The latent agenda for Israel’s April elections? Unilateral concessions - by Dr. Martin Sherman

...whether raised explicitly during the campaign or not, support or opposition for it will be the latent agenda in the April election, and voters ought to be aware of what they are really voting for or against.

Martin Sherman..
JNS.org..
10 February '19..

The major issue is not [attaining] an agreement, but ensuring the actual implementation of the agreement in practice. The number of agreements which the Arabs have violated is no less than number which they have kept.” — Shimon Peres, Tomorrow is Now, Jerusalem: Keter, 1978, p. 255

Almost inevitably, elections in Israel revolve, one way or another, around one issue … even when everyone insists they don’t. This is the “Palestinian problem” and its unavoidable derivative, the fate of the Jewish communities across the so-called “Green Line.”

Take for example the previous elections, in 2015, in which there was widespread consensus among pundits that the conflict with the Palestinian Arabs was largely a non-issue. Indeed, barely a week before polling began, a Reuters report on the electoral campaign, headlined, “As Israeli election nears, peace earns barely a mention,” noted: “While social issues and the economy were grappled over at length, the conflict with the Palestinians and efforts to forge a two-state solution to the crisis … drew little … comment or insight.”

However, despite this apparent marginalization of the Palestinian issue, in broad brush strokes, the parties left in opposition—arguably, with the perverse exception of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu Party—all embraced, as matter of political preference, the idea of territorial withdrawal and Palestinian statehood.

By contrast, all the parties that comprised the coalition were ones with a political aversion to territorial withdrawal and the prospect of a Palestinian state, being ready to express grudging acceptance of the idea only with great reluctance, and subject to unrealistic and unattainable provisos.

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