• Thousands of left-wing protesters stage Tel Aviv rally
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[QUOTE]Nearly a week after major fighting between Israel and Gaza ceased, thousands of protesters gathered in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square on Saturday night to urge Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to resume the peace process with a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas. Meretz leader MK Zehava Gal-On said Netanyahu should quit because he failed in his attempts to bring quiet to the South, despite having a “blank check” to act for five years. She said Israel would do better to lift the blockade on Gaza, end the occupation of Palestinian territories and return to negotiations that extend beyond a cease-fire. “You could have achieved the framework you are willing to accept now without paying the price of 64 dead soldiers and the deaths of civilians,” Gal-On told Netanyahu. The crowd shouted “Bibi go home.”[/QUOTE] [URL="http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Politics-And-Diplomacy/Left-wing-protesters-to-stage-Tel-Aviv-rally-say-wont-be-intimidated-by-far-rightists-371259"]Source[/URL].
They are striking a blow at tel aviv from the inside.
Any Israeli fpers care to give me a quick rundown of politics in Israel? I've always wondered how much internal resistance exists against settlements/the gaza blockade etc.
Always nice to see people who are concerned about their fellow humans, rather than just fellow countrymen.
[QUOTE=Lonestriper;45715263]Any Israeli fpers care to give me a quick rundown of politics in Israel? I've always wondered how much internal resistance exists against settlements/the gaza blockade etc.[/QUOTE] I'll try when I get home later today. [B]Edit:[/B] Okay. Here goes. This is going to be a long and rambling post because there's a lot I want to cover. Specifically: Israeli politics and Israeli opinions, which aren't necessarily the same thing. [U]Part one. Politics.[/U] So. Israel is a [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_system_of_government"]parliamentary democracy[/URL], similar to the UK. That means that the public votes for political parties, and the parties that can form a coalition with the majority of Knesset (parliment) members form the government. Traditionally there have been two major political parties: the center left Labor and the center right Likud. Those where the largest parties who brought in most of the votes and took turns running the country. There were also significantly smaller parties: the ultra orthodox parties (traditionally right leaning, but would join any coalition that cared for their voters), the national religious (less religious, more right wing), the left (more left than the Labour, obviously) and the Arab parties (very left wing, would not participate in any coalition but would vote with left wing governments "from the outside"). Following the [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords"]breakdown of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process[/URL] and the start of the [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Intifada"]2nd Intifada[/URL], and with the ongoing failure of every attempt through negotiations, [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Disengagement"]unilateral actions[/URL] or military operations to resolve the conflict, people have started to lose faith in the ability of the old parties to make things better. As a result, over the last couple of decades the old parties have been bleeding votes to smaller, newer players that constantly pop up and offer new solutions to the same old problems. The unfortunate result of this is that instead of one big party controlling the government you have an uncomfortable coalition of lots of smaller parties, most with incompatible goals and demands, resulting in a government that instead of making any bold decisions in any direction can mostly manage to just barely maintain the status quo, as terrible as it is. Take our current governemnt. It's composed of the following parties: Likud - Bibi's party. No longer even the largest party of the small parties since: Israel Beiteinu ("Israel Our Home") - Lieberman's party. Joined with the Likud to make it larger so it could put together the government, but split from it because it wasn't right wing enough. Secular, right wing party. Originally by and for Russian immigrants. Habait Hayehudi ("The Jewish Home") - Bennet's party. An unholy union of moderate right wing national Jews and rabid ultra nationalist settlers. Moderately religious. Extra nationalistic. Yesh Atid ("There Is A Future") - Lapid's party. Supposed to represent the middle class. Extremely secular, mostly concerned with the economy, vaguely sort of centrist. Currently Israel's largest party. Hatnua ("The Movement") - Livni's party. The atrophied appendix that fell off the remains of Kadima, Sharon's old party and once the mightiest of the new parties. Currently the most left leaning of the parties in the government. Wants to negotiate for peace. Fails constantly because Yesh Atid builds more settlements behind their backs. That leaves an even stranger mix of parties in the opposition, with the confused formerly center left Labor, the consistently left wing Meretz, the constantly-getting-more-radically-left-wing Arab parties and the Ulrta Orthodox who just want their cushy positions of power back. Which makes the opposition completely ineffective in, you know, opposing the government. Which means the government can go on doing whatever it is that they're doing. Basically nothing, while pretending to both pursue the peace process, strengthen the settlements, empower the middle class, reduce the cost of living and so on. While in reality we're just stuck with constantly worsening everything. Yay democracy. Okay, now to what you were probably really asking about: [U]Part two. Opinions.