#likud party

[tomorrowusa]

Until this month, Bibi Netanyahu was a HŪGE fanboy of Hamas. Their relationship goes back decades. This is not some wacko conspiracy theory. Much of the information about this comes from mainstream Israeli media and high ranking Israeli former officials.

Here are excerpts from an in-depth article at the CBC – Canada's public broadcaster.

Israelis don't agree on much, especially lately, but polling shows they mostly agree that Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu is to blame for leaving Israel unprepared for Hamas's onslaught on October 7. The accusations aimed at Netanyahu go beyond merely failing to foresee or prevent the Hamas attack of October 7, however. Many accuse him of deliberately empowering the group for decades as part of a strategy to sabotage a two-state solution based on the principle of land for peace. "There's been a lot of criticism of Netanyahu in Israel for instating a policy for many years of strengthening Hamas and keeping Gaza on the brink while weakening the Palestinian Authority," said Mairav Zonszein of the International Crisis Group. "And we've seen that happening very clearly on the ground." "(Hamas and Netanyahu) are mutually reinforcing, in the sense that they provide each other with a way to continue to use force and rejectionism as opposed to making sacrifices and compromises in order to reach some kind of resolution," Zonszein told CBC News from Tel Aviv.

Bibi and Hamas could be called "frenemies".

Yuval Diskin, former head of Israel's Shin Bet security service, told the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth in 2013 that "if we look at it over the years, one of the main people contributing to Hamas's strengthening has been Bibi Netanyahu, since his first term as prime minister." In August 2019, former prime minister Ehud Barak told Israeli Army Radio that Netanyahu's "strategy is to keep Hamas alive and kicking … even at the price of abandoning the citizens [of the south] … in order to weaken the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah." The logic underlying this strategy, Barak said, is that "it's easier with Hamas to explain to Israelis that there is no one to sit with and no one to talk to."

The Bibi-Hamas relationship goes back almost 30 years. In some ways, Hamas helped put Bibi in power in the first place.

Netanyahu first came to power in the 1996 election that followed the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli extremist opposed to the Oslo Accords. Early polls showed Rabin's successor Shimon Peres comfortably ahead. Determined to sabotage Oslo, Hamas embarked on a ruthless suicide bombing campaign that helped Netanyahu pull ahead of Peres and win the election on May 29, 1996. Today, some of the same extremists who called for Rabin's death hold power in Netanyahu's government.

A reminder that the current Israeli government led by Netanyahu is the most far right in Israel's history. Netanyahu filled it with extremists, religious fanatics, and virulent ethno-nationalists in order to stay in power.

Just two weeks before Rabin's assassination, a young settler extremist posed for the cameras with a Cadillac hood ornament he said he had stolen from Rabin's car. "Just like we got to this emblem," he said, "we could get to Rabin." Today, that young man, Itamar Ben Gvir, is 45 years old and has eight Israeli criminal convictions — including convictions for supporting a terrorist organization and incitement to racism. Once he was rejected by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) for his extremist views. Now, Israel's police must answer to him as Benjamin Netanyahu's minister of national security.

Imagine how a second Trump administration would be and you get a hint of what Bibi's pre-October 7th cabinet was like.

The Bibi-Hamas connection only gets worse.

Netanyahu's hawkish defence minister Avigdor Liberman was the first to report in 2020 that Bibi had dispatched Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and the IDF's officer in charge of Gaza, Herzi Halevi, to Doha to "beg" the Qataris to continue to send money to Hamas. "Both Egypt and Qatar are angry with Hamas and planned to cut ties with them. Suddenly Netanyahu appears as the defender of Hamas," the right-wing leader complained. A year later, Netanyahu was further embarrassed when photos of suitcases full of cash going to Hamas became public. Liberman finally resigned in protest over Netanyahu's Hamas policy which, he said, marked "the first time Israel is funding terrorism against itself."

Yep, Bibi actually had a bag man deliver cash to Hamas.

The Palestinian Authority's Ahmed Majdalani accused the Qatari envoy of carrying money to Hamas "like a gangster." "The PLO did not agree to the deal facilitating the money to Hamas that way," he said.

Netanyahu fancies himself as a clever Machiavellian playing one side against the other. He has even bragged of this to members of his party.

On March 12, 2019, Netanyahu defended the Hamas payments to his Likud Party caucus on the grounds that they weakened the pro-Oslo Palestinian Authority, according to the Jerusalem Post: "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defended Israel's regular allowing of Qatari funds to be transferred into Gaza, saying it is part of a broader strategy to keep Hamas and the Palestinian Authority separate, a source in Monday's Likud faction meeting said," the Post reported. "The prime minister also said that 'whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for' transferring the funds to Gaza, because maintaining a separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza helps prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state."

