Category: Israel 2003-08

Is there a single set of standards that we apply to the behavior of all actors in the Middle East? I would certainly hope so, since the concept of a single set of standards is a cornerstone of the two important principles of (1) human equality and (2) the rule of law.
In the west, a loud chorus of voices has criticized Hizbullah for having undertaken Wednesday’s operation to capture (presumably) as many Israeli soldiers as possible. I completely agree that that operation constituted (1) something of an infraction of international law, and also (2), in the circumstances, an act of escalation.
In the operation, the Hizbullah leadership did the following:

— It sent a squad of its paramilitaries across an international armistice line (presumptively, an international border– though the two states have never made peace and only a 57-year-old armistice agreement governs relations between them.)
— The Hizbullah squad attacked a squad of serving Israeli soldiers, killing three and taking two captive. This was an act of war– and as PM Olmert correctly pointed out, not an act of terrorism (since the victims were not civilians.) This act did not, however, initiate a state of war between the two sides. Rather, it was an infraction of the longstanding armistice agreement between them. The armistice agreement has, of course, been subject to numerous infractions over the past 57 years. The vast majority of these have been perpetrated by Israel, including numerous incursions of longer or shorter duration, and repeated assaults by land, sea, and air, resulting in extremely heavy casualties among (primarily) civilians in Lebanon.

As I noted here yesterday, the government of Israel had numerous options available regarding how it chose to respond to Hizbullah’s infraction. One of those, as stipulated in Art. VII-7 of the 1949 armistice agreement between them, was to submit a formal complaint to the UN’s armistice monitoring commission. (I believe the functions of ILMAC were subsequently taken over by the equally longstanding UN Truce Supervision Organization, which still, I think, has a post along the armistice line, at Naqqura.) Or, Israel could have taken a strong complaint to the UN Security Council.
It chose not to respond in such a de-escalatory, problem-solving way. Instead, it responded in a way that was (1) itself a huge infraction of many aspects of international law and also (2) massively escalatory.
Israel’s response broke international law at both the jus ad bellum level and the jus in bello level. Like Hizbullah, it also ordered its forces to transgress the armistice line and the ceasefire undertakings ensconced in the armistice; and it did so, as we saw, in a very large-scale way. In addition, it did not– as Hizbullah had done up till then– limit its attacks to targets of clearly military status. Rather, as so often in the past, Israeli forces massively targeted civilian infrastructure in an explicit attempt to try to turn the political climate inside Lebanon against Hizbullah. And along the way, of course many tens of Lebanese civilians have lost their lives.
In its follow-up actions, Hizbullah has also launched attacks that have killed Israeli civilians.
In neither of these cases were the civilians in question being directly targeted. But in both cases, the parties have not taken due care to protect the lives of noncombatants. In both cases, too, the parties have targeted civilian infrastructure. (Though “targeting” is a generous term for what most of the Hizbullah rocketeers are actually capable of doing.)
Since the means of attack at Israel’s disposal are– thanks in good part to the aid of my own government– so many times more lethally powerful than those at Hizbullah’s disposal, and since Israel has shown little if any compunction about restricting its use of these weapons to military targets, the number of civilians actually harmed by Israel’s actions has been many times the number actually harmed by Hizbullah.
So indeed, does the world have a single standard by which it judges the actions of these two parties?
A subsidiary question might well arise over the question of “who started it”. We could say that Hizbullah started this particular round. But we should also be aware that Israel has been adamantly refusing to respond to Lebanese demands that it release the three Lebanese nationals whom it has been holding for many years. One of these is Samir Qantar. This Y-net article tells you a little about him.
The article also reminds us that,

In 2004, Hizbullah and Israel exchanged the bodies of three Israeli soldiers kidnapped in 2000 and an abducted Israeli businessman for the release of 400 Palestinian and 23 Lebanese and Arab prisoners in a German-negotiated deal.

