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January 5th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Israel is headed towards a fourth election cycle in two years, this time on the pretext of failure to pass the 2020 budget. The liberal white knight Benny Gantz, the former general who entered politics two years ago boasting of bringing Gaza “back to the stone age”, has proven himself a loser and unable to surmount any real challenge to Netanyahu. He will not see his ‘rotation’ term arrive, just as most Israelis expected to begin with, and the remains of his Blue White party is now hovering just around the electoral threshold of four seats in polls.
Another white knight came from Netanyahu’s Likud, Gideon Sa’ar, with policies arguably to the right of Netanyahu himself. He will redeem Israel with his party “New Hope – Unity for Israel”, upholding the Jewish supremacy of “natural and historic rights of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel”, upholding Israel’s “values as the national state of the Jewish people”. Sa’ar, the Netanyahu without champagne and cigars, is recently polling with 17 seats, down from the hype of 22 a week ago (for creating a ruling collation in Israel, one needs a majority of 61 seats in the 120-seat parliament).
Any other white knights?
Ron Huldai, longtime mayor of Tel Aviv, has just announced his new party. Wait for it: ‘The Israelis’. It’s an original name, you have to give it that. And it has this self-righteousness to it – like, we are the ‘real’ Israelis. How so? Huldai represents the old Israeli Labor ideology – liberal in comparison to the right, but exclusivist in its Zionism and militant, of course. Thus, Huldai presented as the first of his credentials, that he was a combat pilot. It’s a thing these Israelis do, you know. If you have the fighter-credentials, you bring them up first. Then he was also an educator and a mayor. Huldai seeks to revive the hope of the Israeli Labor, where the nominal Labor party has just been going into oblivion and doubtfully even making it past the electoral threshold. Huldai has with him the Labor leader Amir Peretz, who has just left an empty leadership space in Labor, as if anyone really wants to take it.
‘The Israelis’ seem to have cleared well in a first poll, around 8 seats. They may be appealing to some of the left voters who went for the centrist Blue White but got disappointed. Ofer Shelah, one of Blue White’s leaders, just tried to form his own party to generate wider appeal also to the left, but polls at close to zero. Avi Nissenkorn, one of Gantz’s top ministers (who has been Justice Minister until now), went with Huldai.
Once again, as has been the case in the past three elections, there is no absolute clear bloc here for the creation of a government. Likud has lost a considerable number of votes over the Sa’ar split and is now polling at around 26 (down from the 36 it had in the last election in March); nonetheless, it is by far the biggest party, and Netanyahu is by far the most popular candidate for premiership – more than twice as popular as Sa’ar.
And how would it look for a Netanyahu bloc? This bloc would consist of those who are not in the ‘just not Netanyahu’ camp – that includes the religious parties Shas and United Torah Judaism (a consistent 15-16 seats between them) and Naftali Bennett’s right-wing nationalist Yamina with now about 13 polled seats. Yamina have been all the way up at 19 earlier this month, but Sa’ar may have taken some of the more moderate of them. So, if we add up the Likud’s 26 seats with those others, it’s barely even 55. But the rival blocs to this, from the right or the left, don’t add up either.
It’s clear that from Netanyahu’s point of view, the dream scenario would simply be a reinvigorating of the Likud votes, to get those roughly 6 seats back and continue the forever-rule.
But this calls for a a game changer. Any ideas?
Of course. The coronavirus.
Corona-hasbara
Netanyahu has long been eyeing this opportunity, to be the ‘corona king’ and beat the COVID-19 menace to a degree that will make him known as the father of the nation who will protect it like none other. The hyped normalization deals under king Trump, with the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan, Morocco, they were nice, but not a game changer. I mean, tens of thousands of Israeli tourists going to Dubai, many of them as sex-tourists, is after all not going to give that many seats. Israelis are now under a third major lockdown, and they want out – not necessarily to Dubai, but just out of the house.
Thus, Netanyahu has been working frantically to secure a huge amount of vaccine doses for Israelis — but importantly not for the Palestinians under their occupation. He has boasted of calling up Pfizer CEO at 2:00 a.m. Germany has reportedly bent the rules on EU vaccine sharing, and agreed to provide Israel with EU allocated vaccines, under the ‘special relationship’. An Israeli embassy official said that, “Germany sees Israel as part of Europe in terms of procuring the vaccine and therefore it will be permitted to convey the vaccine for use in Israel when it is approved.”
Netanyahu’s Likud keeps bringing up the COVID-19 vaccine in response to the challengers. “We wish Gantz and Huldai luck while Prime Minister Netanyahu brings millions of vaccines to Israel, gets Israel out of the coronavirus crisis and revives us,” they quipped in response to Huldai’s recent announcement to run.
Netanyahu did the expected public vaccination show on the 19th of December, and Israel has been in a race to vaccinate Israelis with a 24/7 program. Now they are boasting of being #1 in the world, having vaccinated about 7% of the population (with a first shot). For example this hasbara channel 4IL video: “The start up nation 🇮🇱 has become the VacciNation! Israel ranks #1 in the world for vaccinations with 7% of the population already vaccinated — over 600,000 vaccines administered.”
The video even features one ‘Arab’ – a Druze man – being vaccinated. This is of course the ‘token Arab’. If Israel were to actually live up to its obligations as an occupying power, then many more ‘Arabs’ (Palestinians) would need to be vaccinated.
No, what is important now for Netanyahu is to race against the clock so that by the elections on the 23rd of March, the Israeli public, notably including all of its settlers in occupied Palestinian territory, would be substantially inoculated. Netanyahu has claimed that Israel will be in the clear “within weeks”. He wants to make Israel #1 on this. He has tried this before, last year, when saying in the spring that Israel was the safest place to be, but then it became one of the most unsafe places to be in the summer. But now, it seems more probable that the Jewish-Israeli population could be convinced of his ability to mobilize safety for them. Israel is reportedly rolling out about 150K shots a day, so in about a month it could have about half of its citizenship inoculated.
Netanyahu sees that this is a war he could win. And there’s the “what’s not to like” aspect here – most want to get vaccinated, most certainly want COVID-19 to be over, at least for them. Never mind about the Palestinians.
In this way, Netanyahu will get into the veins of the ordinary Israeli. They will feel his care deep within. And in those moments of bliss, they might return to him the seats that were taken by the ‘just not Netanyahu’ people. Netanyahu will show them that he is really what is good for ‘the Israelis.’
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