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Tag: Corruption

  • Reporter’s Alert: Part V

    Reporters at major newspapers and magazines are hard to reach by telephone. Today it is increasingly hard to converse with them about timely scoops, leads, gaps in coverage, and corrections to published articles.

    We started an online webpage: Reporter’s Alert. From time to time, we will use Reporter’s Alert to present suggestions for important reporting on topics that are either not covered or not covered thoroughly. Reporting that just nibbles on the periphery won’t attract much public attention or be noticed by decision-makers. Here is the fifth installment of suggestions:

    1. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, has just reported staggering quarterly earnings. This achievement, no doubt assisted by policies of the Federal Reserve, makes the following statement by him on January 21, 2021, a wonderful opportunity for reportorial follow up:

    “I’ve been to a lot of meetings with presidents and prime ministers and senators and congressmen, and the selfishness and parochialism with the business folks is just absolutely outrageous.”

    What did Mr. Dimon mean by such a judgment of his peers in the business world? He is known to be outspoken. There might be a provocative story should he choose to elaborate. But first, he has to be asked.

    2. The scrutiny of Internet advertising is much less than the attention formally given to print advertising before the Internet. The major trade journal, Advertising Age, led by the legendary columnist, Stanley Cohen, was often very critical of the advertising industry. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) even required, at one time, specific advertising claims to have substantiation filed with the agency. Today, the giant’s Google, Facebook, and other masters of the Internet rely heavily on ad revenues, their Achilles Heel. How effective are these ads? Is their fine-tuned targeting based on privacy invasions? What is Google et al. doing in their backrooms?

    3. Speaking of corruption, what safeguards are being placed over the trillions of dollars streaming into all corners of the country from Washington legislation? In the $31 billion proposed for the reservations of the First Nations, there is also $5 million allocated to oversee disbursements. What is being done to catch and punish any waste, fraud, and abuse on what is spent inside and outside the US? Wherever there are government contracts, grants, and loans, there must be consistent media digging and reporting.

    4. Billions of dollars of imported foods are coming to the United States labeled as “organic.” How is this claim being verified? What does the U.S.D.A. do to assure its labels are truthful? Any inspectors? What evasions have been uncovered? The temptation to sell the organic label but not the real organic fruits, vegetables, and other foodstuffs are everywhere. Are any of the major environmental or consumer groups (Greenpeace, NRDC, Friends of the Earth, Consumer Reports) monitoring this situation? Is the Customs Bureau doing anything?

    5. It is increasingly difficult, especially in an Internet Age, to quit your vendor. Some of these obstacles are due to complexities in the relationship. For example, compare banks today with banks in the 1960s. But much of this lock-in is deliberate – sometimes with penalties for leaving – requiring consumers to go through hoops. Try getting out of your Amazon Prime “Membership.” See how leaving Amazon compares to your one-click purchases from Mr. Jeff Bezos. Moving from brokerage and credit card firms is needlessly bureaucratic – after one spends hours trying to get through to the right persons (forget about one-stop quitting in an era of much-touted one-stop shopping).

    Then there are the “dark moments,” where corporate coercion sells you stuff you didn’t ask for or know about. There are also vendor tricks for upgrading your sales category. This is a controlling mechanism by vendors which also dilutes the effects of competition – a kind of barrier to the mobile choice of vendors. There is much to investigate here that is sometimes rooted in the pits of the omnipresent fine print contracts.

    6. Just who are those state legislators in the GOP brazenly harassing certain categories of voters? How dare they do such a thing in plain sight – after their right-wing corporate attorneys do the devious drafting of the bills? Creating crazy hurdles to block voters (such as difficult IDs, requiring notarized signatures, and many more obstacles reported often in the media) is over-regulating, harassing, intimidating, and purging voters. So too are bills in Florida and Texas criminalizing or entrapping free speech street protests.

    Profile these incinerators of democracy, these closeted bigots, and venomous beasts of prey who target the most vulnerable and discriminated against wannabe voters. Do specific state laws provide criminal penalties for officials implementing these shredders of voting rights? If not, why not? Are private remedies too onerous or non-existent? These abuses should get at least as much opprobrium, censorship, and demands for resignation as “no-touch” sexual harassment receives.

