September 23, 2019: Who will form Israel’s next government?

By Michael Regenstreif

As a student of politics (my BA and MA are in political science), this is a fascinating time for me with the second Israeli election in less than five months about to take place on September 17 (after this issue of the Ottawa Jewish Bulletin goes to press but before it comes out), the October 21 federal election campaign here in Canada underway, and a possible election on the horizon in the United Kingdom. As well, of course, the battle in the Democratic Party to see who will take on Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential election is well underway.

This Israeli election was called because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not put together a governing coalition of at least 61 of the Knesset’s 120 seats in the weeks following the April 9 election. The stumbling block was Yisrael Beiteinu party leader Avigdor Liberman (a former defence and foreign minister) who insists that exemptions from military service for haredi men studying Torah be ended. With that demand, Yisrael Beiteinu members will not serve in a coalition with the haredi Orthodox parties – whose support is crucial to Netanyahu’s coalition numbers.

The last Smith Research poll published before the election suggests Netanyahu’s Likud Party could win 33 seats and that his potential coalition partners (Yamina, Shas, and United Torah Judaism) could win a total of 24 seats for a possible coalition of 57 seats. If those predictions are accurate, Netanyahu will again not have enough support to govern.

Netanyahu’s rival for the prime minister’s office is Benny Gantz, a former chief of the Israel Defense Forces, who leads the Blue and White Party. That last Smith Research poll suggests Blue and White could win 32 seats, putting them in a neck-and-neck horserace with Likud.

The poll suggests Blue and White’s likely coalition partners (the Democratic Union and Labor-Gesher) could win another 11 seats. The wild cards are the Joint List (an alliance of Arab parties) which is predicted to take 12 seats and Yisrael Beiteinu which is predicted to win eight seats. If the Joint List and Yisrael Beiteinu join Gantz’s potential coalition (and that’s a very big if), he will be in a position to unseat Netanyahu and form a government. Such a coalition would be precedent-setting as Israel’s Arab parties have never before participated in a governing coalition.

Another scenario being discussed is Blue and White forming a power-sharing unity government with Likud. This is a scenario Liberman is said to favour, as it would mean the haredi parties could be sidelined on the opposition benches. However, there has been speculation that both Gantz and Liberman would insist that Netanyahu step down from the Likud leadership. And Netanyahu has indicated that he’s not interested in such a unity government.

In all likelihood, it will be some time before we know what’s to be. It typically takes weeks of wheeling and dealing after an Israeli election to form a governing coalition. But if neither block is able to form a governing coalition, there may be no other choice but a unity government, as it is doubtful the public would stand for a third election in less than a year.

September 2, 2019: The news is now stranger than fiction

By Michael Regenstreif

My column in our August 19 issue discussed the explicitly racist attacks of U.S. President Donald Trump on four rookie members of the U.S. House of Representatives, all of whom are women of colour. In the days and weeks after that issue went to press, there have been some downright bizarre developments to the story.

Two of the congresswomen, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, who both support the anti-Israel BDS movement, were scheduled to visit East Jerusalem and the West Bank in August. In July, despite a law allowing Israel to bar BDS supporters from entering the country, Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the United States (who is known to be extremely close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu), announced, “Out of respect for the U.S. Congress, and the great alliance between Israel and America, we would not deny entry to any member of Congress into Israel.”

That changed on August 15 when Trump tweeted, “It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib to visit. They hate Israel & all Jewish people, & there is nothing that can be said or done to change their minds.”

Immediately following Trump’s tweet, Israel announced that Omar and Tlaib would not be allowed to visit after all. Although Netanyahu and his ministers claimed the change had nothing to do with Trump’s tweet, few analysts believed that.

The decision was immediately condemned by mainstream American Jewish organizations including AIPAC, Jewish Federations of North America, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee, the Israel Policy Forum, and J Street as contradicting democratic values.

Barring Omar and Tlaib may well have provided more PR value to the BDS movement than the visit itself would have.

Then the story got even weirder. On August 20, Trump proclaimed, “I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat; I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.” (According to the Pew Research Center, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton received 71 per cent of the Jewish vote in 2016, compared to 24 per cent for Republican candidate Trump. In the 2018 midterm elections, after two years of the Trump administration, 79 per cent of the Jewish vote went to Democratic candidates, compared to just 17 per cent for Republicans.)

Trump invoked the antisemitic trope about the loyalty of Jews – one of the most common expressions of antisemitism throughout history. In the following days, Trump doubled-down and tripled-down on the trope elaborating that Jewish Democratic voters (in other words, Jews who don’t support Trump) are disloyal to the Jewish people and to Israel.

“In my opinion, if you vote for a Democrat you’re being very disloyal to Jewish people, and you’re being very disloyal to Israel. And only weak people would say anything other than that,” he declared on the White House lawn.

And in a tweet, Trump quoted and thanked talk radio conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root for his “very nice words”: “President Trump is the greatest President for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world, not just America, he is the best President for Israel in the history of the world and the Jewish people in Israel love him like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God.”

The nightly news – in these Trumpian times – is, indeed, stranger than fiction.

August 19, 2019: A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian

By Michael Regenstreif

No matter what one may feel about the policies of “The Squad,” four women of colour elected in 2018 to their first terms in the United States Congress, or even the antisemitic tropes that were tweeted by one of them, there was no denying the explicit racism employed by U.S. President Donald Trump in his attacks on them last month.

