By far the most important aspect of the Likud victory this week was that once and for all everyone in the world could see how biased and unrepresentative the Israeli media are. Sure, there are complaints about the liberal hegemony over the media in the US and elsewhere. But in the US for every MSNBC there is a Fox News, for every NPR there are twenty conservative talk radio hosts, and for every NY Slimes there is a Wall Street Journal.
Not in Israel. With the exception of the freebie Israel Hayom, almost the entire print media in Israel are leftist, and with no exception at all the television and radio stations are so. The media in Israel operated a naked jihad against Netanyahu in the months before the election, candidly promoting a victory for the Labor Party’s Herzog team and his day camp staff.
The media made no attempt to disguise their partisan agenda. The bias in the Israeli media rivals that in the Soviet media before perestroika. Almost every page in Haaretz and Yediot was an anti-Likud propaganda sheet. Channel Ten Television, propped up by state subsidies and handouts from the Likud government, was at least as biased and at least as open about campaigning for the Left. The bias extended down into the countless “polls” of voters that invariably showed Herzog with a strong lead over Netanyahu. When the media awoke from their wet dream after the poll booths closed, they reluctantly reported that “Netanyahu had made a comeback from behind.” Bullfeathers. Netanyahu was never behind. The media had invented a myth about Herzog being in the lead and they stuck to it.
By the morning after the election the entire media Titanic had sunk beneath the waves, after striking the iceberg of reality. It turns out that Israelis ignored the media seeking to “educate” them and instead they voted their own consciences. The media moghuls will never forgive them for this. If anything, the arrogant insults hurled at voters for the “Right” just before the election by journalists and by artsy-phartsy folks helped turn out the Likud vote.
The Left believed its own media fabrications. The Labor Party had reserved the large Rabin Square in Tel Aviv to hold its victory celebrations for the night after the voting. Labor Party activists had put out their own special newspaper, “Israel Tomorrow,” to outline the agenda they would pursue after their victory. It is now being used to wrap fish. The Israeli stock market bounced up 1.5% the day after the election.
One of the greatest pleasures of the past few days has been reading Haaretz and Yediot, the two monolithically leftist Israeli print dailies. Schadenfreude has never been so sweet! Both had been part of the local conspiracy to pass a law that would have shut down the one Israeli newspaper that refused to toe the Leftist line, Israel Hayom. That bill got stuck in parliament and now will never pass. The squeals of anguish and agony from these two newspapers are by far the most entertaining pastime in all of Israel this week, even better than watching the pre-Passover spring bloom of the trees and wildflowers.
The media Politruks were besides themselves with shock and awe. Democracy in Israel is dead, they chanted in unison, since real democracy must result in their own candidates winning. Haaretz was filled with columnists denouncing the putrid ingratitude of the Israeli people and their suicidal death wish manifested in their failure to vote for the Left. A leading leftist author, Alona Kimhi, denounced Israelis who voted for the Likud as superstitious Neanderthals . She added: “Drink some cyanide, f—ing Neanderthals. You won. Only death will save you from yourselves.”
Others in the Israeli Fascist Left launched a new campaign – one in which they are calling for retaliation against the working-class Israelis and residents of low-income “development towns” because these people overwhelmingly supported Netanyahu and the rest of the “Israeli Right.” The Leftist campaign is calling itself Lo Letet (Do not Give), and its Facebook page is here.
So here we have the spectacle of the same Leftists who pretend that they care about the underclass of low-income and working-class people now demanding that all social programs designed to assist such people in Israel be blocked as retaliation for their having voted Likud. Among the proposals of these enlightened progressive folks are to oppose raising the minimum wage, a remarkable idea since raising the minimum wage does not even help low-income people, and also to oppose welfare spending that could benefit working-class Israelis. In other words, the Left does not really care about low-income working-class people except as a tool that might jettison the Left into power. If low-income people dare to defy the Plantation Leftists and vote conservative, the Left wants them stripped of all support, funding that they now demand be refocused on the Northern Tel Aviv yuppie population!
The ink on the results of the election was not yet dry when the Leftist media were back in form, with their warnings of impending Netanyahu-produced doom. Israel will be isolated and destroyed for resisting capitulation to the demands of the Left and their “Palestinian” house pets, proclaim the media in near unison. Haaretz warns that the new government will launch a series of “anti-democratic bills.” When Haaretz and the Left speak about “anti-democratic bills,” what they really mean is democratic reforms, such as a law reining in Israel’s out-of-control imperious Supreme Court. That Court with its “judicial activism” ideology has been attempting to exercise judicial tyranny, insisting it has the right to invent laws the parliament opposes and block those the parliament passes. The Supreme Court has for a generation attempted to suppress the will of the people through their parliament and replace it with diktats from unelected leftist judges who micro-manage the entire country in everything from military policy to job appointments. Refoming and restraining the Court may be the most important challenge of all for the new government. Haaretz is also worried that a new law might require that the picayune radical leftist anti-Israel NGOs operating within Israel and seeking to undermine the country might be required to reveal the sources of their funding. Oy Veh.
Of course the most important lesson from the election is that the two-state fantasy is dead in Israel. Very few Israelis ever believed that “two-states” was a “solution” of any sorts to the Middle East conflict, as opposed to being a recipe for endless Islamofascist terrorist aggression launched against the rump Israel from the “Palestinian” terror entity to be established in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The only party running in the election on an unequivocal unconditional platform endorsing creation of a “Palestinian state” was Meretz and it got 4% of the vote, just barely squeaking in past the minimal vote threshold level for parliamentary representation. The “United Arab List,” which is an amalgam of Stalinist and jihadist Arab factions whose only common denominator is opposition to the existence of Israel, is not really in favor of a two-state solution but rather in an Exterminate Israel solution. The Labor Party of Isaac Herzog is on paper in favor of a Palestinian state subject to a whole bunch of conditions and caveats, but it did not run on a Two-State Solution platform. Two States were never even mentioned by it. Its entire campaign was based on trying to convince people to vote for it because Netanyahu is such a cretin, and the result was that it got less than 1 vote in 5.
The golfer in the White House may groan all he wants, and so can his Secretary of State with the bad haircut. Obama is still complaining because Netanyahu pointed out that Arab voters in Israel were being bused in to vote with funds coming from outside Israel and so Jewish Israelis should also vote in droves. How racist of him! Yet all those funds smuggled in to the leftist Israeli NGOs campaigning to topple Netanyahu did not help the Left. Israelis made their position clear. They are not willing to commit national suicide to please Obama and the Eurotrash. “Two-states” is a nonstarter. Don’t even raise it as a discussion point option.