    7. During meetings or telephone conversations with newspaper editors, I urge them to do random surveys of how difficult it is for ordinary citizens to simply get through to their government agencies at the local, state, and federal levels. Editors immediately praise the suggestion and then do nothing.

    Many zillions of hours are wasted waiting on the phone for government officials (e.g., the budget-strapped IRS). But apart from any budget excuses, for many agencies, avoiding calls or not responding to callers has become part of the culture at many government departments. Some agencies simply leave their phones off the hook for hours at a time. This occurred before the Covid-19 pandemic. Reporters may not experience this distress because they can get through more often, though they may not like the nature of the response non-response. Media surveys should be conducted by “ordinary people” with ordinary questions, for starters.

    Getting through to corporations and their so-called “customer service” departments can offer similar hurdles. Telephone, insurance, and utility companies, for instance, all avoid talking to their customers. Emails are also easily dismissed and, anyhow, emails are not like two-way telephone conversations.

    Hope all the above and the prior four Reporter’s Alert lists help stimulate some reporting on these important topics.

    This article was posted on Friday, May 7th, 2021 at 10:46pm and is filed under Corruption, Democracy.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Charter Schools: “Choice” Is Not An Argument

    Advocates of privately-operated non-profit and for-profit charter schools have long ignored serious criticisms of charter schools in a variety of ways. They have always believed, for example, that simply repeating worn-out phrases like “charter schools provide choice” will automatically cause everyone to dismiss the need for any discussion, investigation, and critical thinking about the well-documented negative effects of charter schools on education, society, the economy, and the national interest.

    “Choice,” however, is not an argument for the existence or expansion of privately-operated charter schools.

    When charter school promoters use the language of “choice,” they want people to:

    1. Not recognize that education is an inalienable human right that must be guaranteed in practice by a public authority worthy of the name.
    2. Believe that “free market” ideology is the best and most pro-social way to organize education in a modern society based on mass industrial production.
    3. Ignore how “choice” leads to greater stratification and segregation in charter schools through their geographic location and selective student enrollment and attrition practices.
    4. Disregard the fact that by “choice” charter school promoters really mean education is a commodity, not a social responsibility, and parents and students are consumers, not humans and citizens, who fend for themselves while shopping for a “good” school that hopefully does not close in under 10 years.
    5. Think that there is no need to analyze how and why public schools have been set up to fail by privatizers so as to justify the rise of deregulated charter schools.
    6. Get used to the disinformation that public schools are automatically bad and charter schools are inherently superior.
    7. Ignore the fact that charter schools usually choose parents and students, not the other way around.
    8. Overlook the fact that “choice” does not guarantee excellence, stability, or equity. Several thousand deregulated charter schools run by unelected individuals have closed in recent decades.
    9. Believe that it does not matter who “delivers” education, but what kind of “results” are produced.
    10. Dismiss the fact that “choice” means taking money away from under-funded public schools that educate thousands of students and that public schools in many instances are even compelled to provide some free services to charter schools.

    It is not possible to conceal the fact that deregulated charter schools fail and close regularly, educate far fewer students than public schools, are continually mired in fraud and corruption, are governed by unelected individuals, have high teacher and principal turnover rates, spend a lot of public money on advertising and marketing, dodge public standards for meetings and accountability, and siphon enormous amounts of money from public schools every day. Privately-operated charter schools also have more inexperienced and lower-paid teachers than public schools. In addition, many charter schools offer fewer services and programs than public schools. It is also worth noting that the performance of cyber charter schools is consistently abysmal. This is what “choice” has delivered.

    The 50 problems plaguing privately-operated charter schools will not disappear by endlessly repeating “choice is good” and by treating parents and students as consumers and shoppers instead of humans and citizens with rights that must be guaranteed. Turning major human responsibilities like education into a “free market” commodity is not a modern way of educating people in the 21st century. It will not solve any problems. Over the past 30 years, segregated charter schools have only given rise to more problems, including many problems for themselves.

    Parents and students do not need more problematic “choices” or choice just for the sake of choice. They need locally-controlled, world-class, fully-funded, non-demonized, free schools completely uninfluenced by narrow private interests. A modern nation and economy can’t be built on an education system based on the ideology of “survival of the fittest.”

