{"id":14764,"date":"2018-03-14T12:46:11","date_gmt":"2018-03-14T17:46:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/?p=14764"},"modified":"2018-03-14T12:46:11","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T17:46:11","slug":"divisive-enough-to-rule","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/2018\/03\/14\/divisive-enough-to-rule\/","title":{"rendered":"Divisive Enough To Rule"},"content":{"rendered":"

Akiva Eldar describes<\/a> Netanyahu’s campaign tactics and their consequent fallout on AL Monitor<\/strong><\/em>:<\/p>\n

\n

In Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s school of morality and\u00a0politics, accepting a bribe is no reason to unseat an elected premier, nor is a hostile takeover of the country\u2019s media. He insists that a prime minister should not be\u00a0replaced because of criminal indictments or\u00a0guilty verdicts. According to Netanyahu, a prime minister can\u00a0only be \u201creplaced at the ballot box<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0although what he means is that a prime minister can only be \u201creplaced by Jews at the ballot box.\u201d<\/p>\n

March 17\u00a0marks two years since his horrible\u00a0election-day\u00a0video\u00a0warning\u00a0\u2014\u00a0\u201cArab voters are coming out in droves<\/a> to the polls\u201d \u2014 and calling on Jews to turn out en masse.\u00a0It\u2019s hard to know how many votes he picked up for the Likud with this alarmist message, but the damage he caused to relations between Jews and Arabs is discernible.<\/p>\n

The annual index<\/a> compiled\u00a0for more than 40 years by professor Sammy Smooha of\u00a0Haifa University\u00a0points to a decline in the Jewish majority\u2019s perceived legitimacy of the country\u2019s 20% Arab minority. The proportion of Jews accepting the Arabs\u2019 status as a minority with full civil rights in a Jewish and democratic state fell from 75% to 68%. Three out of 10 Jews think the Arabs should leave the country and receive appropriate compensation. The percentage of Jews who refuse to have Arabs as neighbors grew from 41% to 48%.<\/p>\n

At the same time, the Arabs\u2019 perception of the state\u2019s legitimacy has also changed. Whereas 66% of Arabs recognized\u00a0Israel\u2019s right to exist in the 2015 survey, the rate declined to 59%\u00a0in the 2017 survey. Only a minority, 47%, of Israeli Arabs are reconciled to Israel as a state with a Jewish majority\u00a0compared to a majority of 60% two years earlier. In addition, the study discerned a significant increase in the threat perception of Israeli Arabs, with 73% fearing a severe undermining of their basic rights compared with 68% in the previous poll.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is a certain resemblance to GOP<\/strong><\/em> tactics for riling up their base, isn’t there? Get the emotions going, call the other side “God haters”, get the fight or flight mechanism firing – and then harvest the votes.<\/p>\n

It’s really quite despicable, isn’t it? And it has consequences, as the cohesiveness of the Israeli state falls apart, which in turn exacerbates the tensions in the Middle East.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Akiva Eldar describes Netanyahu’s campaign tactics and their consequent fallout on AL Monitor: In Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu\u2019s school of morality and\u00a0politics, accepting a bribe is no reason to unseat an elected premier, nor is a hostile takeover of the country\u2019s media. He insists that a prime minister should not \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14764"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14765,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14764\/revisions\/14765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/huewhite.com\/umb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}