That hostage/bodies exchange was, of course, agreed to by then-PM Ariel Sharon, who was Olmert’s mentor at the time. But now, Olmert says he’s adamantly opposed to any such exchange. (Though there have been many unconfirmed reports of Israeli agents being engaged in indirect negotiations over a possible release.)
Two of the most famous of the Lebanese hostages whom Israel released in that 2004 swap were religious leader Sheikh `Abd al-Karim Obeid and militia leader Mustafa al-Dirani. They had both been gratuitously captured from their homes in Lebanon by the Israeli forces back in the 1980s, in a blatant act of international hostage-taking– and for use simply as “bargaining chips.”
Obeid, we should note, was by no means a combatant. I don’t know if he received anything like the ill-treatment meted out to Dirani. Here is Human Rights Watch’s translation of the complaint Dirani’s lawyers submitted to the Tel Aviv District Court concerning his treatment while in detention. Here are some excerpts from his affidavit:

4. In addition to being shaken, humiliations, beatings, sleep deprivation and being tied in a crouching position for many hours to the point of his limbs becoming paralyzed – a cruel rape and an act of sodomy were perpetrated against the Plaintiff by a soldier whom the interrogators brought especially for this purpose.
5. In addition, several days after the Plaintiff was raped by a soldier, the interrogator who was responsible for the rape once again committed a horrifying act of sodomy against the Plaintiff, by inserting a wooden club into the Plaintiff’s anus, causing hemorrhages in his buttocks. The pseudonym of that interrogator was “George”…
7. In order to humiliate the Plaintiff, the interrogators caused him to remain completely naked for almost the entire duration of the interrogations that they conducted. In order to compound the humiliation of the Plaintiff and to the delight of his interrogators – they also photographed him in this humiliating situation.
8. At a later stage of the interrogation the Plaintiff was forced to drink large amounts of water and paraffin oil. At that point a diaper was placed around the Plaintiff’s loins in which his bodily wastes collected for several days. There was no response to the pleas of the Plaintiff, who was covered with his discharges, to be allowed to clean himself, and only when the interrogators themselves could no longer stand the stench, only then was the Plaintiff allowed to change the diaper.

(American readers: does this account of how Dirani was reportedly treated back in the 1980s remind you of anything?)
Anyway, my main point here is to note that the Lebanon-Israel cross-border hostage-taking question is by no means a “new” issue that Hizbullah suddenly dreamed up, in order to justify an otherwise unjustifiable cross-border raid. It was part of a very longstanding and still “live” concern in Lebanon.
Would Hizbullah, too, have done better to take this concern to the “proper channels” and tried to get Qantar and his two fellow prisoners released through Security Council action or the force of world public opinion? Absolutely, yes.
But the bigger question here, in my mind, is that all these conflicts have now gone on so long, and have so many very tangled sub-themes and potential triggers for escalation by either side, that surely it is time to get the whole darned conflict between Israel and neighbors finally resolved. That means the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the Syrian-Israeli conflict, and the Lebanese-Israeli conflict.
This is indeed do-able. If it is done, basically, on the basis of international law, then nearly all the parties to the conflict know what this is and are ready to go ahead and do such a deal. On the Arab side, all the Arab governments have signed onto the Beirut Declaration of 2002– and the most recent Hamas-Fateh agreement then endorsed all its main points.
The only party that is not basically ready to resolve the conflict on the basis of international law– that is, with Israel withdrawing from just about all of the land it captured in the 1967 war– is that portion of the Israeli public that still clings to the chauvinistic dream of a Jewish Greater Jerusalem that stretches from the Old City just about right down to the Jordan River… an outcome that would be unacceptable to the Palestinians in two major ways: it denies any meaningful Palestinian role or presence in Jerusalem, and it slices a huge wedge out of the West Bank, dividing what remains potentially for use by a Palestinian state into two.
How big is the portion of the Jewish-Israeli public that’s prepared to see their country (and its region) locked forever into cycles of war and violence– simply to indulge the holders of that Jewish Greater Jerusalem dream? I don’t know.
What I do know is that the international community as a whole also has a huge stake in all this. We have a stake in seeing a fair and sustainable outcome to all the remaining dimensions of the Israeli-Arab dispute. But we also have a stake in seeing the principles of international law implemented and strengthened at all levels. That includes in the content of the eventual comprehensive Israeli-Arab peace, which should certainly uphold rather than transgress international law.
It also includes in the application of a single standard of judgment to all the acts of violence unleashed in the continuing storm(s) between Israel and its neighbors.
There is another very simple and very important principle at stake here, too. Every single life snuffed out by the violence is equally dear, equally sacred. The lives of civilians, in particular, should all equally receive the concern of the international community