    To be sure, the rapid multiplication of privately-operated charter schools under President Joe Biden and U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona will go a long way toward nation-wrecking, undermining public education, harming the public interest, and dehumanizing the natural and social environment. It is no surprise that intense controversy and upheaval have characterized the charter school sector since day one and seem to increase every month.

    Now is the time to step up defense of public schools and the public interest. The public matters more than ever. The privatization of schools and many other public enterprises through neoliberal state restructuring harms the majority, the economy, society, and the national interest. Privatization increases corruption and inefficiency, while lowering quality, increasing costs, and restricting democracy. The public must not permit neoliberals and privatizers to wreck public schools that have been serving 90% of America’s youth for well over a century. Schemes based on the “free market” and a “fend-for-yourself” ethos will certainly benefit a tiny handful of owners of capital, but they won’t solve deep problems that have worsened due to the actions of major owners of capital desperately hanging on to an obsolete economic system.

    This article was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2021 at 9:47pm and is filed under Charter Schools, Corruption, Education, Neoliberalism, Public Schools.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • 2020: The Year the Tree of Liberty Was Torched

    by John W. Whitehead / December 31st, 2020

    The people are unaware. They’re not educated to realize that they have power. The system is so geared that everyone believes the government will fix everything. We are the government.

    — John Lennon

    No doubt about it: 2020—a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year for freedom—was the culmination of a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad decade for freedom.

    Government corruption, tyranny, and abuse coupled with a Big Brother-knows-best mindset and the COVID-19 pandemic propelled us at warp speed towards a full-blown police state in which nationwide lockdowns, egregious surveillance, roadside strip searches, police shootings of unarmed citizens, censorship, retaliatory arrests, the criminalization of lawful activities, warmongering, indefinite detentions, SWAT team raids, asset forfeiture, police brutality, profit-driven prisons, and pay-to-play politicians were accepted as the norm.

    Here’s just a small sampling of the laundry list of abuses—cruel, brutal, immoral, unconstitutional and unacceptable—that have been heaped upon us by the government over the past two decades and in the past year, in particular.

    The government failed to protect our lives, liberty and happiness. The predators of the police state wreaked havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government didn’t listen to the citizenry, refused to abide by the Constitution, and treated the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers shot unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—were armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies were allowed to fleece taxpayers. Government technicians spied on our emails and phone calls. And government contractors made a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

    The American President became more imperial. Although the Constitution invests the President with very specific, limited powers, in recent years, American presidents (Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, etc.) claimed the power to completely and almost unilaterally alter the landscape of this country for good or for ill. The powers that have been amassed by each successive president through the negligence of Congress and the courts—powers which add up to a toolbox of terror for an imperial ruler—empower whoever occupies the Oval Office to act as a dictator, above the law and beyond any real accountability. The presidency itself has become an imperial one with permanent powers.

    Militarized police became a power unto themselves, 911 calls turned deadly, and traffic stops took a turn for the worse. Lacking in transparency and accountability, protected by the courts and legislators, and rife with misconduct, America’s police forces continued to be a menace to the citizenry and the rule of law. Despite concerns about the government’s steady transformation of local police into a standing military army, local police agencies acquired even more weaponry, training and equipment suited for the battlefield. Police officers were also given free range to pull anyone over for a variety of reasons and subject them to forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws, forced breath-alcohol tests, forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, forced inclusion in biometric databases.

    The courts failed to uphold justice. With every ruling handed down, it becomes more apparent that we live in an age of hollow justice, with government courts more concerned with protecting government agents than upholding the rights of “we the people.” This is true at all levels of the judiciary, but especially so in the highest court of the land, the U.S. Supreme Court, which is seemingly more concerned with establishing order and protecting government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution. A review of critical court rulings over the past two decades, including some ominous ones by the U.S. Supreme Court, reveals a startling and steady trend towards pro-police state rulings by an institution concerned more with establishing order and protecting the ruling class and government agents than with upholding the rights enshrined in the Constitution.

