The rockets and mortar shells that fall on Israel will shift votes from Kadima and Labor to Israel’s conservative parties led by Likud’s Binyamin Netanyahu and Yisrael Beitenu’s Avigdor Lieberman. Every Kassam reminds voters in the south that the Molten Lead campaign ended too quickly; every Grad shows voters Defense Minister Ehud Barak’s reluctance to knock out Hamas rockets or recapture the Philadelphi route under which Hamas smuggles weapons.
Former Defense Minister Moshe Arens decried Barak’s misfeasance in a column in Ha’aretz today, “The IDF operation was late to get started, proceeded at a leisurely pace, and then halted before the objective of eliminating the Hamas capability to rocket Israel had been accomplished.”
Bombs and Ballots
The course of several European elections have been determined by terrorism. Witness the March 2004 train explosions in Madrid which killed 191 people three days bef
ore national elections. The new Socialist government quickly withdrew Spanish troops from the Iraqi coalition.
In Germany today, six months before national elections, al Qaeda tapes have surfaced demanding that German troops be withdrawn from Afghanistan. "The Islamists apparently want to influence Germany's election year 2009," said August Henning, a senior deputy in the Interior Ministry, in Bild am Sonntag. Jörg Ziercke, who heads up the Federal Criminal Police Office, said recently, "We have observed meaningful parallels to the situation in Spain." He was referring to the March 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid, according to Der Spiegel on February 2.
Terrorists have already “cast their votes” in several previous Israeli elections. U.S. News’ Morton Zuckerman provided this wrap-up several years ago:
“The terrorism of the intifada in 2000 forced Ehud Barak out as prime minister, leaving the office to Ariel Sharon. Suicide bombings in February and March 1996 knocked Shimon Peres out of the prime minister's job. Prior to that, terrorism caused Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir to lose an earlier election. And in an election in 1988, Peres lost following the firebombing of a mother and her three children near Jericho.”
So don’t look for any real Hamas efforts to enforce a ceasefire soon. Nothing would thrill Hamas, Iran and Hizbullah more than to see pictures of Israeli voters scrambling for shelter as they stand in line to vote in Ashkelon or Sderot.
Why would Hamas prefer a conservative government in Israel? Maybe they have swallowed the election campaign propaganda claiming that, if elected, a Netanyahu government will inevitably clash with the Obama administration. Hamas simply cannot understand the respect two democratically-elected governments have for each other, even if they have policy differences. Sphere: Related Content
1 comments:
Israelis are sometimes slow to react. The '77 elections were a response to the '73 Yom Kippur War, but the 1973 elections, which were held in 1974, because of the war, were very "pre-war."
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