In the Middle East, recent events have faced an inexperienced national leadership with a tough test– and so far, they have been failing it. I’m talking about Ehud ‘the hair trigger’ Olmert, Israel’s recently elected Prime Minister, a man with almost no previous experience of strategic affairs, and his Defense Minister Amir Peretz (even less.)
I think this makes the current crisis more volatile than it would have been if– say– Ariel Sharon were still actively on the scene. Sharon was a pugnacious bulldozer of a military (and political) commander, it is true. But he did have a learning curve. Olmert and Peretz, by contrast, still have a lot to prove (and, I think, even more to learn.)
After the militants in Gaza had shown their determination to capture an Israeli soldier from near the border– and in light of long past history– dohn’t you think Israel’s military and political leaders should have been ultra-alert to the possibility that Lebanon’s Hizbollah might do the same? Hizbollah’s ability to do so surely showed a terrible lack of preparedness among the Israeli troops of the “Northern Command”. You can understand why the Israeli leadership felt embarrassed, angry, and just plain pissed off.
But what did they do with all that welter of emotions? They had a number of options they could have pursued since Wednesday– including conducting a rigorous investigation into how exactly the rreadiness in the Northern Command had fallen so low, launching some measured and focused military response, playing the “injured party” card and building a huge international campaign to persuade Hizbullah to release the captured soldiers, etc etc. Instead of which, there has been this infantile, primal-scream type of blanket military response against the infrastructure of much of Lebanon, backed up by some chest-thumping,angry-boy-in-schoolyard type of rhetoric.
To kill (so far) 86 Lebanese people, many or most of them civilians, and to rain fear, injury and massive and sometimes life-threatening destrucrion on many thousands more– all because some Israeli units on the Northern Front forgot their operational discipline and allowed a Hizbullah squad to infiltrate the border and seize control of a Humvee-full of soldiers? This is– as the EU has finally had the guts to say– far from being a proportional response.
I saw one Israeli leader– forget who– quoted as saying “we have to restore our deterrent power in order to restore stability.” This is a way to restore stability???
The WaPo’s David Ignatius had a thoughtful piece in the paper today. I disagree with some of David’s worldview. But he’s a solid and sensible thinker, well-versed in the strategic dynamics of the Middle East and well connected with some of the wiser people in the US intelligence agencies.
In today’s piece he writes this, which I largely agree with:

Israeli and American doctrine is premised on the idea that military force will deter adversaries. But as more force has been used in recent years, the deterrent value has inevitably gone down. That’s the inner spring of this crisis: The Iranians (and their clients in Hezbollah and Hamas) watch the American military mired in Iraq and see weakness. They are emboldened rather than intimidated. The same is true for the Israelis in Gaza. Rather than reinforcing the image of strength, the use of force (short of outright, pulverizing invasion and occupation) has encouraged contempt.

I think he is right to link Israel’s doctrine with the US’s in this way. Both rely heavily on a unilateralist application of “shock and awe” tactics in order to bludgeon their opponents into political submission.
But what happens if you apply massive “shock and awe” tactics and the opponents don’t submit? Then, it seems to me, you end up looking really bloodthirsty, and also rather stupid. (As the US military posture now does, in Iraq.)
Along the way, you also have many further decision points that come along. Some of these can lead you into really serious over-reaching. Liike Sharon’s reckless and bullying decision in 1982 not just to pound Lebanon from air, sea, and land — but to send a large land force in, seize control of opver one-third of the country, andf “cleanse” it of all the Palestinian militants who were (then) his nemesis there… That ill-considered decision cost Israel, its people, and its economy dear… It took Israel a further 18 years that time to dig itself out of the hole it had dug for its forces inside Lebanon. (Hizbullah got born along the way there.) But Sharon also developed something of a learning curve there regarding the disutility of a policy of simply using bullying (and alwasys highly lethal) military force.
Ignatius makes another good point in his piece, too. Noting the importance of world public opinion he wrtites:

To fight the Long War, America and Israel have to get out of the devil suit in global public opinion. For a generation, America maintained a role as honest broker between Israel and the Arabs. The Bush administration should work hard to refurbish that role.

