Tag: Netanyahu

On the brink – Brazil, Israel, USA go the polls

We’ve big elections, with potentially massive consequences, upcoming. The Brazilian election run-off is on Sunday, 25th, the Israeli election on Tuesday 27th, and the US mid-term election on 4th November. The French presidential election follows April next year.

Brazil looks to go far right with Bolsonaro Jnr, after he came in ahead on the first round two weeks ago. The margin may be as little as 2%, but it is of course a presidential election and the winner will take all.

The mid-terms look to be heavily weighted against Trump: the New York Times has the Democrats 11% ahead, NBC 9%. But it comes down of course to individual races, and individual states and districts, with redistricting, also known as gerrymandering, coming into play in some Republican districts.

Israeli has proportional representation so it’s multi-party. There we’ve a pro- against an anti-Netanyahu coalition. The hard right with its overt brutality toward Palestinians just might lose out by a hairsbreadth. But attitudes have changed in Israel since October 7th three years ago. It’s disturbing to read that the hard right have made gains among young people: they used to be the guarantee of social progress.

Whoever wins in the three elections in the next two weeks will win by small margins. But once the door is opened…

It used to be an assumption of post-war liberal democracies that you’d have four or five years in power and then fight another election on your record. The elections would be a level-playing field. But far-right parties (and far-left if we head back further in time) have a long record of manipulating future elections in their favour. ‘Once we’ve a right-wing, nativist, illiberal, populist government, then let’s ensure it will always be that way.’ As they might argue. Usually there’s a charismatic leader who charms and brutalises in equal measures. It’s that disavowal of the free-and-fair-election principle that could be one of the great tragedies of our times. You climb to the top, and you pull up the drawbridge. That’s the old metaphor, it’s graphic, and it’s spot-on.

We’ve seen how the tech bros have kowtowed to Trump. How might they reposition post-Trump? We’ve seen Trump align with Putin. We’ve seen a disregard for human life, with ICE and the defunding of USAID. Even the possibility of a public firing squad. We’ve seen a triumphalist Christianity with its proponents reassured by a belief in a Second Coming which would of course solve all problems. If both houses of Congress go Democrat, planned cuts to Medicaid and reining in defence spending are likely to be a focus. But foreign policy is still ultimately the President’s.

In Brazil, Bolsonaro Jnr, if he wins, will rollback deforestation regulations. Admiration for Bukele in El Salvador and a desire to mimic Trump spells danger for Bolsonaro opponents, which could include Supreme Court judges who found Bolsonaro Snr guilty on conspiracy charges.

We’re in a relatively safe space in the UK at the moment. After two years of Starmer as prime minister we can see the difference that a leader, Andy Burnham, with a clear vision, can make. Reform has, for now at least, lost momentum, a consequence in part of simple sleaziness and the reliance on massive funding from crypto-currency and property tycoons. But the hard-right mentality is deep-rooted, here, as elsewhere in Europe. The right-wing government in Italy is trying to pass reforms which might help consolidate power in future elections. But it’s stayed loyal to the EU and strongly pro-Ukraine, and anti-Russia. And PM Meloni and Trump have fallen out big-time.

Turning to France, just how far would a National Rally government, which looks likely after next spring’s election, push an anti-EU agenda? Would they maintain Macron’s focus on European defence? Would they have the sure touch that Meloni seems to have? We have to trust that the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party in Germany stays sidelined until the Ukraine war is settled, and eyes opened to the absurdities of a backward-looking nostalgia for the imagined certainties of the old East Germany.

We have on the plus side seen Fidesz and Viktor Orban lose power in Hungary. He hadn’t pulled the ladder up quite far enough. That might serve as a warning to others to dispense with a ladder altogether.

You lose an election… OK, we’ll do better next time, you tell yourself. But there does need to be a next time.