    COVID-19 allowed the Emergency State to expand its powers. What started out as an apparent effort to prevent a novel coronavirus from sickening the nation (and the world) became yet another means by which world governments (including our own) could expand their powers, abuse their authority, and further oppress their constituents. While COVID-19 took a significant toll on the nation emotionally, physically, and economically, it also allowed the government to trample our rights in the so-called name of national security, with talk of mass testing for COVID-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, contact tracing, immunity passports, forced vaccinations, snitch tip lines and onerous lockdowns.

    The Surveillance State rendered Americans vulnerable to threats from government spies, police, hackers and power failures. Thanks to the government’s ongoing efforts to build massive databases using emerging surveillance, DNA and biometrics technologies, Americans have become sitting ducks for hackers and government spies alike. Billions of people have been affected by data breaches and cyberattacks. On a daily basis, Americans have been made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.

    America became a red flag nation. Red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws generally push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless. Where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention. In fact, all you need to do these days to end up on a government watch list or be subjected to heightened scrutiny is use certain trigger words (like cloud, pork and pirates), surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, limp or stutter, drive a car, stay at a hotel, attend a political rally, express yourself on social media, appear mentally ill, serve in the military, disagree with a law enforcement official, call in sick to work, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, appear confused or nervous, fidget or whistle or smell bad, be seen in public waving a toy gun or anything remotely resembling a gun (such as a water nozzle or a remote control or a walking cane), stare at a police officer, question government authority, appear to be pro-gun or pro-freedom, or generally live in the United States. Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.

    The cost of policing the globe drove the nation deeper into debt. America’s war spending has already bankrupted the nation to the tune of more than $20 trillion dollars. Policing the globe and waging endless wars abroad hasn’t made America—or the rest of the world—any safer, but it has made the military industrial complex rich at taxpayer expense. The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world. Yet America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world. This is how a military empire occupies the globe. Meanwhile, America’s infrastructure is falling apart.

    Free speech was dealt one knock-out punch after another. Protest laws, free speech zones, bubble zones, trespass zones, anti-bullying legislation, zero tolerance policies, hate crime laws, shadow banning on the Internet, and a host of other legalistic maladies dreamed up by politicians and prosecutors (and championed by those who want to suppress speech with which they might disagree) conspired to corrode our core freedoms, purportedly for our own good. On paper—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—we are technically free to speak. In reality, however, we are only as free to speak as a government official—or corporate entities such as Facebook, Google or YouTube—may allow. The reasons for such censorship varied widely from political correctness, so-called safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remained the same: the complete eradication of free speech.

    The Deep State took over. The American system of representative government has been overthrown by the Deep State—a.k.a. the police state a.k.a. the military/corporate industrial complex—a profit-driven, militaristic corporate state bent on total control and global domination through the imposition of martial law here at home and by fomenting wars abroad. The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has perished. In its place is a shadow government, a corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House. Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats. Rather, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law. This is the hidden face of a government that has no respect for the freedom of its citizenry. This shadow government, which “operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power,” makes a mockery of elections and the entire concept of a representative government.

    The takeaway: Everything the founders of this country feared has come to dominate in modern America. “We the people” have been saddled with a government that is no longer friendly to freedom and is working overtime to trample the Constitution underfoot and render the citizenry powerless in the face of the government’s power grabs, corruption and abusive tactics.

    So how do you balance the scales of justice at a time when Americans are being tasered, tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, hit with batons, shot with rubber bullets and real bullets, blasted with sound cannons, detained in cages and kennels, sicced by police dogs, arrested and jailed for challenging the government’s excesses, abuses and power-grabs, and then locked down and stripped of any semblance of personal freedom?

    No matter who sits in the White House, politics won’t fix a system that is broken beyond repair.

    For that matter, protests and populist movements also haven’t done much to push back against an authoritarian regime that is deaf to our cries, dumb to our troubles, blind to our needs, and accountable to no one.

    So how do you not only push back against the government’s bureaucracy, corruption and cruelty but also launch a counterrevolution aimed at reclaiming control over the government using nonviolent means?

    You start by changing the rules and engaging in some (nonviolent) guerilla tactics.