Now, I disagree wityh David that America and Israel are required to fight any kind of a “Long War” at all. Finding reasonable, negotiated resolutions of outstanding political problems is the only way to exit from the existing cycles of hostilities in the Middle East and in US-world relations. There is no “Long War” to be fought. (The campaign against global terrorism is not, strictly speaking, a “war”.)
But David’s right to note that the salience of the fact that there is currently no ongoing Arab-Israeli peace diplomacy. Of course that affects the political dynamics in the whole of the Middle East. I saw one recent statement from Condi Rice when she talked about the importance of “getting back” to the Road Map and to– this is from my memory– “the shared goal of two democratic states living side by side for Israelis and Palestinians.” Well her attitude towards the democratically elected leadership that did emerge among the Palestinians wasn’t very supportive, was it? And similarly, her commitment to pursuing any serious peacemaking diplomacy between Israelis and Arabs has been just about non-existent.
I could write a lot more about this. I did want to write something about the radical strategic changes in the region since the Bushites recklessly (1) not only overthrew Saddam Hussein but then proceeded to dismantle the Iraqi state, and (2) recklessly broke off their previously close ties with the Saudis… To the point where of courser Iran is emerging as a newly self-confident power in the region. But I don’t have time to do it. It’s been a long couple of days.
One other thing I wanted to note regarding the current crisis is the noticeable dissonance between what Condi Rice is saying, as she continues to speak about the need for all sides to avoid hitting civilians and civilian infrastructure, and her boss the Prez, whose spokesman has just continued saying that he’s “going to second-guess Israel’s military decisions”, etc etc.
So guess which of those two the Israelis seem to have been listening to?
(Meanwhile, some very interesting political developments from Israel. I saw a family member of one of the two latest Israeli POWs saying on the BBC that Israel should negotiate for their release. (As Gilad Shalit’s father has also said.) And Gush Shalom– the Peace Bloc– has reported that just a few hours after Wednesday’s Israeli assault against Lebanon started, some 200 peace demonstrators were on the streets outside the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv.
On their website they report this:

The reaction of passers-by was much less hostile then anticipated. Some drivers shouted curses at the activists, but quite a number honked in agreement. Most drivers seemed to be fatalistic.
The police brought a much larger force than usual, including a special unit for riot control. It seems that they feared a blocking of the traffic by the demonstrators.
The veterans among the demonstrators were reminded of the first demonstration not far from there which took place on the first day of Ariel Sharon’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. That time, also about 200 activists gathered – but their number grew within a few weeks to ten thousand, until the 400 thousand gathered to protest the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Who knows how all this will end? I certainly make no claim to. I do know, though, that the vast majority of Lebanese, Palestinians, and Israelis all want to be able to escape from the horrors of repeated wars and to live lives that are secure, hopeful, and dignified. As I wrote before, it’s high time the Security Council stepped back into Arab-Israeli peacemaking and resolved the remaining dimensions of the conflict once and for all.

It’s a kind of rite of passage for new Israeli leaders: soon after they have finished forming their coalition government at home, they need to visit the United States…. And in the US, of course, all the powerful people from the President to the members of Congress, to the leaders of the big, politically powerful Jewish-American organizations, to the captains of industry and finance, to Hollywood performers, to the editorial board of the Washington Post– you name it–seem quite prepared to bend their busy schedules quite out of shape in order to accommodate the new annointed one.
But in the run-up to this love-fest, typically, the new PM will call in the correspondent of the NYT and give an important interview. This text serves to frame the agenda for the public talks the PM hopes to have while in the US.
So yesterday, Ehud Olmert called in Steven Erlanger and Greg Myre of the NYT, and gave them an interview out of which the NYT’s editorial people helpfully plucked the following snippet to serve as a title: Israel Will Buy Supplies for Gaza Hospitals, Premier Says.
Ehud Olmert the humanitarian! Oh, now we understand what makes the man tick! (Irony alert.)
In the interview Olmert was reportesd as saying that Israel would “pay if necessary from our own pockets” to make sure the Gaza hospitals don’t lack medical supplies… Well, maybe it would help if he started by giving the PA government the three-plus months’-worth of Palestinian customs and other governmental revenues that Israel has quite illegally been withholding since the Palestinian elections of last January? (Erlanger write about this withheld money without specifying for the readers that it was Palestinian money from the get-go.)
Olmert also told his interviewers that he had agreed to take the “calculated risk” of opening the Karni goods-crossing point between Israel and Gaza. They showed a little sliver of reportorial independence by noting in their report that, ” On Thursday, however, Karni was open only for exports to Gaza because of ‘security reasons,’ the Israeli Army said.”
Erlanger and Myre also– interestingly, from my perspective– write this:

Mr. Olmert said he was “ready tomorrow” to end the customs agreement and allow the Palestinians to collect the receipts directly. “Let them collect the money and see what happens,” he said. “This money would disappear into the private pockets of the corrupt administration of the Palestinian Authority.”

