Democrats on Netanyahu’s Speech: Bibi’s Never Seen a War He Doesn’t Want the U.S. to Fight

[karynnj]

16. By definition, the Knesset always has a majority for the PM's coalition

Not to mention, the Knesset was dissolved when elections were called. There is a very hard to completely get process for how the new government is decided and formed.

Apparently, everyone in Israel votes for a party. Each party has a "list" with the names of who they would put in the Knesset in the order in which they will be put in. All parties that get less than 3.5% of the vote are eliminated and all others get a number of seats proportional to the remaining votes. (ie if your party gets 6 seats, they go to the top 6 on your list.)

Once the Knesset is formed, each MK can recommend who they want as PM. The President (Rivlin) chooses the head of some party to have the first try in forming a coalition. That person needs 61 of the 120 MK to join his/her government. It is not required to pick the party with the most votes. In 2009, Kadima, headed by Livni, got more seats than Likud, but the then President tasked Netanyahu to form the government as there were far more center right MK than center left and his view was that was more likely to work.

One thing that has greatly changed Israel is the absorption of over a million Russian Jews in the 1980s/1990s. Part of the motivation was Israeli concern over demographics - as there was a higher birth rate on the part of Israeli Arabs than Israeli Jews. It was also concern that the Russian Jews were discriminated against. Many of these immigrants are now the settlers of the West Bank. At any rate, Israel moved from its left center Labor roots to the right. (Consider that the coalition of Livni's party and Labor did not take the Labor name (or anything associated with leftish democratic roots -- but Zionist Camp)

Next remember how angry many Israelis were every time Kerry spoke even very diplomatically about the Palestinian issues. One thing that became clearer in the Gaza War last year was that it became far harder to be both liberal and Zionist -- and, at least to my reading the left leaning Haaretz, many journalist were extremely shaken by realizing that they could no longer avoid seeing that a choice must be made.

To me, this brought back what I found nearly schizophrenic in Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit's Promise Land book. He patted himself on the back repeatedly in the book for giving clear descriptions of the Nakba (day of the catastrophe) when on the eve of the birth of Israel Arabs were killed or driven out of many areas of Israel AND arguing that unlike many liberals, he accepted that the Nakba was necessary to have the state of Israel that exists today. A similar disconnect occurs when he lists that the choices for Israel now included 3 that were completely unacceptable (ethnic cleansing (sending the Arabs out of all the land that would be Israel), appartheid, and democracy for all (not Zionist!) - leaving only the 2 state solution, but he argued they currently did not have the political will or the right leader to do this. Note this was someone who had been part of the peace movement decades ago.

This may explain why some Israeli Arab leaders, who are likely to again be in the Knesset questioned whether supporting the left center was better for them --- suggesting the starker unacceptableness of Netanyahu as better. The more I read on Israel, the less optimistic I become.