| fastpat |
01-05-2006 01:15 PM |
Quote:
Originally posted by speeder
Depends on who fills his shoes. Hard to imagine anyone worse, but hard-core right-wing hawks have gotten a lot of traction in Israeli politics in recent years.
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Maybe not:
Quote:
Ran HaCohen's "Letter from Israel"
December 7, 2005
Democracy and Colonialism
by Ran HaCohen
Israeli politics is boiling. People rejoice: finally, it seems, the deadlock is collapsing. Amir Peretz, a young, Eastern, social-democratically oriented leader took over the petrified Labor Party from the opportunistic Shimon Peres � the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who was the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East, and later kidnapped the Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. Just days after these surprising primaries, and following Peretz's pullout from his coalition, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon left his ruling Likud Party, taking with him a third of the party's Knesset fraction and, according to polls, most of its voters. The old bulldozer is now reshaping the Israeli political map: the present parliament suffered, as usual, an early death; Sharon created his new, private party, Kadima, and since Israeli mainstream politicians usually adapt their views to their party affiliation rather than vice-versa, numerous dizzy politicians � but also quite a few academics, journalists, and other newcomers � are now choosing a new party and worldview that will hopefully assure them the benefits of power after the coming election in March 2006.
The Victims of Neo-Liberalism
As far as Israel's social policy is at stake, these might be significant developments. Given the world media concentration on The Conflict, the shifts in Israel's economy are less known outside the country. In two decades of a ruthless neo-liberal economic policy, supported by both Likud and Labor, Israel witnessed sharp welfare cuts, booming state support for the rich (including the insatiable military sector), a successful war waged on organized labor, unrestrained privatization, and, these very days, a sellout of Israel's major financial institutions to foreign investors, who, portrayed as its great benefactors, come to milk the Israeli economy dry.
This policy left Israel � once a moderate welfare state � with the highest income gaps in the Western world, with growing un- and underemployment, with a rapidly shrinking middle class, with appalling poverty rates among the elderly, children, and adults, and with a prospering charity industry; in short, a society rapidly deteriorating toward Third-World conditions, with the handful of rich enslaving the impoverished masses. With a strong state and a weak civil society, there was very little resistance to neo-liberalism in Israel; one of the last strongholds of organized labor, Israel's trade-union federation, or Histadrut, was destroyed in the early 1990s by Chaim Ramon, a Labor Party Trojan horse who took over the historic institution in order to demolish it from within. Only now, significantly, did Ramon leave Labor to find his right(-wing) home in Sharon's new party.
Amir Peretz was Ramon's successor in the Histadrut leadership: he reconstructed what was left of it, albeit more for the sake of the few surviving stronger trade unions than for the ever growing masses of unorganized laborers. His moderate social-democratic discourse, with occasional vague allusions to Clinton, Blair, and/or Schr�der, combined with his highly developed political skills (for better and worse), now won him the Labor Party, making it for the first time in decades somewhat comparable to its sister parties worldwide. Peretz will try to focus the election campaign on social and economic issues, where he can appeal to the masses of the economically threatened, including Eastern Jews who traditionally feel alienated by Labor. No matter how serious Peretz is about changing the economic policy (don't expect a Hugo Chavez), the shift in the political discourse is not insignificant: not because neo-liberalism is more important or more dangerous than colonialism, but because, the two being increasingly intertwined, opposition to the former may be a good lever to oppose the latter as well.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE - http://antiwar.com/hacohen/?articleid=8220
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Sharon's definitely on the way out, so the above should accelerate.
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