Of course Bibi was ultimately being too clever by half.

Netanyahu insisted that neither the money nor the construction material given to Hamas would be diverted to military purposes. But today, the IDF finds itself showing how Hamas has done exactly that — by diverting and converting civilian funds and materials to warlike purposes. The military tried to warn him at the time, former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot told the Ma'ariv newspaper. He said Netanyahu acted "in total opposition to the national assessment of the National Security Council, which determined that there was a need to disconnect from the Palestinians and establish two states."

A lot of radical chic Hamas fans in Western countries will undoubtedly try to obscure the fact that they are cheering the same group which a far right Israeli politician (until recently) has been lavishing with tons of cash.

And the Bibi-Hamas connection is a reminder that while far right politicians in many countries like to portray themselves as tough on security, they will usually put their craven lust for power above all.

[ancientsage]

THE HOLY LAND: Home of the Most Intense, Hate-Filled Religious Brutality on Earth

Can there be any doubt now about Netanyahu’s intentions and that of Hamas? While Hamas has been advocating for the complete eradication of Israel, Netanyahu’s Likud Party has been calling for the annexation of virtually all Palestinian territory since its inception and pointing to its Bible for justification.Netanyahu is vowing to open a full assault on Rafah ‘with or without’ hostage deal even…

[brojames-glorytogodvideos]

Trump Ally Netanyahu Plans Comeback As Leader Of Israel

Once again, Israel is headed toward new elections - on the 1st of November. In June, the existing coalition government collapsed. The upcoming elections will be Israel's fifth election in less than four years, an election in which former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to return to power. Polls currently indicate that Netanyahu's Likud Party will possibly take most seats in a new election. So it appears very likely that Trump's strong ally Netanyahu may be back in power before Trump. 

 Our website.. GloryToGodVideos.com

[dinozaurtual]

leftists adopting a "violence, even extreme violence, is always okay if its inflicted on the Bad Guys because it will never compare to the violence THEY inflicted upon us" will always be objectively funny and also really fucking sad.

[lunarian-anarchist]

Apparently Ben Gvir was in a car accident. How come car accidents kill innocent people all the time but monsters like him get lightly injured?

Also the putz ran a red light.

[news4dzhozhar]

This whole interview was great but apparently it's too much truth for the powers that be. TikTok removed it saying that it disparaged a "protected group". Instagram slapped Bassem with a warning and I tried just now to post the YouTube link to the full video but received this error:

This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated.

That's bullshit truly! Removed the entire account instead of just the video.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Germany's anti-Semitism expert insists that saying Israel is adopting Apartheid policies is "inherently anti-Semitic." But South African Jews who have immigrated to Israel find themselves in agreement: these policies match what we recall. Benjamin Pogrund: I’ve lived through it before: grabbing power, fascism and racism, destroying democracy. Israel is going where South Africa was 75 years ago. It’s like watching the replay of a horror movie. In 1948, as a teenager in Cape Town, I followed the results of the May 26 election on a giant board on a newspaper building. The winner-takes-all electoral system produced distorted results: the Afrikaner Nationalist party, with its smaller partner, won 79 parliamentary seats against 74 for the United Party and its smaller partner. But the Nats, as they were called, in fact won only 37.7 percent of the vote against the opposition’s 49.18 percent. Although the opposition got more than 11 percent more votes, the Nats said they had a majority and could do what they wanted.

In the Israel of 2023, I'm reliving some of these same experiences. Our proportional election system can distort results as well: last November, Likud, with its smaller partners, won 64 seats against 56 for the opposition. In fact, the right-wing bloc won by only 0.6 percent of the vote. The 0.6 percent government says that it represents the will of the majority and can do whatever it wants. It goes on saying this even though a poll from the Israel Democracy Institute shows that less than one-third of Israelis back its law to end the so-called reasonableness standard, which allowed the High Court to overturn government decisions it deemed unreasonable.

[Haaretz]

[Robert Scott Horton]

[jackoshadows]

This 2020 article from the Times of Israel is really eye opening into how bloodthirsty and racist Joe Biden really is.