Israel and Gaza – keeping the faith

So much is written about Gaza. I feel outrage, and disbelief. About Hamas and the brutality, and the futility, of its actions. And about Israel’s response, which has directed our focus back in Israel itself. What does it stand for?

Zionist ideas going back to Theodor Herzl are interwoven with a sense not just of a physical return to the Land of Israel (Eretz Israel) but of a spiritual and territorial revival of the old biblical, pre-diaspora Israel. This isn’t the modern Israel we in Europe supported. But it is the Israel of Netanyahu, Ben-Givr and Smotrich. It is also it seems the Israel of Trump’s born-again-Christian ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. He recently visited a Christian church in the West Bank which had been attacked by Jewish settlers. He protested. But attacks on Palestinian Arabs are condoned. It is as if it’s they who are the occupiers of Jewish land, of the territories Huckabee and the Israeli government describe as, using their biblical names, Judea and Samaria.

I have always been pro-Jewish. I cannot emphasise that more strongly. My academic heroes and indeed teachers were Jewish. I never made distinctions between Jew and Gentile. The Old Testament, ‘Old’ as Christians see it, has been and is a primer for life, with God and without, as well being both magical story and superlative historical document. For my father freemasonry brought Christian and Jew together in Manchester in the 1930s and later decades. I remember reading, as maybe a ten-year-old child, a story about 1948 and Israel’s fight for and achievement of independence. Only later did I learn about the nakba (the mass displacement of Palestinians in 1948) and take on board the other side of the story. Later, in my twenties, Martin Buber became one of my heroes, for his books ‘I and Thou’, life lessons that have stayed with me, and the wonderful ‘Tales of the Hasidism’, and for his advocacy back in the 1930s of a bi-national, Israel and Palestine, solution.

Yesterday I watched footage, on Channel Four, from the West Bank, of settlers fencing off land owned by a Palestinian Arab farmer and, when he tried to stop them, a settler shooting him in the leg. The farmer’s son recorded the incident on his mobile phone.  Settlers are allowed to carry guns. The farmer had a leg amputated. He’s now back defending his land.

Two days ago I learnt of the death of an Al Jazeera journalist and his team in Gaza. The Israelis did not mind taking out five others if they got their man, Anas Al-Sharif. They claim to have documents linking him to Hamas and missile campaigns against Israel. But they won’t answers questions. They can’t produce the documents. Journalists are excluded from Gaza. We are left to conclude that Israel’s claims are specious. And they don’t care. They are, it seems, past caring, locked in their own doom-loop. Al-Sharif reported from  his tent, his home having been bombed, on the day-to-day reality of Israel’s bombardment. We need to hear what he had to say.

In this week of anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki we’re reminded of the terrible realities of destruction from the air. Israel’s destruction of Gaza has been measured, deliberate, and slow, and no less terrible for that. And yet we feel some residual moral obligation to support Israel. And that compromises our position when we oppose the brutalities of Vladimir Putin, also the SAF (government) and RSF (rebel) forces in Sudan, and the army junta in Myanmar. There is a deep cynicism in the way Netanyahu’s government turns that obligation to their advantage.

Israel in the years up to the Likud victory 1977 still had its pioneering spirit. That I could connect to. In the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars it was fighting for its survival. That was enough to overcome any ambivalence I felt. This was what I’d characterise as the old Israel. I could connect to its passion, and to its genius. Friends who worked on kibbutzim came back with good stories.

Yes, we could be accused of romanticising Israel. We weren’t to know how terrible the consequences of the continued occupation of Jordanian and Egyptian lands after 1967 might be. That opened floodgates for which there is no sign of any closure. But the old Israel I know is still there, it was in its own way an inspiration to us back then, and we lose too much if we lose it, vexed and violent though its origins were.

As for the ‘new Israel’ of Netanyahu, Ben Givr and Smotrich, of Judea and Samaria as they would rename Palestinian territory, they have nothing to offer the world. Only their hatreds.  And they have turned the current conflict into, as now it seems a majority of Israelis see it, a battle for their nation’s very survival.