Um, Ehud, that would be the old PA– the one headed by all of President Mahmoud Abbas’s old Fateh cronies. The people in the present PA government have no track record of corruption (and long may that last). And while we’re talking about corrupt practices in government… well, how about your own country?
Anyway, the most interesting part of the interview, for me, was this:

This first trip to Washington is for discussion, Mr. Olmert said…. “What I can talk about at this point is the basic desire to set borders for Israel, to separate from the Palestinians, and to create a contiguous territory that will allow the Palestinians to fulfill their national dreams and establish their own independent state alongside the state of Israel.”
The plan, he said, “needs to be coordinated with a lot of sensitivity with our different partners, particularly the United States government and the president, and of course, the United Nations, the Europeans, the Russians.”
What about the Palestinians?
He stopped and said, “I don’t believe that at any time in the future we will change things without talking to the Palestinians.” But the decision, he made clear, would be Israel’s. [So the point of talking to the Palestinians would be– ?]
Mr. Bush is the crucial figure, Mr. Olmert said. “I feel that I come to my senior partner, and I hope that he is ready to accept me as his partner.”
His predecessor and ally, Ariel Sharon, believed that the United States was Israel’s only real ally. Mr. Olmert, almost 20 years younger, is a professional politician who did not come out of the election with as strong a mandate as he and Washington might have hoped. Some American officials are concerned that Mr. Olmert may have bitten off more than he — or, perhaps, a politically weakened Mr. Bush — can chew.

Just look at those last two sentences. Obviously, Erlanger and Myre talk to a lot of Bush administration people– both the senior figures in the embassy there in Tel Aviv and also many of the other senior administration people who travel frequently to Israel. So they’re probably pretty well informed when they reveal that “Washington” might have hoped that Omert had had a stronger mandate from the Israeli voters than he ended up getting…
And then, look at that last sentence quoted there. Note the assumption embedded in it that “American officials” have the same goals as Olmert– and also at Erlanger and Myre’s failure to distance themselves, as independent “reporters”, from that assumption in any way… Instead, they convey a strong sense of “We’re all in this together!”– Olmert, the Bush administration, and the two of them. (But then there’s also the expression of concern that Bush’s political weakness may damage this joint project that all these parties want to pursue… )
There a few interesting languaging issues in the article, too. One has to do with the English translation of the Hebrew term hitkansut, which is the name that Olmert has given at home to his planned project to carve up the West Bank. When I was at the Wilson Center conference on Israel and Palestine last week, former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami said, “In Hebrew it’s a lovely word. But the most common English translation for it would be ‘concentration.’ That is obviously not such a lovely term in this context.”
Erlanger and Myre make no mention at all of this “most common” rendering of the word in English. Instead, they write that Olmert “has called his ambitious project ‘hitkansut,’ which best translates as consolidation.”
Right.
(I note that others in Israel have translated the word as “convergence”. If they were to ask for my advice, I would say, stick to “convergence”– it has a nice hippy-ish New Age feel to it… Actually, if they were to ask my advice, I’d say, “Quit playing around with all these settler-colonialist, land-grabbing plans and start dealing with your Palestinian neighbors as your human equals!”)
Another language issue is in a part of the interview that I had omitted from the longer quote above: “This first trip to Washington is for discussion, Mr. Olmert said, calling consolidation ‘a dynamic concept’ requiring preparation.” Maybe someone should tell these people that in Rumsfeld-speak, “dynamic” means it involves warfighting?
And finally, fairly disturbingly, at the end we have Olmert’s revival of the use of extremely distasteful pathological analogies to describe the Palestinian issue.
Erlanger and Myre write that Olmert compared the Palestinian issue,

and implicitly the occupation, to a suppurating wound. “When you have an open wound, and you’re bleeding in your belly, even when this doesn’t jeopardize your life, it occupies all of your attention most of the time and it deprives you of the joy of life.”