Biden a veteran friend of Israel, settlement critic, may be at odds over Iran

In June 1982, a few days after the start of the Lebanon War, known as Operation Peace for the Galilee, Begin met with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington. Several lawmakers grilled him over Israel's alleged disproportionate use of force. "A young senator rose and delivered a very impassioned speech — I must say that it's been a while since I've heard such a talented speaker — and he actually supported Operation Peace for the Galilee," Begin told Israeli reporters after he returned to Jerusalem. The senator — Biden — said he would go even further than Israel, adding that he'd forcefully fend off anyone who sought to invade his country, even if that meant killing women or children. "I disassociated myself from these remarks," Begin said. "I said to him: No, sir; attention must be paid. According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war… Sometimes there are casualties among the civilian population as well. But it is forbidden to aspire to this. This is a yardstick of human civilization, not to hurt civilians."

[feydrautha]

Ngl, the way some people on here have been ready to call jews on here zionists or saying downright heinous stuff to them because they expressed even the smallest bit of sadness over the israelis (for whatever reason it may be) who were killed or said the most milquetoast "i don't want there to be any violence against israelis or palestinians" rlly has me thinking that some of you are not all that much about the palestinians' well-being but very much for your antisemitic bias

[todaviia]

.

[odinsblog]

“Freedom from the river to the sea for me, but not for thee.” The blatant hypocrisy is blatant

#It’s another variant of white supremacy. Netanyahu and the Likud Israeli government are nearly indistinguishable from Trump and the Republican Party — Netanyahu is a racist rightwing authoritarian who WANTS TRUMP TO WIN

Netanyahu is on his way to making Israel a pariah state, and he is an unpopular authoritarian who has always opposed an equitable two state solution. In fact, over his career Netanyahu has worked tirelessly to prop up Hamas, in order to sow division and play the West Bank against Gaza (source)

[jewish-sideblog]

I feel like people have such a limited view of the Shoah as something that killed religious Jews living in Eastern Europe. Certainly, that’s the majority of Jewish deaths from a raw numbers perspective. But that narrow view erases so much suffering.

Imperial Japan was allied to the Nazis, so Jews in East Asia and the Pacific forced to flee or die as Japan expanded their empire. Fascist Spain was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, and it’s not like the Sephardic Jews could easily flee into France after 1940. The Axis powers had colonized Algeria, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia at that point, so North African Mizrahi Jews weren’t spared the horrors. While the US government didn’t directly kill Jews, they denied us refugee status during the Shoah, and they did nothing to prevent the spread of multiple US American fascist parties and white suprematist groups. The Vatican, unofficially allied with Fascist Italy, handed over the names and locations of Jews they had converted to Catholicism decades or centuries prior. Families who didn’t even know they were ethnically Jewish were dragged out of Catholic Churches during Mass and sent to slaughterhouses hundreds of miles away. There were precious few diasporic communities throughout the world where Jews were safe in the 30s and 40s.

The Holocaust spanned entire continents. The Holocaust was global.

Edit 04/02/24: This post wasn’t written about Israel, and you shouldn’t make it about Israel. In either direction. The Shoah should not serve as a justification for the unnecessary abuses of the Palestinian people by the Likud government. Simultaneously, the Shoah was not a “lesson” to be learned by Jews, you cannot make a reasonable comparison between the Shoah and Gaza. This post is not about Israel and Palestine. Do not make it about Israel and Palestine. The deaths of our ancestors are not a tool with which you can make your argument.

[evilwickedme]

It's so clear to me that so many so called "anti Zionists" - especially the non Palestinian goyim - have no idea how the Israeli election system works, and how bibi remains in power, and why we had five elections in like, three years, despite elections supposedly being every four years - because he couldn't keep a government stable enough to stay in power. Bibi netanyahu is MASSIVELY unpopular, and his approval rate has tanked even more since the war started, even among likud voters, the people who vote for HIS party (although their approval rates ranked less than the rest of the population). He has an extreme right wing government because if he didn't cooperate with right wing extremists and haredim he straight up wouldn't have the majority he needs to be our prime minister in the first place. He's been on trial for corruption for years at this point, and tried to completely restructure the judicial system just to avoid prison - leading to nearly a full year of protests until Oct 7. Luckily it didn't end up passing.

If elections were held at any point in the last five months since this war started, not only would he not be PM, we'd straight up have a center-left government. My recent transformation into a Yair Golan stan account is a joke but also 100% real - according to polls from the last three months or so, if he does what he's campaigning to do, leading a combined avoda and meretz party, he'd get enough votes to have an actual influential left wing party in the government for the first time in decades. An unbelievable amount of Israelis are calling for bibi to resign, many of them not calling for it to happen after the war ends, but right now.