The forces of hatred are not yet spent. We as outsiders might long for a pragmatic solution but by its nature pragmatism cannot be imposed. Like Keir Starmer I want to see Palestine independence recognised but wonder also what good it might do and how might Hamas be excluded. Would it be no more than a token gesture? With Trump dictating our response we are little more than straws waving in the wind.  

But we must keep the faith. In a very literal sense – Christian and Jewish. We need both.

Trump the day after

Trump has won. The end of innocence, and maybe the end of this blog? (Or maybe not!) I began it in the early Obama days, on a note of huge optimism. Obama gave us Obamacare but he didn’t sort out the malaise in the American blue-collar economy and in the end he, and Biden after him, had no answer to a Southern Baptist-style resistance to any kind of deep social change. The open economy will become as far as Trump can take it a closed economy, operating behind tariff barriers.

I’ve been as guilty as anyone of denigrating Trump. I say ‘guilty’. Yes, he does remind me of the Antichrist of the Left Behind novels. He has Messianic tendencies. He’s happiest dealing with autocrats. He aspires to be one himself. Power rather than leadership is his game. And yet… he read the runes, he caught the mood and he’s been remarkably consistent. He made the economy the one big decisive issue, which it always is. Yes, it’s performed well compared to the rest of the  world over the last three years but it hasn’t brought jobs back where it matters in the Rust Belt, and inflation, however much it can be tied to the response to Covid, is a real big issue.

(I am, however, reminded of a comment by an Austrian ex-Nazi I came across yesterday. He argued in 1946 that he’d only supported the Anschluss in 1938 because he thought it would solve his country’s economic problems. Prioritising the economy can take us down perilous routes.)

How quickly tariffs, by reducing imports, can open up new jobs and a new prosperity for American workers is a very open question. Will they have the opposite effect? We may soon be back with higher levels of inflation, underpinned by low interest rates, if Trump can somehow override the opposition of the Federal Reserve.

The other big and decisive issue has of course been immigration. If a pushback in the other direction stops the northward movement in its tracks then the immigration tide might just be turned. If there no promised land you’ve nothing to head toward. How he plans to send back illegals in their millions is an open question. Is it feasible? And who will receive them? And what impact could it have on an American economy which needs immigration?

Putin will be happy this morning. Xi Jinping has reasons to be worried. If tariffs hit home then he’ll have to find new markets, not least by injecting demand into his own economy. Narendra Modi will be smiling: he will once again have a like-minded president to deal with. Israel – Trump could bear down on Netanyahu in a way Biden couldn’t and Harris wouldn’t have been able to. Netanyahu won’t have much pushback if Trump wants to be assertive. Trump is of course strongly pro-Israel but he will also want to show that he has a magic power to bring wars to an end.

Ukraine. It should have been the first of my list of foreign policy issues. The conflict has become normalised. We can get used to war. Boundaries will be as they are now on the battlefield. The Donbas will be lost to Ukraine, maybe forever. Ukraine won’t get NATO membership. What guarantees will it get? An end to war on terms which allow for their country’s survival may be acceptable to most Ukrainians.

As for NATO, it will survive but in how much of an emasculated form? And the EU: Trump won’t give its concerns and welfare a second thought. It might be different if there was a big European figure with Trump-like tendencies he could sit down with. Hungary’s Viktor Orban writ large. Nor will he have reason to give the UK much attention, save insofar as it can provide him with more golf courses.

We have to hold our breath, to hope he doesn’t take on his domestic ‘enemies’ as he has threatened to do. That he doesn’t attack institutions as the Heritage Foundation have suggested he should, and impose new conditions of loyalty on Federal officials. That the next midterm election will be free and fair.

As I write I don’t know if the Democrats will regain control of the House of Representatives. If the Republicans control both sides of Congress then Trump will have untrammelled power.

Welcome to the uncertainty. We just don’t know how it will all play out.