the Israeli election results, this is it
The Labor Party and Meretz have been examining the possibility of a merger, with the addition of candidates from Arab parties, following a bruising election that has halved their representation in the Knesset.
No concrete proposals have been put forward yet but lawmakers in both parties may advance such a step in the near future.
>> How Israeli Arab voters saved Meretz, the Druze got payback and kibbutzniks broke tradition ■ For real change, the Zionist left must drop its sense of Jewish supremacy | Opinion
Arab-majority Hadash rejected calls to join forces “with Meretz or anyone else” for now, arguing that with the six Knesset seats its joined slate with Ta’al gained, it is “the leading and biggest party among the Arab public.” Some Labor representatives also expressed reservations about a possible merger.
Labor, with 18 seats in the last Knesset, won only six this time, while Meretz was reduced from five seats to four.
Speaking of a potential merger, Meretz chairwoman Tamar Zandberg told Haaretz that “the components for such a linkup must include Labor, Meretz and a significant Arab figure or party, such as Hadash or a part of it.”
“Israel has to have a more significant left-wing element, Jewish and Arab,” Zandberg added. “The votes Meretz got in the latest election shows that this is possible. This is the time when there is a chance for things and I intend to help them happen. We need to begin to do this now. Israeli elections are called by surprise and now is a good time to take a step.”
Both Meretz and Labor were significantly shaken and lost a core base of supporters to the Kahol Lavan party. Meretz owes at least one of its four seats to Arab voters. Zandberg said that in hindsight, her proposal to Labor chairman Avi Gabbay to unite before the elections would have been the correct move to make.
“I proposed this because I expected a tsunami. I wanted to do it not as a lifeline because we had no choice but as a part of a more significant move by the left,” Zandberg said.
Labor MK Shelly Yacimovich wrote on Facebook this week that there had to be a distinction drawn between a possible linkup between Labor and Kahol Lavan or Meretz. But another Labor lawmaker, who asked to remain anonymous, said any linkup of the party with Meretz would likely damage the party’s base of support.
“It could be that linking up with Meretz is the right move,” the lawmaker said, “but such a unification could split the Labor Party and its supporters. Labor has a significant hawkish branch that has no common language with Meretz and its messages, and such a situation could split the party.”
Another senior Labor figure said: “All talk about uniting with Meretz at this stage is too early and unnecessary. At the moment the party has to undergo a healing phase. It has to choose a new chairperson. It has to understand how to confront its core base and see how to build itself into an alternative with only six Knesset seats.”
Labor Party chairman Gabbay has made clear he intends to leave his post as soon as possible. In talks with senior party figures he confirmed that he considered resigning the night of the election as soon as the failure became clear, but he didn’t want his departure to look like he was abandoning ship.
Tal Rousso, the number two on the Labor slate, also considered dropping out of the party on Thursday in light of the party’s electoral failure, but later reneged.
In the coming days Gabbay is expected to lead discussions about whether to move up a party leadership contest, which would be held within three months, or name a temporary chairperson and have the election held at a later time. Senior Labor figures said that if there’s a decision to name a temporary chairperson the leading candidate for the job is lawmaker Amir Peretz, but Peretz has apparently not decided whether he would be interested in taking the job.
Hadash lawmaker Youssef Jabareen harshly criticized some Meretz lawmakers who opposed a bill he proposed, to define Israel a “democratic and equal” state, as an antithesis to the Nation-State Law. Their vote “exposes Meretz’s hypocrisy,” Jabareen said.
“However, we’ll keep cooperating with opposition parties for a public front, as broad as possible, against the government’s occupation and discrimination policies,” he added.
Related articles
More in this category
OUR SITES אתרי מבט
Argentina Rabbi Recovers After Antisemitic Attack
Rabbi Shlomo Tawil, co-director of the Chabad House in Rosario, Argentina. Photo: Facebook.
JNS.org – Rabbi Shlomo Tawil, director of Chabad-Lubavitch in Rosario, Argentina, was recovering at home after being assaulted by three youths on Sunday night during the holiday of Shavuot.
According to neighbors who came to the rabbi’s aid, the attackers shouted antisemitic insults at the rabbi, and began hitting him in the head and abdomen, reported Chabad.org.They then threw him to the floor, kicked him and trampled his hat before fleeing.
Thousands of Palestinians Riot on Border, Amid Heightened Gaza Tensions
A Palestinian man inspects the site of an Israeli air strike in the southern Gaza Strip, June 14, 2019. Photo: Reuters / Ibraheem Abu Mustafa.
Thousands of Palestinians rioted on the Israel-Gaza Strip border on Friday, hurling rocks, firebombs and explosive devices at IDF troops.