    Take your cue from the Tenth Amendment and nullify everything the government does that flies in the face of the principles on which this nation was founded. If there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it may rest with the power of juries and local governments to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.

    In an age in which government officials accused of wrongdoing—police officers, elected officials, etc.—are treated with general leniency, while the average citizen is prosecuted to the full extent of the law, nullification is a powerful reminder that, as the Constitution tells us, “we the people” are the government.

    For too long we’ve allowed our so-called “representatives” to call the shots. Now it’s time to restore the citizenry to their rightful place in the republic: as the masters, not the servants.

    Nullification is one way of doing so.

    America was meant to be primarily a system of local governments, which is a far cry from the colossal federal bureaucracy we have today. Yet if our freedoms are to be restored, understanding what is transpiring practically in your own backyard—in one’s home, neighborhood, school district, town council—and taking action at that local level must be the starting point.

    Responding to unmet local needs and reacting to injustices is what grassroots activism is all about. Attend local city council meetings, speak up at town hall meetings, organize protests and letter-writing campaigns, employ “militant nonviolent resistance” and civil disobedience, which Martin Luther King Jr. used to great effect through the use of sit-ins, boycotts and marches.

    The power to change things for the better rests with us not the politicians.

    As long as we continue to allow callousness, cruelty, meanness, immorality, ignorance, hatred, intolerance, racism, militarism, materialism, meanness and injustice—magnified by an echo chamber of nasty tweets and government-sanctioned brutality—to trump justice, fairness and equality, there can be no hope of prevailing against the police state.

    We could transform this nation if only Americans would work together to harness the power of their discontent and push back against the government’s overreach, excesses and abuse.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the police state is marching forward, more powerful than ever.

    If there is to be any hope for freedom in 2021, it rests with “we the people.”

    This article was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2020 at 7:40am and is filed under Corruption, COVID-19, Democracy, Espionage/”Intelligence”, Freedom of Expression/Speech, Opinion, Police, Politics, Privacy, Racism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A Country in Turmoil: Why Netanyahu is a Symptom, Not Cause of Israel’s Political Crisis

    It is convenient to surmise that Israel’s current political crisis is consistent with the country’s unfailing trajectory of short-lived governments and fractious ruling coalitions. While this view is somewhat defensible, it is also hasty.

    Israel is currently at the cusp of a fourth general election in less than two years. Even by Israel’s political standards, this phenomenon is unprecedented, not only in terms of the frequency of how often Israelis vote, but also of the constant shifting in possible coalitions and seemingly strange alliances.

    It seems that the only constant in the process of forming coalitions following each election is that Arab parties must not, under any circumstances, be allowed into a future government. Decision-making in Israel has historically been reserved for the country’s Jewish elites. This is unlikely to change anytime soon.

    Even when the Arab parties’ coalition, the Joint List, imposed itself as a possible kingmaker following the September 2019 elections, the centrist Kahol Lavan (Blue and White) list refused to join forces with Arab politicians to oust Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Kahol Lavan’s leader, Benny Gantz, preferred to go back to the polls on March 2 and eventually join forces with his arch-enemy, Netanyahu, than make a single concession to the Joint List.

    Gantz’s decision did not only expose how racism occupies a central role in Israeli politics, but also illustrated Gantz’s own foolishness. In rejecting the Joint List, he committed an act akin to political suicide. On the very day, March 26, that he joined a Netanyahu-led coalition, his own Blue and White alliance collapsed, with Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid and Moshe Ya’alon of Telem breaking away immediately from the once-dominant coalition.

    Worse, Gantz lost not just the respect of his own political constituency, but of the Israeli public as well. According to an opinion poll released by Israel’s Channel 12 News on December 15, if elections were to be held on that day, Gantz’s Blue and White would receive only 6 seats out of 120 seats available in the Israeli Knesset. Gantz’s former coalition partner, Yesh Atid, according to the same poll, would obtain an impressive 14 seats.

    While Netanyahu’s Likud Party will remain on top with 27 seats, Gideon Sa’ar’s “New Hope – Unity for Israel,” would come a close second with 21 seats. Sa’ar’s is a brand new party, which represents the first major split from the Likud since the late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, formed the offshoot Kadima party in 2005.

