Our World: Israel’s Uninformed Electorate, by Caroline Glick
Excerpts;
On the eve of the Knesset elections, Israel faces multiple challenges. Hamas, in appointing technocrats and terrorists to run its new government is showing that it is possible to learn from the Nazi model of governance. Even genocidal mass murderers who seduce their societies with delusions of racial and religious supremacy can receive international acclaim if they make the trains run on time.
Israel’s political spectrum is divided between the Left, represented by Kadima and the Right represented by Likud. Kadima wishes to contend with the Hamas threat by making a public show of shunning Hamas while surrendering Judea and Samaria to the terror organization.
The Likud points out that surrendering Judea and Samaria to Hamas will make it impossible to defend the rest of the country. Since Likud doesn’t think that Israel should surrender its right to defend itself by turning its heartland over to a global terrorist organization which together with Fatah and Islamic Jihad has already murdered over 1,100 Israelis and remains committed to annihilating Israel, it objects to surrendering any territory to Hamas.
It has been repeatedly noted in this column that the Israeli media has blocked all public debate on this issue. The media mollycoddles politicians on the Left – applauding them for mindlessly repeating the talking points they received from their public relations advisers. Politicians on the Right on the other hand are harassed, insulted and forced on the defensive for daring to suggest that expelling Israelis from their homes and transferring their land to Hamas might not be in Israel’s best interest.
ASIDE FROM the economy, there is the issue of Israel’s constitutional crisis. During the course of the campaign, there have been several notable episodes which illustrated the depths of Israel’s constitutional morass.
First we have the interim government’s treatment of the Knesset’s investigative committee into police brutality against protesters at Amona last month. Acting in clear contempt of the Knesset, Internal Security Minister Gideon Ezra and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz barred their senior officers from testifying before the committee. The fact that as government ministers in a parliamentary democracy they are constitutionally bound to uphold the decisions of the Knesset seems to have made no impression whatsoever on the ministers – who have the full support of the media in their law-breaking activities.
Following Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s massive stroke in January, Mazuz invented a bit of Orwellian legalistic gobbledygook by defining Sharon’s condition as of one of “temporary incapacity of a permanent character.”
In the next few years, Israel’s security, economic growth and constitutional order will all be challenged in both familiar and unfamiliar ways. Sadly, because of our media’s temporary bias and superficiality of a permanent nature which causes it to squelch all public debate on all the issues of the day, as we go to the ballot box next week, we will be casting votes that will influence how those challenges will be met without the least awareness of either the issues at stake or the manner in which the political parties will contend with them.
Then again, since they have never been challenged on any of these issues, most of our politicians are also unaware of them.