I am sourcing this information from polls conducted by channels 11 (kan), 12, and 13, as well as by the Israeli democracy foundation, all but one of our important news channels - channel 14, the last channel, is our equivalent of fox news, and despite their numbers often being extremely different due to what is in my opinion biased reporting and flawed methodology, even they at times have had to admit that gantz is currently leading in the polls.

(Disclaimer that I work for a company that provides subtitles for channel 13, but i do not directly work for channel 13. Channel 13 leans mostly center left, and employs several (self identified) Arab Israelis in front of the camera, including Lucy Aharish, who makes considerable effort to bring Palestinian and Bedouin perspectives to her show. It also employs at least one massive racist though.)

I write this post because I keep seeing an unsourced claim by goyim that there's a poll showing a high rate of approval - 88%! - of the destruction and/or deaths Israel and the IDF are causing in Gaza. I went down a rabbit hole and simply couldn't find a poll asking about approval of deaths or destruction, although maybe I was looking up the wrong keywords? As a result I have just... So many questions. Because with the information I have from trustworthy local news sources, from the news channels I mentioned above and papers such as yediot aharonot/ynet and Haaretz, it doesn't fit with current public opinion, including many recent protests for more efforts towards a ceasefire. So my questions are thus -

Who conducted this poll? Was it a think tank, a government agency, a paper, a news channel? If so, which one? Are they left leaning, right leaning? Was it conducted by an Israeli or foreign institution?

Who did they ask? Was it a sample of likud voters; all Israeli adults; did they include only Jewish Israelis or also Arab citizens (approx. 1.5 million out of our 8 million population), Bedouins, and other minorities?

When was the poll conducted? Was it in October, immediately after the Oct 7 massacre, before the death toll in Gaza grew? Was it conducted more recently?

What, exactly, did they ask? Did they ask about destruction in general, or about the death toll in particular? Did they ask about the attempts to rescue hostages with military means, or all military actions? Did they ask about the number of Hamas operatives dead, about their estimated ratio of Hamas to civilians, about the total deaths?

What was the size of the pool surveyed? Was it conducted on a few dozen, a few hundred, or a few thousand people?

Because without this information, that one, sole statistic is essentially useless. As Mark Twain said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics. Always look at the source and ask: who asked the questions, who got asked, and what the questions were.

More specific statistics and sources under the cut.

I did find one survey by the Israel democracy foundation that asked if the IDF should take the Gazan suffering into account - an entirely different question, although it did still have a horrific 89% Jewish Israelis and 14% Arab Israelis and Palestinian citizens who said they shouldn't. That said, the pool they were drawing from was not very large - 500 of the interviews were conducted in Hebrew, 100 were conducted in Arabic. Also, of the people who supposedly said that they shouldn't, a little more than half of both populations said they should "somewhat" take it into account - that is, they didn't say they shouldn't take it into account at all, just not make it their first priority. This survey was conducted mid December.

In another survey by the same source with a slight larger sample size (a little over 600 Jewish Israelis and a little over 150 Arab Israelis), an insanely low 15% still wanted Bibi to be the PM, with the only candidate who received more than 6.5% being the center candidate Benny Gantz, who historically has tried to cooperate with center and left parties, with a whopping 23% of the votes. The survey included 10 candidates, as well as five other non candidate options. 4% voted "just not Bibi", and an actually insane 30.5% voted they were undecided. Only a quarter of those surveyed believed Bibi would manage to maintain a coalition after the war, a number that includes more extreme right wing voters, and only the ultra Orthodox haredi population had a majority of people (60%) who believed he can. This survey was conducted in January.

The channel 13 news survey from early March - barely over a week ago! - covered more specifically which parties would manage to get into the government and how many seats they would get, as under a certain amount of votes you simply do not get seats. Not all seats get into a coalition. According to their poll, the amount of seats the likud would get is halved, from 32 to 17, while gantz's the state camp would grow from 12 to 39. While currently meretz gets 4 seats and haavodah do not get enough votes to get a seat at the table so to speak, a combined haavodah and meretz under Yair Golan gets 9 mandates. In total, the right wing only get 47 mandates, well short of the amount of mandates necessary to create a government.

Channel 12's corresponding poll from January shows 35 mandates for gantz, and bibi had 18 mandates. Channel 11, in the same month, gave gantz 33 mandates and bibi 20.

I also sources an English Jerusalem post article which reports on channel 14's polls; jpost is a right wing biased paper, and yet even they report 36 mandates for gantz and 18 for bibi as of February.

