Omar Baransi, a 71-year-old retired building contractor with a lined, leathery face, brags that he won\’t be voting in Israel\’s general election on Jan. 28. \”We don\’t trust anyone these days,\” he said, \”not even the Arab candidates. We\’ve been citizens for 55 years and nothing has changed.\”
Like marijuana?
Believe in men\’s rights? Want a secular state?
If you happen to have an offbeat or nonmainstream platform for Israel, now is the time to run in the Jan. 28 parliamentary elections. One lesson to be learned from the list of the 30 parties vying for Knesset (see page 18) is that Israelis are disenfranchised, and looking for alternatives to the major National Security issue.Â
And while Aleh Yarok (Green Leaf) — the party promoting marijuana legalization — always seems to hit the headlines a week or two before elections (despite publicity before the last elections in 1999, the party mustered 34,029 votes, representing slightly more than 1 percent of the electorate — 15,000 votes short of the 1.5 percent threshold for Knesset membership), other parties with less headline-grabbing platforms are really set to win big.
As sure as death and taxes, Israelis can count on a coalition crisis every year in the last week of December. It happened three times to the Likud\’s Binyamin Netanyahu, and no one was surprised that this month it happened to his Labor successor, Ehud Barak.
Joy pervaded the Knesset last week as news spread that a report of legislator Amnon Rubinstein\’s death was untrue.
The rejoicing provided testimony to the respect and affection felt for Rubinstein, who was very much alive in a hospital after suffering a minor stroke.
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.
Until the last couple of weeks, the best thing one could say about Ehud Barak\’s campaign for prime minister was that it couldn\’t get any worse.
Israel\’s ratification of the Wye agreement, calling for another 13-percent West Bank withdrawal in return for Palestinian security measures, was completed on Tuesday night when the Knesset endorsed the American-brokered deal by a vote of 75 to 19, with nine abstentions.
Two leaders of Israel\’s opposition Labor Party were in Los Angeles last week on separate visits and voiced sharp criticism of the current government\’s peace policy, and support for a strong role by the United States in the stalled negotiations.
Binyamin Netanyahu recently suffered the most wounding parliamentary defeat of his two-year premiership. It left the Likud leader more dependent than ever on the pro-settler right, which has threatened to bring him down if he hands any more of the occupied West Bank to Yasser Arafat.
Richard Strauss\’s opera \”Salome\” had its Israelipremière in Tel Aviv this month. Strauss, who died in 1949,served, however briefly, as a cultural official in Adolf Hitler\’s Nazi administration. The season, by the visiting Kirov Opera from St.Petersburg, was an unchallenged hit. Strauss has been forgiven,perhaps because he had a Jewish daughter-in-law and soon learned thefolly of his ways.
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