I’d like to see an exact transcript of the way Olmert used that “open wound” analogy there.
Back in July/August 2002, IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon used another distasteful pathological analogy to refer to the Palestinian militants, when he said they were a “cancer” that had to be aggressively dealt with.
This use of pathological analogies is disturbingly reminiscent of the way the Nazis referred to the groups of people they considered subhuman: Jews, Roma, homosexuals, people with mental disabilities, etc. Olmert can try all he wants to present himself as a great humanitarian, but his use of such language to refer to his neighbors seems very far from humane…

38 days after their recent parliamentary elections, Israel has a government. That link goes to a JPEG file with pics and party affiliations of all the ministers. So it’s 12 Kadima members, seven from Avoda (Labor), two Pensioners, and four from Shas. (Amazing how similar the neatly-groomed bearded men of Shas look like their Hamas counterparts.)
Jonathan Edelstein says he expects this government will be fairly stable:

My primary reaction to the cabinet lineup (other than being unutterably glad that this idiot [i.e., Avigdor Lieberman] isn’t in it) was how much of an apparatchiks’ gallery it is; other than Peretz at Defense, Rafi Eitan in his new senior citizens’ portfolio and possibly Yuli Tamir at Education, I can’t see any of them making any radical or controversial policy changes..

Here is the list that HaAretz published of the eight agreed policy guidelines that will form the basis of the government’s work.
Crucially, in terms of the prospects for peacemaking, the second and third points are these:

2. The government aspires to bring about the definition of the state’s permanent borders as a Jewish state with a Jewish majority, and as a democratic state, and will act to do so through a negotiated agreement with the Palestinians on the basis of mutual recognition, existing agreements, the principles of the road map, an end to violence and the disarmament of the terror organizations.
3. The government shall endeavor, as stated, to conduct negotiations with the Palestinians … but if the Palestinians do not behave as stipulated in the near future, the government shall act even in the absence of negotiations and an agreement with them … The government shall determine the borders of the state. The Israeli settlement in Judea and Samaria must be reduced.

“The near future” makes it sound as though they’re not going to give the Palestinians very long at all to respond on this. Note also the non-specificity of saying “the Palestinians” throughout, rather than “the PA”.
Actually, I still think there’s a fairly high probability that the system of two parallel unilateralisms, on both the Palestinian and Israeli sides, that we saw throughout the past 15 months will continue and become more engrained in the practice of both leaderships, at least for the coming couple of years.
As part of this, I believe there’s a distinct possibility the Olmert government might act fairly soon (if still discreetly) to urge Washington to ease up some on the efforts to strangle the Palestinian administration through financial/administrative means.
It is only the Israeli government that is in a position to persuade Washington to do this– and of course, Israel hasn’t had a government able to do it ever since their election campaign started there in late February.
It truly is not in the interests of either the Israelis or anyone else to see an exacerbation of the pain in the Palestinian community. Added to which, using basic international aid payments and the Palestinians’ own tax revenues as a lever to force compliance is quite immoral… And then– they seek compliance with what? with a ‘road map’ that now really doesn’t exist and that Olmert has never believed in?
Anyway, the weeks ahead will tell. let’s check back on this issue in, say, four months, and see how matters stand then.
… One last point: The Israelis got their coalition government formed 38 days after their election… The Palestinians, operating under the difficult logistic conditions imposed by the Israeli occupation authorities, got theirs formed 63 days after their election… And in US-occupied Iraq? Well, it is now 140 days— exactly 20 weeks– since their election, and they still don’t have a government. Ain’t American military occupation a wonderful thing? (Heavy irony alert at the end there.)

HaAretz is now saying that the vote count there, with 99.5% of votes counted, gives this result for the 120-seat Knesset:

Kadima– 28 seats
Labor– 20
Shas– 13
Yisrael Beitenu (Lieberman)– 12
Likud– 11
National Union/National Religious Party– 9
Pensioner’s Party (Rafi Eitan)– 7
United Torah Judaism– 6
Meretz– 4
[All Arab parties]– 10

Congratulations to my friends in Meretz for having retained their four seats! (At one point, they were forecast to lose two of them.)
The rise of the “Pensioners’ Party”, headed by longtime spy boss Rafi Eitan, was the big surprise. He was the man responsible for (1) capturing Adolph Eichmann and (2) running the very damaging spy Jonathan Pollard deep in the bosom of the US national-security apparatus in the 1980s…
(Hat-tip to Imshin for tha tlast link. She wrote today, “You wouldn’t believe how many youngsters I know who voted for the pensioners’ party, not to mention non-Russian’s who voted for Avigdor Lieberman…”
Now coalition formation will get seriously underway…

HaAretz had a fascinating piece yesterday that was Ari Shavit’s account of a fierce discussion he had with Kadima MK (and Labor defecter) Haim Ramon about the virtues of the ‘spearation barrier’ (the Wall) and the whole Kadima mindset of unilateral separation that goes with it.
Since this is certainly the main issue in today’s election in Israel, I thought people might want to read the article. It’s here.