Sources

The Israel democracy institute: 1 (English), 2 (Hebrew), 3 (Hebrew)

Haaretz: 1 (English) (paywalled)

Channel 13: 1 (Hebrew)

Ma'ariv: 1 (Hebrew) (reporting on channel 12)

Podcast which summarizes the above article: 1 (English) (includes transcript)

Kan 11: 1 (Hebrew)

Jpost: 1 (Hebrew)

[thejewishlink]

Likud, Religious Zionist parties sign coalition agreement, paving the way to a new government

Likud, Religious Zionist parties sign coalition agreement, paving the way to a new government

“Today we are taking another historic step to establish a Jewish, Zionist and national government,” Finance Minister-designate Bezalel Smotrich said. (December 1, 2022 / JNS) The Likud and Religious Zionist parties reached a coalition agreement on Thursday evening that clears the way for Prime Minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu to form a government backed by 64 members of Israel’s…

[lem0nademouth]

hot take: in order to criticize the Israeli government, you need to know more than a Google search’s worth about the Israeli government

here are some examples

criticism: Benjamin Netanyahu is a dangerous, ineffective leader that must be removed from power and the Likud party does not have anyone’s interests in mind but their own. Compulsive conscription manipulates the valid fears of Jewish Israelis & diaspora Jews (lone soldiers) in order to make the actions of the military seem permissible no matter the circumstance.

antisemitism: Israel is a genocidal settler state that needs to be eradicated and no one on Israeli soil should be treated as a civilian because all of them are settlers

see the difference?

[tamamita]

why do zionists always assume its antisemitic to think that zionism a settler colonial idea

Modern Zionists aren't actually well-read into their own history. I could invoke the likes of Theodore Herlz, Ze'ev Jabotinsky, David Ben Gurion, and many other political Zionists and how they were ardent supporters of settler colonialism, yet it wouldn't get through their head, because they genuinely believe the land of Palestine is their right to claim, despite the people inhabitating the area. But to claim that the establishment of the Settler state was necessary due to antisemitism is not correct.

The pogrom of the Jewish people in the Pale of Settlement in Imperial Russia resulted in the mass displacement of Jews. But most Jews did not flee to Palestine, but to the US and Western Europe to live relatively better lives, due to the French revolution and so on. They had no desire whatsoever to move to Palestine due to its harsh climate and environment. Although the repression of Jews in the 19th century added to Zionism's appeal, Zionism did not emerge because of it as is often portrayed.

Jewish historian Michael Stanislawiski explains:

The first expression of this new ideology were published well before the spread of the new anti-semitic ideology and before the pogroms of the ealy 1880s. The fundamental cause of the emergence of modern Jewish nationalism was the rise, on the part of Jews themselves, of new ideologies that applied the basic tenets of modern nationalism to the Jews, and not a response to persecution.

-- Zionism, a short introduction (Stanislawski, 2017)

As was the case for that time, the doctrine of nationalism became prevalent across Europe. Many versions of it gained hold of European intellectuals and the upper-classes. One of these were ethnonationalism, which emphasised common ancestry. Such a view was popular among Germans, Hungarians, Russians, Poles and etc, who saw their "tribes" as being distinct, and therefore needed to be preserved from foreign threats. Zionism would mirror some of these aspects, which was prevalent in Eastern Europe. The founding father of Revisionist Zionism (and the precursor to the Likud party), Ze'ev Jabotinsky stated:

"The creation of a Jewish majority, was the fundamental aim of Zionism, the term "Jewish State", means a Jewish majority and Palestine will become a Jewish country at the moment when it has a Jewish majority".

-- Zionism, and the Arabs, 1882-1948 A study of ideology (Yosef Gorny, 1987)

However, there was another ideology emerging which was far more popular among the oppressed Jewish people, which would propell them to emancipate themselves where they lived. Revolutionary Socialism.

According Ilan Pappe, the doctrine of Zionism was vehemently opposed by Jewish leaders all around Europe on the basis of Talmudic violations, the rise of revolutionary socialism and the rise of Jewish assimilationism. Additionally, in a conference in Frankfurt, rabbis decided to omit the mentioning of "the return" from Jewish prayers as a reaction to Zionism. However, Zionism would face intense opposition from Socialist Jews, especially the Bundists, who openly declared Zionism to be anti-Socialist, opportunistic and reactionary. Zionism was an alien idea, and revolutionary socialism emphasised the importance of the liberation of Jews where they lived, resulting in an ideological feud between the Bundists and Political Zionists. Even the likes of the Chaim Weizmann, the first president of the Settler state, and David Ben Gurion, the first PM of the settler state, would condemn the Bundists for their opposition to Political Zionism.