    Netanyahu and Sa’ar have a long history of bad blood between them, and although anything is possible in the formation of Israel’s political alliances, a future right-wing coalition that brings them both together is a dim possibility. If Sa’ar has learned anything from Gantz’s act of political self-mutilation, it is that any coalition with Netanyahu is a grave and costly mistake.

    Ideological differences between Netanyahu and Sa’ar are quite minimal. In fact, both are fighting to obtain the vote of essentially the same constituency – although Sa’ar is hoping to extend his appeal to the disgruntled and betrayed Blue and White voters, who are eager to see someone – anyone – oust Netanyahu.

    Never in the history of Israel, spanning seven decades, had a single individual served as the focal point of the country’s many political currents. While beloved by some, Netanyahu is much loathed by many, to the extent that entire parties or whole coalitions are formed simply to remove him from politics. That in mind, the majority of Israelis agree that the man is corrupt, as he has been indicted in three separate criminal cases.

    However, if this is the case, how is a politically controversial and corrupt leader able to remain at the helm of Israeli politics for over 14 years? The typical answer often alludes to the man’s unmatched skills of manipulation and backdoor shady dealings. In the words of Yossi Verter, writing in the daily Haaretz, Netanyahu is “a first-class master swindler”.

    This analysis alone, however, is not enough to explain Netanyahu’s durability as the longest-serving Israeli Prime Minister. There is an alternative reading, however, one that is predicated on the fact that Israel has been, for quite some time, navigating uncharted political territories without a specific destination in mind.

    Prior to the inception of Israel on the ruins of historic Palestine in 1948, Israel’s Jewish political elites clashed quite often over the best way to colonize Palestine, how to deal with the British Mandate over the country, among other weighty subjects. These differences, however, largely faded away in 1948, when the newly-founded country unified under the banner of Mapai – the predecessor to Israel’s current Labor party – which dominated Israeli politics for decades.

    Mapai’s dominance received a major boost after the Israeli occupation of the remainder of Palestine in 1967. The building and expansion of more Jewish colonies in the newly-acquired territories breathed life into the mission of Israel’s founding fathers. It was as if Zionism, the founding ideology of Israel, was rediscovered once more.

    It was not until 1977 that the erstwhile negligible Israeli right formed a government for the first time in the country’s history. That date also ushered in a new age of political instability, which worsened with time. Still, Israeli politicians remained largely committed to three main causes in this specific order: the Zionist ideology, the party and the politicians’ own interests.

    The assassination of the Labor Party leader, Yitzhak Rabin, at the hands of a right-wing Israeli zealot in 1995, was a bloody manifestation of the new era of unprecedented fragmentation that followed. A decade later, when Sharon declared the ‘Disengagement from Gaza’ plan of 2005, he further upset a barely functioning political balance, leading to the formation of Kadima, which threatened to erase the Likud from the political map.

    Throughout these turbulent times, Netanyahu was always present, playing the same divisive role, as usual. He led the incitement against Rabin and, later, challenged Sharon over the leadership of the Likud. On the other hand, he was also responsible for resurrecting the Likud and he kept it alive notwithstanding its many ideological, political and leadership crises. The latter fact explains Likud’s loyalty to Netanyahu, despite his corruption, nepotism and dirty politics. They feel that, without Netanyahu’s leadership, the Likud could easily follow the same path of irrelevance or total demise as was the case with the Labor and Kadima parties, respectively.

    With none of Israel’s founding fathers alive or relevant in the political arena, it is hard to imagine what course Israel’s future politics will follow. Certainly, the love affair with the settlement enterprise, ‘security’ and war is likely to carry on unhindered, as they are the bread and butter of Israeli politics. Yet, without a clear ideology, especially when combined with the lack of a written Constitution, Israeli politics will remain hostage to the whims of politicians and their personal interests, if not that of Netanyahu, then of someone else.

    This article was posted on Wednesday, December 23rd, 2020 at 10:38pm and is filed under Annexation, Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Corruption, Disinformation, Elections, Gaza, Israel, Israel/Palestine, Language, Lies, Occupation, Politics, Power, The “Right”, The Joint List, Zionism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.