Israel's political system stands at a dead end. Various players' considerations are not only ideological but involve personal, sectarian, and factional interests, with the overarching interests of the state shoved aside, to the margins of political discourse. Proof of this is the complete absence of the Palestinian issue from public and political discourse that accompanied the election, as if this matter has already been resolved.
Israel's political quandary is similar to the one in Lebanon. Anyone with a deep understanding of the process Lebanon has gone through since gaining its independence in 1943 to the present day knows that what eliminated "Middle-Eastern Switzerland" and dragged it into the arms of Hezbollah and Iran was the fact that Sunni, Christian, Druze and Muslim politicians preferred personal and sectarian interests to those of the state. Politicians sacrificed the country and its existence on the altar of their personal careers by disqualifying their opponents, promoting their relatives and associates, and worst of all: they have come to terms with the existence of Hezbollah as a militant organization. Over the past 40 years, they have even trained Hezbollah's fighters, accepted its entrance into politics and even formed political coalitions with it. This, despite the fact that everyone knows with absolute certainty that it exists to serve the Iranian takeover of Lebanon. As far as they are concerned, Lebanon can go to hell.
Anyone possessing a deep understanding of the process that Israeli politics has undergone in recent years, and especially in recent months, cannot escape the impression that what happened in Lebanon is happening here as well: parties are established and run on a personal basis, politicians disqualify each other for personal reasons and regardless of the state's existence and prosperity. Worst of all: everyone – right and left – is seeking an alliance with the Islamic Movement, whose ideology openly seeks to eliminate Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
The Islamic Movement is the Israeli branch of the global Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological incubator that has grown organizations such as Hamas, al-Qaeda, ISIS and hundreds of other Sunni jihadist organizations, which do not see Israel as a state with a right to exist. Even the Southern Branch that has been represented in the Knesset since 1996 did not join the Israeli legislature for Zionist reasons, but rather to influence the Israeli political and public system. What is happening today – that validation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a legitimate party in Israel – is the fulfillment of the Islamic Movement's dream: influencing the Israeli political system by taking advantage of its weaknesses.
Both right and left are guilty. Both sides are deteriorating the State of Israel in a process similar to the one that brought to the end of Lebanon as state founded to defend the Christian minority against the Muslim majority of the Middle East, as a necessary conclusion drawn after the Armenian Genocide in World War I.
The resemblance between Lebanon and Israel is chilling. Israel was founded to give the Jewish people a state in the land of their ancestors, and many Jews immigrated to it after the Holocaust and because of it. Israel's war for survival is directed at the Islamic world, since Islam, in principle, does not consider it a legitimate state. Judaism (like Christianity) is a "void religion." The Jewish people are not a people but communities belonging to all the peoples of the world in which they lived over 1,900 years of exile, and the Land of Israel according to Islam is "Palestine" sacred to it since the Islamic conquest of 637 CE.
When we hear Mansour Abbas renounce these Islamic beliefs, when he faces the camera, along with all members of his party, and declares that Judaism is a "true religion," that the Jewish people exist and are entitled to a state on the historic Land of Israel of which Jerusalem is the historic and eternal capital – then, and only then, can we see the Islamic Movement as legitimate. Then, a coalition may be formed with these people. However, the chances of the Islamic Movement saying this, even as a pretense, are nil.
All the sugar-coated slogans that have blossomed in recent months claim that "the Arab community has undergone profound change," that "young Arabs think differently," that "they are completely Israeli in their way of life," that "they're ready to leave the stands and enter the field of political activity"- all of them, down to the last, are intended to cover the shame of politicians and their unwillingness to bring the political system out of the crisis for which they themselves are responsible. For, if they desired, they would solve the problem very quickly: push aside all personal and sectarian considerations and get under the stretcher on which they have laid the country. But no, they prefer the help of a movement whose entire existence is intended to eliminate Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. That is why I see in everyone – left, center and right alike – the culprits in pushing Israel down the path paved by the Lebanese, who also ignored the danger called Hezbollah and claimed (like some commentators here) that entering politics is "leaving the circle of terror and entering the political arena."
I am unimpressed by the dress of the members of the Islamic movement, the clean Hebrew in their mouths, their academic degrees and the slogans they use. The Islamic movement in Israel did not forsake its ultimate goal: the elimination of the State of Israel as a Jewish state, and all of its conduct since entering the Knesset has led to this moment, when it will be validated by Zionist Jews paralyzed by internal quarrelling.
Dear readers, look to Lebanon and draw your own conclusions.
