New elections will give Israel another chance for peace

J. Zel Lurie

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This column is being written on Dec. 4, my 101 birthday. There will not be a big party tonight like the one that marked my first century. Only five members of my family will be there, but a couple of hundred residents of Harbors Edge will dance and frolic on my birthday. There will be little talk here about the new Israeli elections scheduled for March 17.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right wing coalition government was doomed from the start. Its twenty month reign was the shortest of any Israeli government. Netanyahu was forced to give up his traditional ally, the ultra religious Shas Party by Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett.

They pushed through the Knesset a law that canceled the automatic draft exemption of ultra religious youth. Once this law was passed the right wing coalition split. Naftali Bennett who represents the Jewish settlers on the West Bank came out strongly against any move toward peace.

Netanyahu who had campaigned against a peace settlement in the 2012 elections reversed himself in words but not in action. He broke up the peace negotiations advocated by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Mr.

Kerry greeted the announcement of new elections by saying he hoped that the new elections would “produce the possibility of a government that can negotiate and move toward resolving the differences between Israelis and Palestinians.” The two-state solution is not dead, as Naftali Bennett wrote in an op-ed piece in the New York Times a few weeks ago.

The new elections are Israel’s last chance to revive it. The average Israeli revels in the slogan “the whole world is against us.” The five European nations who voted symbolically to recognize the Palestinian state, are not against Israel. They oppose Netanyahu and the Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

Let us remember that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip comprise 28% of Mandatory Palestine that the U.N. partitioned 50/50 in 1947. Let us remember that since 1967 Arabs in the West Bank have been oppressed by army occupation. Let us remember that Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority has come out strongly for peace that will protect Israel’s security.

His intelligence branch has succeeded in squelching a potential third intifada. The violence of the last few months in which 11 Israelis were killed occurred in East Jerusalem where Palestinian intelligence has been banned. Meanwhile a real enemy has developed on the Syrian border.

How this transcription was made

Date and publication rest on the collector's slide label; no masthead, folio or printed dateline appears on this clipping. The page prints: CONTINUED ON PAGE 46

Context added by this archive

Opinion, not reporting - and that is where the word 'occupation' turns up. Lurie also gives the only land-proportion figure in batch B and is the only writer here who credits Palestinian security cooperation. Note his own framing: 'Arabs in the West Bank', not Palestinians, in the sentence about occupation.

He describes Bennett as the man 'who represents the Jewish settlers on the West Bank' and as having 'came out strongly against any move toward peace' - blunter than anything in the staff or wire copy in this batch.

Cite this clipping

"New elections will give Israel another chance for peace," South Florida Sun Sentinel, 10 December 2014. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2014-053. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2014-053