“So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” Trump tweeted on July 14.

And that was only the beginning of Trump’s tweet storm.

Just for the record, three of the four congresswomen Trump was attacking – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib – were born in the United States. The fourth, Ilhan Omar, was born in Somalia and was brought to the U.S. legally as a refugee when she was a child. Omar became an American citizen in 2000 when she was 17.

By the way, earlier this year when Jewish organizations and congressional colleagues came down hard on Omar for employing antisemitic tropes in criticizing Israeli government policies toward the Palestinians, she did apologize for them – even writing an op-ed in the Washington Post describing Israel as the “historical homeland” of the Jews and reiterating her support for a two-state solution to the conflict, calling for “internationally recognized borders, which allow for both Israelis and Palestinians to have their own sanctuaries and self-determination.”

So, while Omar did come to understand why Jewish people were hurt by her words, and apologized for them, Trump has shown no such understanding.

Even leaders of some of the U.S.’s closest allies took the unusual step of calling out the American president for remarks he made about domestic political opponents.

“The prime minister’s view is that the language used to refer to these women was completely unacceptable,” said the spokesperson for then-prime minister Theresa May of the United Kingdom.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she rejects Trump’s racist comments and stands in solidarity with the congresswomen he targeted.

“That is not how we do things in Canada. A Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian, and the diversity of our country is actually one of our greatest strengths and a source of tremendous resilience and pride for Canadians, and we will continue to defend that,” said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Trudeau’s comments were inspiring to hear at that time. Our Canadian Jewish community, and so many other ethnic and religious communities in Canada, have thrived in a country that takes justified pride in its multiculturalism.

But, and it’s a big but, “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian” is not necessarily true when Quebec, our second-largest province, encompassing nearly a quarter of our population, uses the notwithstanding clause to override the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms to prevent people working in the public sector from wearing kippot, hijabs, turbans and other expressions of religious belief, including Stars of David, under its Bill 21.

For example, Minister of National Defence Harjit Sajjan is a Sikh whose religion mandates that he wear a turban – a turban that he wears in the House of Commons, a turban that he wore as a Canadian military officer serving on deployments to Bosnia and Herzegovina and three times to Afghanistan, and a turban he wore during an 11-year career as a Vancouver police officer and detective. Now, though, because of that turban, Sajjan cannot be a police officer in Quebec.

With a federal election two months away, are Trudeau and the other federal leaders and candidates willing to defend our diversity – in both official languages – and ensure that “a Canadian is a Canadian is a Canadian” is more than just a platitude?

July 22, 2019: We know not to trivialize the Holocaust

By Michael Regenstreif

Last month, U.S. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a left-wing progressive who was first elected in her New York district in 2018, came under attack when she referred to the detention centres used by the United States government to warehouse Central American migrants – including children needlessly separated from their parents – as “concentration camps.”

As horrible as the conditions are at those detention centres – and from all credible reports the conditions are truly horrible – Ocasio-Cortez quickly came under sharp attack from political opponents, scholars, and several American Jewish organizations for her use of a term that conjures comparisons to the camps used by Germany’s Nazi regime in its perpetration of the Holocaust, a genocide in which six million Jews were murdered in an attempt to eradicate European Jewry.

“Concentration camps assured a slave labour supply to help in the Nazi war effort, even as the brutality of life inside the camps helped assure the ultimate goal of ‘extermination through labour.’ Learn about concentration camps,” Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, in Jerusalem, tweeted to Ocasio-Cortez.

Even U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a candidate for the Democratic Party’s 2020 U.S. presidential nomination usually seen as an ally of Ocasio-Cortez, distanced himself from the comparison. While saying, “locking up children and keeping them in deplorable conditions for weeks in places that are not meant for kids … is absolutely unacceptable,” Sanders stressed that he didn’t and wouldn’t “use that terminology.”

We have learned not to trivialize the Holocaust – the worst genocide and the ultimate manifestation of antisemitism in history – with comparisons that do not rise to that horrible standard. That is why objections were raised to Ocasio-Cortez’s use of the term “concentration camps” and why we bristle when Israel is fallaciously accused of behaving like Nazis toward the Palestinians.

And yet, perhaps the most trivial of comparisons to the Holocaust in recent memory came from no less a figure than Rafi Peretz, Israel’s minister of education.

Peretz, who served as chief military rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces from 2010 to 2016, was elected leader of the Jewish Home Party in advance of the last Israeli election after former leader and former education minister Naftali Bennett, and former justice minister Ayelet Shaked, left Jewish Home. In a deal brokered by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Jewish Home and Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), a Kahanist successor to the banned Kach Party, stood together in the April election as the United Right, winning five seats in the short-lived 21st Knesset. A new election is scheduled for September 17 after Netanyahu failed to build a governing coalition.

On July 1, during an Israeli cabinet meeting, Peretz compared intermarriage – when a Jew marries a non-Jew – to “a second Holocaust” and rhetorically said that six million Jews have been lost to intermarriage over the past 70 years.

The comment came after a cabinet briefing on trends in Jewish communities around the world from Dennis Ross, chair of the Jewish People policy Institute.

As Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League tweeted in response to Peretz, “It’s inconceivable to use the term ‘Holocaust’ to describe Jews choosing to marry non-Jews. It trivializes the Shoah. It alienates so many members of our community. This kind of baseless comparison does little other than inflame and offend.”

Surely, the minister of education of the State of Israel should have known better.