Also on Friday, numerous blazes were ignited in southern Israel by incendiary balloons sent over the border from Hamas-ruled Gaza.
Early Friday morning, the Israeli Air Force struck several Hamas targets in Gaza, in response to a rocket attack the previous night in which a religious school in Sderot was damaged.
WHERE BDS AND TERRORISTS CONVERGE by Caroline Glick
On May 31, the cry went out from Times Square, New York City, to annihilate Israel and extend the terror war against the Jewish state to America.
As they did in Beirut, Berlin, London, Tehran, and Dearborn, Michigan, Israel-haters gathered at Times Square to call for Israel’s dissolution on the day the Iranian regime has determined to be “Al Quds Day,” that is, Jerusalem Day.
The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) posted a video of the event. In it, a series of speakers called over and over again for Israel’s annihilation, voiced support for terrorists and terrorism and called for the war against Israel to come to New York.
Nate Chase from the World Workers’ Party led the crowd in chanting, “We don’t want not two state! We want ’48!”
LEFTIST COMEDY IS LITERALLY HITLER by Daniel Greenfield
Leftists have never been as humorless, unfunny and touchy as they are now. And they’ve never poured as much time and money into late night comedy, Netflix comedy specials and assorted people angrily shouting things about Trump and their confused sexual identities into a microphone, as they are now.
Comedy, as supported by billion-dollar media corporations based in blue states that would legalize killing babies and heroin before they would permit gun ownership, has returned to its roots in Greek political life. Except the ancient Greeks thought that people insulting each other’s politics was funny and the modern Proggies think that the insults should be one-sided and delivered in an echo chamber.
UCLA DAILY BRUIN CENSORS FACTS ABOUT STUDENT LINKS TO TERRORISTS by David Horowitz and Sara Dogan
The UCLA Daily Bruin and its editorial staff have made a mockery of the concept of a free press, opening their pages to terrorist political organizations and closing them to the opponents of terrorist propaganda and Jew hatred. The Bruin’s allegiance to the destroy-Israel left and failure to observe the core principles of journalism in a democracy was glaringly obvious in its coverage of a recent student government ruling.
The resolution passed on Tuesday, May 21, by the UCLA Undergraduate Students Association asserted that—contrary to all evidence and a long history of spreading the genocidal lies of Hamas terrorists, and harassing Jewish students and their invited speakers— the group Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) is not anti-Semitic.
New Column!
Soeren Kern : Britain’s Back-Door Blasphemy Law
The long-running dispute revolves — most recently — around an effort by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on British Muslims, a cross-party formation of around two-dozen MPs in the British Parliament, to institutionalize the definition of Islamophobia in racial rather than religious terms.
The proposed definition has been opposed by many Britons, including British Muslims, who warn that it would effectively shield Islam from scrutiny and valid criticism.
Carrie Sheffield : NY Times Claims Trump Does Not Care About Re-Election Campaign
The New York Times claimed that President Donald Trump does not care about his re-election campaign or about the policies he would seek to enact during a second term.
“In a recent overarching state-of-the-race briefing in Florida with Brad Parscale, his campaign manager, Mr. Trump was consistently distracted and wanted to discuss other things,
Jonathan S. Tobin : Fake News? David Friedman Didn’t Endorse Annexation
The New York Times got quite a scoop when, in an interview with its Jerusalem bureau chief David Halbfinger, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman said that he favored Israel’s annexation of the West Bank. That was the lede of Halbfinger’s article, as well as in the headline. And that was also the way the story was played in virtually every one of the many publications that picked up on the story.
Daniel Greenfield : A Movement of Professional Victims and Conspiracy Theories
Every movement has a mission statement. “Make America Great Again” is the conservative one. (It’s the “Again” part that makes it conservative.) The enemies of making America great have one too.
If the radicals had red hats, they would say, “They’re Out To Get You.”
TOTGY has been the leftist motto since before Marx learned to shave and then decided to stop doing it. The arc of history may bend toward many places, but the black rainbow serviced by a snarling leprechaun with a PhD and a cocaine problem always begins and ends in the same paranoid place.
Ben-Dror Yemini : Israelis Should Not Celebrate U.S. Ambassador’s Talk of West Bank Annexation
In certain circumstances, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman said last week, Washington would recognize the annexation of Palestinian territories by Israel.
As expected, Friedman’s comments led to fierce criticism. The Palestinians already call him the “settler spokesman.”
But in fact, instead of blaming the settlers, the Palestinians can only blame themselves. And given that we are in the era of “narratives,” namely, lies that pretend to be history, we should pay attention to the facts.