His cameo on Parks and Recreation made him a major player in the Israeli elections.
Or possibly his cameo in the Penguins of Madagascar movie. There were many factors to his sudden rise to prominence.
Bibi v. Buji -- you can say what you want, but Israeli politicians do have the best (as in least dignified) nicknames.
A facebook friend posted (with negative comment) a clip of Chuck Norris doing a Party Political obo Netanyahu. I hope he's inundated with messages from Israelis telling him to mind his own fucking business.
Sure, but why wouldn't they be outnumbered by the jingoistic nationalistic Israelis?
They may be, but unless I was on the extreme right, I think I'd still mainly be annoyed by a fucking American actor telling me how to vote.
I take one brief flight and now there are whole bunches of new threads.
5: He was inundated by Bibi thanking him on Twitter.
Thank you for the campaign support @chucknorris
בנימין נתניהו (verified account)
@netanyahu 1:52 PM - 16 Mar 2015
I think I'd still mainly be annoyed by a fucking American actor telling me how to vote.
And not even Jewish! And hardly even an actor!
Off to watch the results and drink a lot with friends. Good luck good luck to us, though even if Herzog becomes PM I don't think much will change in the next few years. The shit will be a little less foul-smelling, is all. I do have lots of hope from seeing the grassroots movements and the people involved as the elections advanced.
Best wishes, Awl. Plenty of the rest of us know about living through depressing elections and their aftermaths.
I'm sure ACORN is behind this somehow.
An international left-wing zionist conspiracy.
Maybe some of you don't know that Sheldon Adelson funds a free daily newspaper Israel Today, that is a huge supporter of Bibi and the Likud. So there is something slightly amusing about Netanyahu complaining about foreign money corrupting Israel's political process.
Best of luck, Awl! Hope you have cause to celebrate or at least not be so glum.
Fuck. Looks like the two leading parties are tied, and the media is already treating this as a victory for Bibi.
"The exit polls don't all agree. But most show a virtual tie between Labor and Likud in the high 20 seat range. In other words, both major parties seem to have over-performed their numbers. [...] The overwhelming consensus has been that a tie or even a close second amounts to a win for Netanyahu, with him getting the first opportunity to form a government. That is still the best bet. But the over-performance of both major parties means a lot of assumptions go out the door. If both major parties end up at say 28 seats, that means they have a good ten seats that we had been assuming would go to other parties. Just who lost them will be critical."
If you know enough about all the rest of Israel's political parties, you can play "build your own coalition".
I don't usually truck in contradiction-heightening, but it seems like another round of Netanyahu might actually stand a chance of weakening the US's UN veto for Israel. Herzog would be at least quieter on Iran but as Abunimah notes, no better for the actual humans living under occupation. And of course better on domestic issues.
Or maybe Herzog would be separation but not increased settlement activity. There's a reason I don't usually truck in contradiction-heightening.
I've been thinking something a lot like 24. The difference between a continued Netanyahu government and someone more sane isn't going to be that big on the substantive Israel/Palestine point. I mean, there will be mitigating bits but at the end of the day we're going to see more or less the same nasty things happening. On the other hand, a more moderate government is going to look a lot less demented doing it, and going to alienate people a lot less.
It's kind of like the Michelle Bachman effect: she didn't really vote any differently than any of her sane-seeming colleagues, or at least not on any substantial level. But she was so utterly demented that she did a lot of damage to the image of the Republican party, and probably was, on balance, way better for the country than whatever quiet, responsible seeming politician they elect to replace her.
I guess the most likely options are (in no particular order):
Likud(27) + Kulanu(12) + ultraorthodox(7+6) + racist(8+5) = 65
Likud(27) + Kulanu(12) + Yesh Atid (12) + racist(8+5) = 64
Likud (27) + Zionist Home (27) + Kulanu (12) = 66
Israel's electoral situation seems similar to Germany right now, in that you can't get a majority on the left when you have a large leftist party that is not allowed to be in the government. So you're only going to have unity governments or right governments.
26.last seems right and super depressing. It worked so well for postwar Italy, too! Ugh.
And Bibi pulls it out. Fearmongering: It works.
28. In the spirit of 5 above, I shan't comment on what this may mean for Israelis and Palestinians, but for the rest of us I hope 24.1 is right, because otherwise we're all fucked at a level of fuckage rarely seen since the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
I wish Facebook was better at translating Hebrew to English. It's finally showing me an election-related post from someone I know in Israel (oddly, they've been completely absent up to this point), and there's a heated argument in the comments that I can follow only in broken translation. It appears one person is criticizing Likud for being anti-women and everyone else is piling on and calling him a socialist.
You can cut/paste the text from Facebook into google translate. That's what I have to do to read the posts not in English.
Google translate seems slightly better than Facebook's built-in translation but not enough to clear up the whole conversation.
Didn't Herzog promise to restart talks with Abbas and freeze new settlement construction? I don't understand the claim that there's no difference between them on Palestine.
It's possible it isn't going to make total sense anyway.
It just interests me because it seems like Palestine-related issues just aren't coming up at all in their conversation, despite dominating how people outside Israel think about their politics.
Ugh, the exit polls were way off, but only on Likud and Zionist Camp, which is weird. But I guess exit polls just aren't very good.
33. Sure, but 'talks that never seem to go anywhere productive because of crazy demands from Israel while things continue to get worse for Palestinians' has been a longstanding pattern. The thing about Netanyahu is that he doesn't even appear willing to play that game.
And that being not willing to play that game helped him win an election.
37: Israel has definitely not pursued peace very aggressively, but there's still a signficant difference between people like Barak and Sharon, and Netanyahu, particularly the Netanyahu of the last week.
39: the obviously significant difference being that Netanyahu is still in the game. And Sharon -- if we're thinking of him as a moderate, I have lost all my bearings entirely.
40: Compared to Netanyahu on the Palestinian question? Obviously yes.
Now the arguments have really broken out on my Facebook feed. I didn't previously know there was an Israeli Jewsih faction that thinks that Israel can never make peace with Arabs because God told the Jewish people that the two will always be at war. That sounds more like good old-fashioned American evangelical Christianity to me.
Another one I never heard before: the claim that almost everyone living in British-controlled Palestine was Jewish, and Arabs moved in only after the Israeli state was created.
I guess it shouldn't surprise me that the Israeli right has a whole set of echo-chamber beliefs similar to those of the US right.
39.
"...and the Netanyahu way."
"Isn't that just the Sharon way?"
"Yes - but faster!"
Further to 24.1: It would be very easy to make too much of this, given the final graf, but here you go.
Aaaaannd back to the status quo.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, in his first American television interview since winning re-election, appeared to back away Thursday from his declaration that he would not allow the establishment of a Palestinian state.
"I don't want a one-state solution," he told NBC News in an interview. "I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution."