Will 5759 be remembered as a year of radical change in the course and direction of Israel\’s history, or merely as a year when the government changed hands after an election and life went on much as it did before?
A flamboyant underworld attorney and former synagogue president was elected mayor of Las Vegas by a landslide, according to the final results from last Tuesday\’s vote.
The question left pending until this Tuesday\’s run-off between incumbent Barbara Boudreaux and challenger Genethia Hayes is, will Tokofsky get to command a new majority?
During the wild victory party in Tel Aviv\’s Rabin Square on Election Night, a chant went up in the crowd: \”Just not Shas!\” Ehud Barak heard the same chant when he spoke early this week to a gathering of campaign activists. A booth with a fax machine in Kikar Rabin has already sent more than 20,000 faxes to Barak from his supporters, who urge him not to invite the meteoric Sephardic fervently Orthodox party into his governing coalition. Thousands of e-mails have been sent to Barak with the same message.
As the election dust settles and coalition-building tensions grow, religion is emerging as the single most dominant factor in Israel\’s current political cataclysm.
Two decades ago, after hearing the then-Col. Ehud Barak deliver a eulogy for a fallen comrade, popular Israeli poet Haim Guri predicted: \”One day, this man will be prime minister.\” On May 17, Israel\’s voters proved him right. Barak was elected by a landslide, his 56 percent to 44 percent for the right-wing incumbent, Binyamin Netanyahu — the younger brother of the man Barak eulogized in 1976, Yonatan Netanyahu, who was killed rescuing a planeload of hijacked passengers at Entebbe airport.
Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak fought side-by-side a quarter of a century ago in some of the most intrepid exploits of Israel\’s crack anti-terrorist unit, the Sayeret Matkal.
Israeli voters go to the polls on May 17 in what could be the most critical election in the young nation\’s history.
Mark Levin knows about as much as anybody about Jews in the former Soviet Union. But sitting in his office during a recent chat with reporters, he admitted he had no easy answers to the toughest question of all: When should Jewish leaders push the panic button and do everything possible to convince Russian Jews to get out while the getting is good?
You\’ve got to feel sorry for Arthur Finkelstein. The legendary Republican campaign consultant, slayer of liberals from North Carolina to New York, seems to have met his match this year, in Israel of all places. And all he wanted to do, he said in a recently published interview, was \”be part of Jewish history.\”
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