[/U] This is obviously a more loaded question. These are obviously my observations, and you'd probably get three different opinions if you ask another Israeli or two. Here goes. The way I see it, most Israelis want nothing more than peace, and to end the occupation. I know, seems unlikely from where you're standing. I mean, look at us. But look at the evidence: Israelis have supported by a vast majority pretty much everything that looked like it could bring anything resembling peace. We supported giving back Sinai to Egypt in exchange for peace even though they were our most bitter enemies, responsible for leading the Arab world in wars that killed far more Israelis than the Palestinians ever did, and not only we consider than the most important even in our history, but we turned Egypt into a beloved tourist destination. Jordan- bitter enemies at times, totally loving them now. Also tourist attraction. We supported the Oslo accords, and Barak's offer to Arafat that would give most of the territories and even east Jerusalem, a huge taboo to this day, in exchange for nothing but peace. We supported the pullout from south Lebanon, even though we knew we'll get no love from Hezbollah. And yes, we supported the Gaza disengagement. And regardless of where Sharon thought he was going with that, it was sold to us as an alternative to the already dead peace process, a chance to finally separate from the Palestinians. We were told if it works the West Bank would be next. And even though it meant all the settlements in Gaza had to go, and even though we knew it was a huge fucking risk most of us still supported it. And my guess is that if any leader comes up with half a reasonable plan to get rid of the territories we'd probably go with it. Not becuase we're all pacifist saints that want nothing but love and puppies. Because we really, REALLY don't want to be there. For most Israelis (and most of us aren't, amazingly enough, messianic ultra nationalistic settlers) there's nothing there for us. No vital resources, no desirable real estate, no workforce to exploit. Just a whole lot of people who hate us and want to kill us. And keep in mind most of us serve in the IDF. Trust me, there's nothing worse than having to spend any amount of time there as a soldier. Except maybe knowing you're doing it to protect a small group of belligerent assholes that think god put them there to start shit with the locals. Fucking settlers. Most Israelis don't want to die for settlers. Or even do reserve duty for them. So why aren't we out in the street demanding the government pulls out of the West Bank and gets it over with? Mostly because south Lebanon and then Gaza blew up in our faces so hard. We pulled out, left nothing behind, even brought in the UN the make sure we were back behind the internationally recognized line, and the other guys just lined up behind the fence and started throwing rockets at us from way up close. Unilateral actions don't work. It has to be a settlement. Both sides have to want it. And you know the really sad part? We already know exactly what a settlement with the Palestinians is going to be like. We'll give back most of the West Bank, maybe leave a couple of chunks with the couple of Israeli cities that are too hard to move, give land elsewhere in exchange for that, give most of East Jerusalem, maybe put the holy places under international supervision, give the right of return to a reasonable amount of Palestinians, give monetary compensation to the rest, open the borders... it's all there. We're killing each other over the fine print. There's not a sane politician in Israel, right or left that hasn't accepted the two state solution by now (well, except Bennet). Most Israelis are positive this is how it's going to end. And yet more than 20 years later we're still not there. Too many asshole leaders on both sides. And Hamas. We don't trust them. They haven't accepted the two state solution, and they're still trying to kill us. So we kill them back and the cycle continues. You know what? Forget about this whole "recognize Israel as the Jewish state" bullshit. If Hamas ever comes out and says with a straight face "We are willing to lay down our arms and seriously negotiate for lasting peace" or, hell, even "we're with the Fatah now, and we're cool with whatever you and them decide" we'll probably sort of believe them. We believed Fatah, right? And they used to be the PLO. Remember the PLO? But the more time passes, the harder it is for more and more people to believe this will ever end. There's a new generation of adults that doesn't remember being around in the 90's when everyone were sure we were on the verge of peace in the Middle East. All they remember is assholes from the other side of the fence throwing rockets at them all the time. So we're slowly sinking into despair, and then into apathy. You know the last elections were maybe the first in Israel's history where the main issue was the economy rather than security? Nobody cares about the peace process anymore. Most people don't believe it's a real thing. They just want the government to do what it has to do to contain things. Keep them as they are. And we all know it's not getting better. We're just trying to slow it from getting worse. By piling more and more dead bodies in its path. Obviously, it's not working. So what do Israelis think about the blockade? They're mostly okay with it, in the same way they're okay with there not being a blockade on the West Banks, seeing as they're not shooting rockets at us. The way Israelis see it, we gave them their own land and they used it to shoot at us. We don't see ourselves as imprisoning them, just as containing them as best we can to keep them from getting to us. They're not a prison we're guarding, but an enemy nation whose border we guard as best we can. Yes, we're aware they're suffering. We know how bad it is in there. And most of us don't care because they're still shooting at us. If they just for one minute stopped shooting at us or trying to get more stuff to shoot at us we'd be okay with letting them breath, we tell ourselves. But they never do. So fuck them. And we know it's not working. We know once every couple of years it's going to flare up and we're gonna have to march in there with planes and bombs and we'll die and they'll die more and then maybe we'll have something a little more like quiet for a while longer. But nobody has any idea how to fix this. There are of course some of us who still believe in peace, and in dialog, and still think we can work this out and maybe stop trying to kill each other all the time. But we don't talk about it too often, bacause nobody talks about politics any more. It's gotten too depressing. And being a leftist is slowly getting to be like, I don't know, like a flat Earther. So it's good that we have those big peace demos from time to time. To remind us we're not alone. Maybe remind the other side there's still a little hope. Anyway, I still vote [URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meretz"]Meretz[/URL].
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