Election quagmire

Regarding “Netanyahu defeats Gantz with 60-seat bloc” (March 3), even though – again – neither side seems to have won an outright majority, the people have spoken. They want Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, maybe not because he is such a great person but because he is an excellent prime minister.

Now it is time for candidates from other parties who agree with the platform of the Likud but who object to Netanyahu personally to put their personal dislike aside and either move over to the Likud or join a bloc of independent supporters of a right-wing government.

Let’s face it, a united government is not going to happen so long as Blue and White leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid head the opposition. But responsible individuals must do their bit to assure that a fourth election does not happen to the nation that is in dire need of a government now!

ANNABELLE HOROWITZ Petah Tikva

In “King Bibi Netanyahu, the magician” (March 2), Herb Keinon makes several good points, but they are not the most salient ones.

For me, who to vote for in the Israeli elections was quite straightforward. I believe that Iran presents an existential threat to Israel and the world since, according to Bernard Lewis, “For people with this mindset, mutually assured destruction (M.A.D.) is not a constraint; it is an inducement...”

There are three Israeli politicians who are fully aware of the magnitude of the Iranian threat. They are:

1) Benjamin Netanyahu, who was consulted by Bernard Lewis and at the end of the talk was convinced that if the ayatollahs obtained nuclear weapons, they would use them.

2) Michael Oren, who quoted Bernard Lewis in his Los Angeles Times Op Ed in 2015, and

3) Moshe Ya’alon, who used to say that “the regime of the ayatollahs is apocalyptic-messianic in character.”

Of the three, Ya’alon changed his mind about the Iranian threat in 2016 and Oren is out of the Knesset.

That leaves only Netanyahu.

MLADEN ANDRIJASEVIC Beersheba

Regarding “A time to heal” (March 3), the Israeli political scene is mired in a mess. One major party cannot sit with the Arabs or with Liberman or with the so-called peaceniks. The other major party cannot sit with the Arabs or the ultra-Orthodox.

Both parties seem incapable of garnering 61+ seats from the remainder.

There are calls by President Reuven Rivlin for compromise and joint leadership, but this will not happen since one of the major parties (the smaller one) is led by a bunch of political neophytes who – in a world dominated by bastions of “ethical” behavior such as US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, and Syrian leader Bashar Assad plus the anti-Israeli leaders of the European Union – still believe that we have the luxury of demanding “personal morality” as the most important indicator of who should lead Israel to safety in a local and global den of thieves.

The situation will only worsen in the coming years as minority parties gain in numbers due to demographics. Something’s gotta give – the Messiah, perhaps ?

YIGAL HOROWITZ

Beersheba

Regarding “Israeli voters head to polls for third time in a year” (March 2), this idea of free holidays for the masses is complete nonsense. In order to bring sense and sensibility to the matter, in my opinion, it would be appropriate that each voting card is stamped by the people manning the voting stations, only on completion of that individual’s voting obligation.

Each individual must hand in their voting card to their companies paying their salaries, and only those that are stamped should be paid for the holiday taken. It should be compulsory to keep and hand in the cards; if an individual cannot produce a voting card, then it is as if he did not vote, and therefore gets registered for unpaid leave.

I do not think the country can afford to allow people paid leave if they do not take their civic duty to vote as an obligation for the good of the state. It should not be a right to vote, but an obligation to vote. Apathy is not an option

I SIVAN Kiryat Bialik

I read with great interest, as I have been doing for the past 11 years, Yaakov Katz’s articles published in The Jerusalem Post.

I have always admired his journalistic standpoint, whatever the subject. When he was military correspondent, as well as now, when he is the editor-inchief.

It seems to me, however, that Katz got carried away by the election fever in his February 28 editorial. He writes, “For 15 months Israel has been fighting within itself: the Right against the Left; religious against the secular; and settlers against peaceniks.” The latter may well have been borrowed from a caricatural point of view. However, it does not prevent the reader from asking, “Really, this is how Katz sees the Israeli society? Left and Right ? OK. Religious and secular? Borderline, but OK. Let’s agree that this simplification is for the sake of journalistic style.

But settlers against peaceniks? Who are the settlers? Who are the peaceniks? Jews who are pro-settlements, but who live in Tel Aviv, are they settlers? And if they long for peace, are they peaceniks or settlers?

Everybody knows this feeling: whenever you read an article about a subject that you know very well, or even about yourself or your family, almost every time you see that the writer didn’t quite get it. He got close to the subject, but you can feel that it does not reflect the reality in many aspects.

Well, here, with Yaakov Katz’s editorial, it seems that he did not quite get it. Israeli society is more complicated than the way it is described in most non-Israeli newspapers... and now in the Post as well, apparently. We all know that calling some Israeli citizens “settlers” is a way of dividing Israeli society with excessive simple words. This process is not very far from the one described by George Orwell’s 1984.

I have a bad feeling that the Post, or at least a part of it, is becoming less Israeli and more non-Israeli.

Later in the article, I read that Benny Gantz’s calling for a Jewish majority government is bad, because “what would we say if a European politician would call for a Christian majority?” Is this all there is to say about it? Have the European countries acquired such a moral level that we can take them as a standard? Isn’t there an Israeli (if not a Jewish) standard to which we should refer to in order to show our disagreement with such a statement? And, should we really disagree? Isn’t the basis of Zionism to keep our country Jewish, accepting all minorities? Should we really rely on the reaction of