Netanyahu?s Netanyahus take charge in Israel

But if you thought it couldn’t get any worse than Netanyahu, think again.Bennett, the former leader of a prominent settler group and a fanatic whack who prides himself on killing Arabs, has even fewer scruples than Netanyahu.Paradoxically, his party failed even to cross the threshold necessary to have any seats in the Knesset in the April 2019 elections.Now he is destined to become prime minister.Go figure.True to form, the political establishment spiders and scorpions will soon be at it again, if or when Likud decides to depose the criminally indicted Netanyahu from the party leadership, especially now that he is officially on trial on serious charges of corruption and fraud and could very well end up in prison.Such development is sure to open the way for different, more coherent coalition possibilities for the right and far-right parties that make up the majority in the Knesset.The first thing these parties will do is to throw the “overly pragmatic” United Arab List under the bus.The United Arab List hopes that its support for the government, which oppresses its own people on the other side of the Green Line, may win it some financial crumbs, but once Netanyahu is gone, the Israeli right is sure to coalesce once again without it.Despite its preoccupation with personal political vendettas and its media’s preoccupation with the political circus, Israel has in fact been consistently moving further to the right for years.Today, the hardcore right-wing Likud party maintains some 30 seats in parliament while the presumably “centrist” Labor party, which governed Israel over three decades, is a mere political footnote.For the past several decades, both establishment parties have given birth to a variety of extremist parties that support illegal settlement expansion and annexation, and fundamentally oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state.These parties are indispensable for any future coalition government – without them, no major political party can govern.In short, don’t expect the “change government” to lead to much change in an already dreadful state of affairs.