Nothing illustrates the political bankruptcy of the Israeli political center better than this image of Tzipi Livni, founder of the Ha-Tenuah Party holding hands with her freshest catch, Amir Peretz, former Labor defense minister and second highest vote-getter in the recent Labor primary.
The image of a former Mossad agent and ideological descendant of the Stern Gang canoodling with the former head of Israel’s labor movement, the Histadrut, is revolting.
It reminds me of a game of musical chairs in which each politician scurries from one seat to another seeking the biggest payday and best advantage for himself without regard to principle. At the end of the game, there will be one player left with no chair on which to sit: it will be Israel’s center-left itself. It will have maneuvered itself into irrelevance, thus leaving the ultrantionalist right in triumph, controlling all the chairs and levers of power.
During this press conference, Livni had the chutzpah to claim (with Peretz sitting beside her) that Labor didn’t invent the social justice movement. That in fact, Jabotinsky had called for social justice in his own political manifesto.
The reason Peretz is offering for abandoning Labor is that its current chair, Shelly Yachimovich is refusing to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian issue during the campaign; and she’s refused to rule out joining a coalition government with Likud.
That’s all well and good. But does Peretz really think that joining with Tzipi Livni will bring Israel any closer to a peace deal with the Palestinians? What did she and Olmert ever do that brought the country any closer to peace with the Palestinians?
You don’t like Livni?
Who, then, do you want to see as the next Israeli PM?
Dov Heinin
I’m not seeing him among the list of candidates.
The PM candidate in his party (Hadash) is Mohammad Barakeh.
Would you support him for PM?
A couple of corrections.
(a) Livni is by no means an ideological descendant of the Stern Gang. She’s consistently been a Zionist pragmatist practising realpolitik. Though I personally wouldn’t dream of voting for her or her ilk, one has to bear in mind that – from South-Africa to Northern Ireland – this is the type of master-race politicians who bow (and scrape!) to reality to make historical compromises with “convicted terrorists” they had previously trained themselves to hate and despise.
(b) The Histadrut is Israel’s labour-unions, not to be confused the Labour Party (often self-described as the historical Labour Movement). Peretz has headed both of them, but not concurrently.
Maybe Richard is thinking about the fact that Tzipi Livni’s parents were both well-known members of Irgun.
Probably. Her dad was Irgun’s chief of operations. What would later become the popular anthem of the veteran terrorists – “Upon Barricades” – had been dedicated by the lyricist, a fallen comrade, to her mum …
Though the Stern Gang originated from Irgun and they cooperated in atrocities too familiar to you, their post-“liberation” visions differed significantly.
@Deir Yassin Right.
The reference to her Stern Gang roots was from Dov Heinin & he was referring to Livni’s parents who were both “heroes” of the Stern Gang. She started out in politics as a disciple of Sharon & gradually softened her politics (as he did).
Again: neither of Livni’s parents was in the Stern Gang.
As for Dov Heinin. He’s a decent mensch and one of Israel’s finest parliamentarians – I’d greatly despise anyone attributing him “Stalinist ideological roots” just because of his parents’ history.
I stand corrected. I thought Dov Heinin could be trusted on the subject. But really, the difference between the two groups was really a matter of degrees. They both engaged in acts of terrorism and assassination.
I couldn’t agree more.
The Sternists, though, introduced an element of shear madness into a ruthless yet well reasoned ideology. Their original raison d’etre was siding, in WW2, with the Nazis while Irgun chose to join their erstwhile enemies, the Brits (Irgun’s leader at the time, Raziel, actually died while on a British military intelligence mission).
You are pathetic. Lying about her parents in the first place, then trying to smear her with what you alleged her parents to be.
Propaganda at its worst.
Take it up with Dov Heinin. I linked to his tweets on the subject. But it’s nice to know that you too are defending Jewish terrorists like the Irgun and Stern Gang. BTW, Stern was a breakaway faction of the Irgun. So for example, how much difference politically is there between one Israeli Kahanist who supports what most of us would call terrorism, and another that doesn’t believe in individual acts of terror, but supports state terror in the form of mass expulsions of Palestinians?
Regarding propaganda, your problem is that you’ve been fed Revisionism from your mama’s breast and so anything that isn’t ultranationalist propaganda is alien thought to you.
Sir Gerald Kaufman at 2.42:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGuYjt6CP8
The master of deception as a young man:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lixYEZ9M_dU